Headworx

Despite some early growing pains , USB Type-C is a winner. USB, as we know it mostly today, is 22 years old. Pretty mature. Even considering the accelerated pace of development of new technologies, I am sure Type-C will last until 2040 and will be in use by 2050. The thing illustrated here is a combo USB drive by Kingston. It is a classic USB on one side and Type-C on the other, making file transfer between systems dead fast and easy. This ultra-tiny piece of hardware has 128GB capacity and works with everything, including iPhone 8. This is probably the best news for all of us: Apple dropping Lightning and adopting USB Type-C . This tiny connector is reversible (like Lightning) but is much more versatile, capable of carrying signals like high definition video. It also carries almost unbelievable (for its size) amount of power: up to 100W (remember: the original USB could do 2.5W). So essentially it becomes the ONLY connector any portable device (laptop, tablet, phone) needs. It i...

Almost exactly a year ago Skip Ashton published a blog that looked both promising and scary. Promising, because we really need a standard that covers such simple things like switches and light bulbs. Scary, because at that time I knew Bluetooth Mesh would still have a long way to go until being officially adopted. Now a year has passed and nothing happened. ZigBee released their Draft of Revision 6 of the Cluster Library specification . Google started their baby steps with Weave Schemas and the merged OCF started the oneIoTa Data Model . Unfortunately none of these brings any meaningful change to the landscape. After a more serious look at each of these the conclusion is obvious: these efforts are very immature. Let's take the light bulb example. Both Weave and OCF don't specify a dimming curve. They just say you tell a bulb a non-zero value and it starts emitting light. But actually how much light - nobody knows. ZigBee goes a little further - they actually do have a d...

This week has been full of Bluetooth. The 5 is out. It's been a long wait. Not really wait but countless hours of brainstorming, design, tuning, test specification development. Now Bluetooth SIG estimates we will wait between 2 to 6 months until the first Bluetooth 5 products hit the market. We are somehow used to an 18-month mobile phone replacement cycle, but technology does not run THAT fast. Let's face it: what is the real difference between iPhone 6 and 7? Significantly smaller than between Bluetooth 4 and 5. It just takes time to develop a global leading standard. Now speaking of standards and implementations, I just can't help commenting on how big the gap can be. Bluetooth 4, with the LE subsystem, was released in 2010. Today, almost 7 years later, a flagship Google device - the Pixel C is not capable of running a stable Bluetooth connection with its keyboard. And Apple is still struggling with synchronizing timing of a stereo sound between a left and a wirele...

The Lufthansa strike brought a series of headaches to my travel schedules. I admit it's been a while since the lat major disruption (see the Volcanic Panic post). Unfortunately very little has changed on the IT technology front since then. I spent again several hours on a phone waiting in line for "the next available agent". The case seems simple. I'd expect logging to the portal of the airline that is experiencing service interruptions and being presented with available options. Exactly what an agent offers me on a call after the long wait. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is still humans doing the tedious work that computers could easily handle, given a relatively simple set of rules. Interestingly the same applies to online travel agents, such as Expedia. Most of flight modifications and cancellations has to be done via call center agents. Long waits. Long talks. Still no app for that.

Last week's Strategies in Light Europe, colocated with Lux Live 2016 , brought fierce discussions on the future of wireless lighting. One very evident trend was Bluetooth Low Energy, showcased by several companies (including us), each proposing their proprietary mesh network based on the Bluetooth LE standard. The voice of the lighting industry has been clear: "Give us an interoperable, full stack solution that works. Wireless audio has had it for years. Why wireless lighting cannot have the same?". Could not agree more, and believe me, this is my personal priority, leading the Bluetooth Mesh Working Group: unite and deliver. It is also our mission at Silvair : make wireless lighting fly! And we know and completely understand why a full stack, open, standards - compliant solution is the only answer. I have been repeating this for years, stressing the importance of the application layer, as well as the " Layer-0 ". Yes, the full stack is 8 layers, not 7. ...

Grab your smartphone and (provided you're using a Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS) open this link: https://www.panomoments.com/m/grand-central . It is a pretty jaw dropping experience, how - what seems to be - a simple web image reacts to movements of the mobile device. Immediately you can envision how being able to capture such panoramas would become the future of personal photography. PanoMoments plans to offer both the hardware and software to make this happen. I have to say this is one of the most exciting Kickstarter campaigns I've come across this year. Considering my recent fascination with wide angle lens and encouraged by the on-time delivery and great performance of the Zero-D 12mm Laowa lens, it didn't take me too much time to decide on backing this project. Startups seem to be driving the innovation in prosumer photography space through Kickstarter. PanoMoments - if it delivers - not only on the hardware side, but also on the software end (much more...

