Headworx

Over the years, probably many of you have experienced failures of consumer electronic devices. Power supplies, internet routers, game consoles and personal computers. During the last 12 months I have had an unusual number of such failures. Two satellite receivers ( Kathrein UFS-910 ). Three plug computers ( Sheeva Plug Development Kits ). Three wireless routers ( ZyXel Ethernet-Over-Powerline ). That is eight devices in one year. Pretty unusual statistics. Enough to trigger my curiosity to conduct a forensic investigation. All those failures obviously had an number of things in common. Firstly, all failures were at power supplies circuits. Bam, and all of the sudden the electronics were not receiving the regulated supply voltage. I quickly recalled the failed devices were running quite hot prior to the failures. After opening the cases I found burst electrolytic capacitors. And replacing the capacitors fixed the problems. First - I thought - bad design. Electrolytic capacitors are quit...

My old and faithful BlackBerry Curve 8900 gave up the ghost a week ago. My fault. I have been dropping it on a concrete floor too many times. It was in a really poor physical condition. But such is a life of gadgets being used on continuous basis. So time for a new one. Two years since I last shopped for a mobile phone. I have build a checklist of must - haves. Ended up with a short one - just two items: Support for UMA (connecting to the mobile network via WiFi). It is a must have for me, as where I live, there is no coverage. So I can either sit on top of the roof (which is difficult and not an option in Winter), use a femtocell (none of the MNOs in Poland offers them yet) or use UMA to tunnel my cellphone calls via my private WiFi and DSL line. More on UMA for techies on my tech.slupik.com blog . WebKit - based Web Browser. WebKit is the best Web rendering technology on the market. It is a foundation for many top - performing browsers, including the Chrome, Safari, Android and oth...

Qualcomm is one of my top favorite companies. I got infected by it more than ten years ago by George Gilder. Today I tried to check what I have written about Qualcomm over the five years this blog is active. The search returns four pages of results. For years Qualcomm has been "all mobile". It obviously started with CDMA, the wireless data transmission technology used today in various incarnations (including HSPA) by all MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) across the Globe. Qualcomm pioneered the technology and has always been the largest supplier of baseband chips used both in base stations and mobile handsets. Over time mobile phones evolved to be more computers than just phones. A need for mobile application processors was born. Qualcomm answered the trend launching the most successful mobile application processor to date - the Snapdragon. Snapdragon today powers the entire line of the latest Windows Phone 7 handsets. It is also in the heart of virtually every phone manufactu...

I have to be honest the subject of touchless input , has been keeping my mind busy for several weeks now. I talked on the subject with several friends of mine. And everybody's reaction was showing some angst. Are the machines really going to read our minds? Well... This is a problem. We don't want to lose the privacy of our thoughts. A couple a weeks ago I pointed to the article describing the joint work of Intel and Carnegie Mellon University, quoting Justin Rattner, the CTO of Intel saying "Mind reading is the ultimate user interface." . I did not object then. But I do now. Justin, I do not agree! I still stand by my vision of directly coupling computers to our brains. But there will be no machines READING our minds. It will be the other way around. We will be CONTROLLING the machines with our brains. Let me explain. Your hand. Your very hand. It does everything you want. It obeys the orders of your brain. But can you say your hand READS your mind? Never... It is yo...