Headworx

Despite some stupid and controversial moves, (like the recent one by Facebook to change the Terms of Use stripping users of the rights to their content), Internet - powered social networking keeps on gaining in popularity. We suddenly find we live in communities. Communities that even cross each other and are totally location - independent. Yes, there still is a barrier of timezone, or - more important - culture, but it would be nearly impossible to find a person these days, who does not have friends abroad. The other day I had an idea of a device / service (I even wanted to patent it). A box sitting between the Net and a TV (like Apple TV) with an interface to a webcam. The idea behind was to achieve social watching experience, but with an ordinary TV and voice / interactive video overlay, instead of PC and "just" texting. I even envisioned an Apple TV box where you could just plug in any USB webcam, and some software to overlay a strip of your buddies' faces on top of...

So we all have wireless wide area connectivity, right? Well... most of the time this is true. At least when we do not leave the home country. Going abroad is (still) a different story. "G" in GSM stands for "Global". The idea behind was to have a phone that works in every country. And more or less this vision has been fulfilled, when it comes to voice calls. SMS messages are not too far behind, but I do remember just a few years ago going to the US would result in very unreliable SMS service. I was always supposed to send an SMS home when landed. Unfortunately they were not always delivered on time. I mean - today it is probably not an issue, since service providers have polished their roaming agreements and network interconnects, so they really work. But in 2005 I happened to send a couple of SMS messages and they were delivered some three weeks later. Of course SMS is a store - and - forward messaging, so likely messages are stroed somewhere in transit and once in...

I have been using the BlackBerry Bold for two months now. It has been a battle uphill the learning curve. The basic laws of nature are different in the BlackBerry world. Of course I expected something unexpected entering this land. I expected BlackBerry handsets being fully controlled both by RIM and by the wireless service provider. But what I did not expect was how a service provider can without a reason cut the functionality by half. Or even more. But let me tell the story from the beginning. BlackBerries have their own very special way of handling data connections. In case of the Bold 9000 there are four scenarios: The phone is connected via cellular data channel (GPRS or EDGE or 3/3.5G) to the service provider's generic APN. With this connection you can run some (but relatively few) applications (like the GMail rich client) and one incarnation of Web browser that goes directly to the Internet and renders pages entirely on the device. The phone is connected to your local Wi-Fi ...

My brand new Lenovo X200s died. The first symptoms of the deadly illness were spotted a month ago. It was 3 weeks old at that time. Horizontal strips across the screen and reset. I sent it for warranty repair, it came back after 15 days not being touched. "Tested" was the service description, I tried to argue with the lady handing it back to me, but finally gave up... And It worked fine for two weeks without a glitch. I was even thinking I had treated the lady at the Lenovo service center too bad, and may be the computer was really "tested" and the previous breakdowns had been just my imagination. But then it crashed for good. My feeling is these days electronics fail much more often than mechanics, so do not immediately trust these ads saying "no moving parts" etc... Do not be surprised when your SSD drive fails while your spindle drives keep on running... Anyway... I was facing another two weeks without the laptop. I tried to rejuvenate my old OQO 01 bu...