Headworx

They call me almost every week. I recognize them as they are the only callers not presenting their caller id. The sales people working for my mobile service provider. Yes I must have had agreed somewhere in my contract to let my MNO contact me over the phone. Silly me. But I really did not realize they can be so silly too... They call me when I am on vacation, interrupting my sea - side lazy afternoons. Or when I am on a business trip. Generally they call me when I am roaming, forcing me to pay for receiving the calls. Silly approach. Their HLRs know I am on a foreign network, and that generally means it is not the best time trying to sell me something on the phone. Is it such a big IT integration issue for a call center software working for a mobile network operator (MNO) to query a HLR before making a call? Or is it cheaper just to call a subscriber ignorantly pretending the operator's sales department has no idea of subscriber's whereabouts (while the billing department prec...

For years I have been absolutely happy with my Lenovo X200S laptop. It was light enough to follow me almost everywhere and powerful enough to be the only machine I had. Especially after the SSD upgrade. But I wanted more. I mean less :). I fell in love with the Nokia Booklet 3G and decided to swap the Lenovo for the Nokia. Looking from today's perspective I very often think this was not the best decision. The keyboard on the Nokia is far from what the Lenovo offered. And I miss the trackstick - yes the touchpads are far inferior. And most importantly the Nokia is slow. Even after the SSD upgrade . But on the other hand I love it when I have to carry it, feeling almost no weight in my bag. It fits nicely in my Kata 123-GO photo bag. And most importantly, with its tiny weight, it is able to work all day on a charge. So I never ever carry a power supply with me. I made some extra setup for the Nokia at home. 22-inch FullHD monitor - the iiyama ProLite E2210HDS (what a name!) connects ...

Apple bypassing Google and then becoming the biggest tech company in the World fuels a lot of talk and speculation. Apple is having a time of its life, with share price up 30% YTD in a shaky market. At the same time Google is down 30% YTD. Definitely investors have fallen in love with Steve Jobs at take whatever Google offers as granted. But paying a closer look may reveal quite a different picture. With all the credits due, Apple is chiefly a design company. Whatever they have done since the original iPhone 1 launch, can hardly be considered innovative or breakthrough. The iPhone was a breakthrough. Nobody expected anything close when they launched. But whatever happened after that has been just incremental, linear improvement. 3G. GPS. More memory and faster processor. Better screen and battery life. Yawn. The null-modem-cable iTunes connectivity remains the same. It is so hard to believe design sells so well. Or that good design is so hard to implement. I wrote about the new Mac Min...

I am a big fan of a life within a browser. I hate apps. Every time I have to install a program or application on my computer or smartphone, I don't like it. Applications are evil. They crash. They have way too broad access to various niches on my hard drive. I don't trust them, in general. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg writing an application for Windows. What would it be doing? It would spend all time and resources scanning your file system and memory for things it could post on Facebook. It would invite all your friends to become fans of your bank account statements and post your Web browsing history as a Facebook news feed. Trust, or lack of it, is the reason I strongly prefer things running inside my browser. It is a big deal. Remember Activex versus Java in the late 1990's? Microsoft just could not implement secure enough way of handling native - code Activex controls, to prevent potential damage. It is the same story again on the smartphone / teleputer platforms (the iOs and...