Headworx

Device interoperability is absolutely expected by users. But they are not getting it. Why is it so hard to deliver? Because we've never done it. How does an electric plug look like? It depends on which country you live in.... It has a very simple function and there is no interoperability. Converters and adapters are needed. But computers connected to the Internet are interoperable. So why things can't be? Why don't things use WiFi, which is an interoperable protocol? These questions are based on false assumptions. Computers are not interoperable. WiFi is not interoperable. Humans using them are. My laptop cannot talk to your laptop. But I as a human can use an application (like Skype) to connect over WiFi and the Internet to your laptop that runs Skype and has you on the other side. Remove the humans and nothing works. We've never built a single interoperable system! Even the airline reservation systems are not interoperable. So often it happens a ticket iss...

Two weeks ago I made an experiment installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Air. Initially it went smoothly but ended up in a total fiasco. I mean - it worked, but the overall experience was very poor. The battery life dropped down to 2 hours (from around 6 with OS X). After digging around and installing some extra power saving tools and drivers I got it up to 4 hours. But it was unreliable. A couple of times the machine did not turn off after closing the lid. The effect - unexpectedly dead battery. The touch pad was also somehow impaired. Not sure what the problem exactly was, but simply the touchpad operation was not that smooth as on the original Apple software. And I am comparing apples to apples (pun intended), because on both systems the only application I run is Google Chrome. So yes, the Chrome experience on the OS X MacBook is much better then the Chrome experience on the same machine running Linux. I am back to OS X with relief. Which spells again: the devil is in the details. Thou...

What Android TVs and the new iPads have in common? They don't know how to organize the users around them. The world was pretty simple with personal devices. My phone. My tablet. My laptop. My account. My phone shares the photos with my laptop, because both devices operate in a context of the same account. But the problem arises with devices that - by design - are shared. A TV set is a crown example. What user account should the Android TV sign with? And there is no obvious answer to that question. I ended up setting up a new account that I call the "Family Account". Both the TV and the Android TV players are signed to the Family account. This setup is not that bad. Each family member can share selected content with the Family account. Like photos. And then the TV set can go and run the DayDream screen saver displaying randomly the photos it has access to. At least in theory. The real life shows the idea is still not fully supported. Android TV screensaver can grab...

My adventure with digital photography started in 2002 when I realized the quality of images taken with my Minolta Dimage F100 beat an analog film. Since then I have been paying a lot of attention to ordering my catalogs, backing them up and preparing them for sharing as well as being able to display on variety of devices. As a matter of fact this comes down to my Definition-of-Done. Done is not when I press the shutter button. Done is when the photo is cataloged, geo-tagged, post-processed, stored in an ordered album, ranked and shared on line. Today, 13 years later, this process remains extremely painful and difficult. There seems to be only one photo post-processing app that stands out. The Adobe Lightroom. It is difficult to learn but after you master even the basics, everything else pales in comparison. There is also a huge ecosystem of Lightroom plugins that are not available otherwise. Some of them, like the Google Nik Dfine 2 are worth every cent ad then some. Unfortuna...