One of the unintended consequences of [Apple] dropping the 3.5mm headphone jack may be an increased adoption of Bluetooth beacons. For beacons to be effective, phones need to have Bluetooth enabled. Which still many users don't do. Either because they don't have a reason or because they believe it eats battery fast (the latter is a habit from the Nokia 6310 times, when phones lasted for a week and has virtually no effect today). When an audio jack is no longer available and other wired options are still not compatible (Lightning on iPhones and USB Type-C elsewhere), many users will bet on the only safe and prevailing wireless audio standard: Bluetooth. More Bluetooth audio accessories will cause more Bluetooth adapters turned on permanently, opening more opportunities for beacons. It looks like smartphones are firmly settling now on three radios: cellular (for outdoor), WiFi (for indoor data streaming) and Bluetooth (for all kinds of accessories and IoT). Bluetooth clearl...

I'm facing a very busy year-end period with lots of travels. And while the iPad Pro is a very handy form factor for in-flight content consumption, I was struggling with proper preparation of content to study while airborne. Until a friend reminded me about Pocket . I had tried Pocket before but probably not thorough enough to appreciate its virtues. On a second try now it shapes entirely different, addressing exactly what I need. AFter having installed "Save to Pocket" extensions everywhere (on a phone, in Feedly, in desktop browsers...), it is just a subsecond click during busy hours to send content to Pocket. And then, when a proper moment for digesting comes, Pocket on iPad has it all, in offline / "article" mode (without disturbing ads and active gadgets). Beautiful! It is not entirely perfect - I cannot for example send PDFs and other more heavy content, such as Slideshare presentations or network videos with a single click (that'd be awesome, ai...

Here is the list of Bluetooth - based equipment I carry in my backpack when roaming between the home and the office: 1. Windows laptop (Lenovo) 2. iOS iPad (Apple) 3. Android phone (Blackberry) 4. Smart watch (Garmin) 5. Wireless mouse (Logitech) 6. Apple pencil (Apple) 7. Mono headset (Plantronics) 8. Conference speaker (Jabra) 9. Keyfob (Tile) When going for a business trip I usually add to the list: 10. Stereo headset (Bose) 11. Music speaker (Bose) 12. Muscle toner (Slendertone)  Additionally on a daily basis I'm using: 13. Wireless keyboard (Logitech) 14. Car audio (Pioneer) 15. Garage door opener (Proxi) 16. Property gate opener (Proxi) That is 16 Bluetooth devices per person, while Bluetooth Mesh is yet to land in all lighting fixtures in offices', restaurants', shopping malls' and airports' ceilings. This is and will continue to be the most widely spread and adopted wireless technology. And it is not only the number of nodes. It ...

A couple of days ago I lost my faithful Livescribe 3 pen. This was a device I had ups and downs with. The most annoying feature (or the lack of) is the missing migration path for captured notes from one phone / tablet to another. And no way to back up the database. The notes live in the pen and in a phone (after transferred), but there is no "Cloud" or any other option to backup / export / import the data. But even being fully aware of this problem I decided to order a new one. I have actually been using this gadget quite often and when I started recollecting the reasons why... one important popped up immediately: it used to work for days (or even weeks) on a single charge. I actually never had a situation the pen was discharged and did not capture the notes. The experience would have been completely different if it required a daily charge. It'd be too much of a hassle. Similar experience I have now with the Garmin fēnix watch. It works for 10-14 days on a charge. ...

At the 2016 LpS Symposium in Bregenz, Austria, our friends from Chess Wise recalled a very interesting study on reliability of wireless systems. Professor Holger Hermanns of Saarland University have developed a wireless bike brake system with a fail rate of three times in a trillion attempts. Or 99.999999999997 percent. The secret? Multiple senders attached to the bicycle repeatedly send the same signal. Multi-path delivery becomes the secret sauce of high reliability low power mesh networks and is especially applicable to lighting systems. The beauty of multi-path delivery is that it is an ideal (if not the only one) method of controlling a large group of devices (such as a hotel lobby with 500 lights). The level of reliability achieved with multi-path essentially removes the need of acknowledgements being sent back to the sender. And the math is simple: 500 lights, all controlled as a group Single path delivery with acknowledgements: 1000 messages + retry logic Multi-pa...

After the hard drive crash experienced several weeks ago I ended up reinstalling Windows 10 and all desktop applications from scratch. Something I was avoiding for a very long time. Older versions of Windows used to get slower over time and the "restart from scratch" method was recommended at least once a year to clean up the system. Since Windows 7 this has no longer been the case, so I had an accumulated residue of 6-year worth of variety of applications. One particular workflow I put a lot of attention to is digital photos. They come in RAW from several digital cameras and from smartphones, as JPEGs. I like hos the entire library is handled by Adobe Lightroom and it restored all the settings from backups nicely. I use Lightroom to do post processing and then I used to use Picasa to share JPEGs exported from Lightroom. But to my surprise, I realized Picasa was no longer available from Google. So I ended up installing Google Photos uploader only. It took a good couple o...

