Headworx

Battery chargers often occupy my mind. Probably because I live with dozen battery - powered gadgets and I am continuously trying to optimize the bulk of chargers I carry. And I must say I have been quite successful with this optimization process, thanks to the USB becoming the de-facto battery charging standard, after. I called it the Universal Supply Bus in 2006 . It was not obvious back then and I remember people smiling after reading my post. Today it is mandatory in the EU to provide micro-USB charging port in a phone. Even Apple has to comply ... As part of my preparations for the summer holidays I went out looking for a smart charger for my Sigma Merrill digital camera. The Merrill eats batteries very fast, so this means having probably five spare ones at hand (which is not a big deal, as they are rather small). But the problem is how do I charge them all during one night, I will be spending from time to time in a hotel equipped with power sockets. This problem is not s...

Back in 2002, as an experiment, I bought my first digital camera, the Minolta F100. And just after taking the first batch of pictures I realized the analog era was over. The mix of quality and flexibility of digital photography surprised me at that time. I have never taken an analog photo anymore. Ten years later, in 2012, as an experiment, I bought the Sigma DP1M, a Foveon - based compact camera. And just after taking the first batch of pictures I realized the classic Bayer - based digital photography might be coming to an end... I explained the difference between Bayer and Foveon many times. My Polish friends may refer to the 2007 article in Computerworld: http://www.computerworld.pl/artykuly/56408/Technologia.fundamentalnie.lepsza.html . Also here on this blog there are a number of posts on Foveon, notably the two: http://headworx.slupik.com/2007/02/x3-digital-film.html and http://headworx.slupik.com/2013/01/merrill.html . The Sigma DP1M has many drawbacks. No optical viewfin...

My faithful Subaru died two weeks ago. Fatal engine failure, starting with the head gasket, ending up with exhaust gasses in the coolant and local overheating of one of the cylinders leading to piston ring split and scratched cylinder. Later on I've learned this has been a fairly common fault of the EJ25 Turbo engines (they are reamed 2.0 liter blocks, with thinner walls). Anyway, after doing some market research I decided to order the all-new Forester 2013. What I like in Subaru is they do not have options and you do not have to "configure" the car. Like Apple, they know better and decide for the customers. I hate options and spending days on studying what should I order. And paying twice the base price in the end. The downside is... the new car is coming with a factory navigation system - the most useless system today. I wrote many times here and I know what I'm saying. Factory Navi systems are crap. They are like from the past century. For two reasons. One -...

Near Field Communications, or NFC, is finally being widely adopted. Apple missed this train (the lack of NFC has been the biggest disappointment of the iPhone 5), but this has not stopped the market from adopting the technology. Initially NFC was considered as the enabling technology for mobile payments. But this has not happened. Mobile payments require more than NFC, which is just a "transport" technology. Mobile payments require security and there is this ongoing tug-of-war about who owns the secure element: phone makers, OS makers, MNOs or banks? This is why we have contact-less credit cards (PayPass and PayWave: no ownership dispute there) and we cannot virtualize them in a phone (even if the phone has NFC circuitry). But in the meantime NFC has found a way into consumer electronics market of various connected things. Things require connectivity. Connectivity needs to be set up. And it is not so obvious how to set up a thing, which wants to be connected, before it ...

Electronic gadgets are flooding our lives. And the good thing is they are now equally stylish and well designed as functional. Nokia was probably the first major company to discover technology was about style and fashion as well as about function. While Ericsson was introducing new features to their mobile phones in the 1990’s, Nokia had interchangeable color covers. The memories of those times still come back today when I see a 3D printer printing a custom color cover for a Nokia Lumia phone on the Nokia stand. Today Nokia has lost its glamor to Apple, but the good news is nearly every manufacturer of consumer electronics pays a lot of attention to the details in design. Recently I have been impressed the most by Jabra, the Danish mobile sound products manufacturer. While Jabra still has some homework to do to surpass Bose in quality of portable sound, the design of their latest products has surpassed even Apple. Take the new Vox in-ear ear-buds and have a look. There is a tiny so...