Headworx

We have not touched base on the iPad for quite a while. When it was launched in January, I thought I would buy at least two. Eventually I bought one and I still have mixed feelings. Sometimes I like it. Today is one of these days. Sunday recovery session, with lazy time passing by, I have been sitting on a sofa by my big window overlooking the garden with yellow leaves already dancing in the wind. I have read two technology / investment forums I participate in, browsed through some 200 new items in the Google Reader and read some ten articles. Content snicking. This is what can be done very well on the iPad. But when I wanted to continue with my current book - The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century , I reached for the Kindle. One of the background tasks running in my head was still processing the puzzle I was offered on the Domino forum, when suddenly it interrupted my reading with the Eureka! To offer the solution to the puzzle, I had to check some stuff on the Internet ...

What do you think is one of the problems we will not solve for good before 2020? It is power consumption (yes, I have said this a number of times already...). Thirty years ago when I was starting my lifetime adventure with computers, nobody cared about power consumption. The problem number one was speed. And today? Theoretically we can have almost as much speed as we want, provided we have enough power to supply to a computer and are able to dissipate the heat it converts to. Things are not that bad as long as our machines are plugged to a power plant. But get orders of magnitude more complicated once we want to cut the power cords and be mobile. Today all mobile devices have one problem in common. Battery life. From mobile phones to portable game consoles, to music players and portable computers, their batteries last too short. And even if they in some rare occasions last long enough, it is because we limit the battery life cutting down on speed or because we install excessively big b...

After several weeks of heavy artillery, today I offer something on a lighter note. After months of searching I have finally found a really universal USB charger. Why do I consider this significant? Look. Depending on a trip, I usually take more than one USB powered gadget with me. I have a phone (Blackberry), mobile speakers (iHome IHM79), a mobile WiFi router ( Huawei E5830 ), an eBook Reader (Kindle), a music player (iPod Nano) and sometimes a tablet (iPad). There are two fundamental reasons this one is like no other: It has two USB ports. I always have at least two USB powered gadgets with me. Or more. Having two ports I can spare another charger. It is the only one that charges all my gadgets. It had been a tough puzzle before. Because the Huawei router can only be charged with the Kindle charger. But the Kindle charger does not charge the iPad. And the iPad's charger does not charge the Blackberry. And both blackberry and Huawei have bulky and heavy chargers. Now there are no...

We are so excited about the pace of technology progress. Every problem seems to be just a temporary problem, with a solution already on the horizon. Faster connection speeds. Faster processors. Smarter algorithms. Stronger materials. All those inventions make possible things that were not possible just a while ago. But there are certain fundamental technology problems, which will not be solved. At least not before the end of the current decade. One such problem is supply of power to mobile devices. Before we even start thinking about mobile devices, let us realize the power problem has become the biggest problem in the non-mobile computing world. Fulfilling the Moore's Law, we are able to scale down the geometries and scale up densities. The concentration of raw computing power per physical volume is skyrocketing. And so is the power draw. And still all the power consumed by electronic circuitry is turned into heat, which has to be dissipated. To dissipate the heat, we use even mor...

My thoughts are still circling around the general user interface issues, and especially around the input methods people use to interact with computers. "Computers" here has a very broad meaning. Today anything is a computer. Be it a car A/C control or a house thermostat or a video recorder (referred today as a PVR - personal Video Recorder, as if the former ones weren't personal...). Humans are analog by design. Computers are digital. Back in 1970's when the first digital systems were emerging there was a huge drive and demand for everything digital, especially as an input and output. The first digital, LED based watches. The first VCR's. The first massive failures. The VCR era, that lasted during the 80's and the 90's can be very accurately identified by any time traveler by blinking [12:00] clocks in the living rooms. Guess why... The users simply did not know how to use the digital remotes to set up their digital clocks. Even if they managed to do this ...