Headworx

After a really long and thorough preparation, the Namibia / Botswana / Zimbabwe trip went way over the initial expectations. Over three weeks we covered almost 4000 miles, more than 80% of that was gravel and off road. There are close to 2000 photos, which I'm trying to reduce down to about 300 before publishing. I could go for hours telling what worked (many things) and what didn't (almost nothing...), but here is the list of the indisputable winners: The Hankook DynaPro MT tyres. They carried our HiLux Dakar through the entire distance with no single puncture (although we had two spares). This is a phenomenal track record and those of you who do some off road trips know how important it is to have absolutely dependable tires. The Tracks4Africa maps, both paper ones and the electronic edition loaded on the Garmin GPS platform. It is just unbelievable how precise and dependable they are. Nobody should even think of self driving there without these maps. The Delorme inRea...

I have just had a couple of novice interactions with GoPro. It is one of the worst UX I have ever had. Tiny LCD, a set of ambiguous buttons, the battery losing power, especially when WiFi is enabled. It is hard to understand and explain a product like that is having such a market success. But being successful does not mean you couldn't be even more successful or at least generate less frustration for users. Of course using a phone a a remote keyboard and display via a wireless connection is obvious. They even try this over WiFi, but wifi brings at least three problems here: It draws a lot of power and impacts the already very poor battery life It has to be turned on and off and it is not obvious how to do it The discovery process and securing the channel is not that straightforward either It all could be solved easily by implementing a Bluetooth Smart radio on GoPro. It could be always on, not affecting the battery. It could be automatically detected and create a secure c...

Security of software - based systems is very high. It may sound weird because we keep on hearing about malware and hacks and holes. But a typical software - based system is far more secure today than typical hardware, be it a door lock or a padlock or even car's ignition system. Opening a locked door to a house or an apartment poses no problem to a professional thief. But there is one fundamental difference which makes software based systems such attractive targets. A software attack is scalable. When you find a way to break it, you may bring a huge number of systems down. It is yet another scenario where bits scale and atoms do not. Breaking into thousand houses requires a significant effort from the attacker, even if opening a single door is easy. In software, when you find a way to break in, usually breaking into million systems requires the same effort as breaking into a single one. This is what makes software - based systems so vulnerable. Not because the defenses are we...

In his January 2015 blog , Scott Jenson writes: we just assume there won’t be many smart devices in our homes because it is so damn hard to put them there in the first place! With the two previous standards in place, it would be child’s play to add items to a home and it would quickly change this from a game of things to a game of swarms With my "live in the future and build what's missing" motto, I arrived at several hundred connected devices at home some time ago. And interesting problems emerge when you have 500 devices around. E.g. with the "industry standard" failure rate, I have several nodes on my network dead every day. For many reasons: depleted batteries, sensors being eaten by dogs, taken away by kids, flooded by rain after being pierced by birds (they especially like the swimming pool floating thermometer), etc. I also once had several radio controlled relays I built into some legacy products (coffee makers etc) and their power supplies died m...