It seems there is a significant change coming to power supplies. And as always startups are leading the pack. I praised the Zolt not long ago and now last week I received the FINsix Dart . There have been two surprises: It is significantly smaller than Zolt It has a USB port All in all, a great upgrade for my Cable Bag . I also like the way the power cord is designed. It provides a USB port close to one end of the cable. But entire cable is reversible. Therefore the USB port may be close to the power brick or may be close to a laptop, further reducing cable entanglements. Really ingenious design. Volume - wise the whole package is about 30% of the Apple 65W adapter. Plus it has an USB out, which the Apple brick lacks. Market leaders should never allow companies like FINsix to grow. Apple or Lenovo should have acquired it long time ago.

Last week's LED Professional Symposium sparked many discussions about IoT business models. It starts with lights, but after all lights are no longer about being a light source. Lights are sensors. Lights are routers. Lights are computers. And most importantly, lights form infrastructure mesh data networks.  Connected lights transform ceilings into digital ceilings and this really becomes now the essence of IoT. Lights are not lights. And a network that connects them is not a lighting control network. It is a multi-service infrastructure / sensory data network. Feilo Sylvania says the value of presence heat map data harvested by lights is 6-7x higher than the value generated with the most energy efficient lighting system. So if this data really has that much value, immediately the ownership dispute kicks in: who owns it? And this is a deep gray area now: nobody dares to clearly answer this question. But clearly two models are going to emerge: the "Cisco model" ...

In the middle of the very busy Bluetooth Working Groups Summit, I'm very happy to unveil some harbinger news on the upcoming IoT standard we've been working on for some time now. The Mesh Working Group has won the Working Group of the Year award. This means a lot to the working group and it also means how important this development has become to the Bluetooth standard. We have all reasons to believe this is shaping to become the most successful IoT protocol. We are still in a stealth mode but I encourage all who express interest in the IoT revolution to come and join Bluetooth SIG to become part of it.

One thing, which is absolutely striking me when talking to customers, trying to convince them to support the development of the Bluetooth Mesh standard is many of them asking "will it support proprietary extensions?". This question is brought even before they go and check if it is necessary in the first place. Proprietary is easy. And proprietary promises some short term rewards: "we will keep this space for us". 20 years after the Sony MiniDisc people still want to create their own minidiscs. One thing the proprietary proponents never take into account is that standards ultimately prevail. Think MP3. Think HTML. Think Ethernet. Think Bluetooth. Think AES. Of course creating a standard is an effort that is orders of magnitude bigger than going a proprietary route. But to anyone thinking big, proprietary is not an option. Even the biggest company like Apple does not have enough power to enforce proprietary solutions on emerging markets. Think HomeKit: a nice se...

I experienced a series of laptop disasters, exactly when I'm completely overloaded with finalizing the design documents for (the most) important IoT standard. Murphy's law... First I happened to spill some tea on the lid but the machine kept working, so did I. It lasted for 15 minutes and then gave up the ghost. In a hurry, to continue my (almost) uninterrupted work I hijacked my co-worker's machine (identical model of Lenovo Yoga) put my hard disk in and kept on going. Unfortunately the hijacked machine was in a poor shape: very noisy fan and some broken internals. I managed to rebuild it using the parts of the dead one and thought the problem was over. The rebuild process involved swapping the motherboard and also swapping the touch-pad, so it cost me almost a day. The following week I found the hard drive gave up the ghost too: "SATA device not recognized" greeted me last Thursday morning exactly 3 hours before a planned train trip. Desperately looking for ...

Security in IoT is paramount. And the most difficult at the same time. Difficult because of the nature of the tiny devices that have very small storage and very low processing power. But any new product or protocol must be designed with at least the fundamental security features as standard: The design must be published, so it can be analyzed and scrutinized publicly. You should not even try to touch a proprietary solution. It must be upgradable. Bugs happen and can be fixed. But what is a fix worth if it cannot be deployed? It must be physically resistant to attempts of extracting security material (keys). External flash memory is a no-go. No keys should ever be hardcoded. Because they will fall eventually. Humans should not be responsible for creating the keys. Because they usually will be weak. Keys should be generated by truly random generators. Nonces have to be truly unique. Not just random. A system should be able to roll the keys periodically to prevent brute force at...

All signs point to the mobile industry moving towards headphone apocalypse by dropping the 3.5 mm standard jack. I know it potentially means more money, but first and foremost it means confused and frustrated consumers. Envision this: the next phone you are about to buy will not have a standard analog headphone socket. You can now trash your high quality Bose, Monster, Beats or whatever you've been using recently. Or you can use a Type-C- to - 3.5mm dongle (yeah, yet another dongle). The problem not just the dongle itself, but the fact it will occupy the only port the phone has, so you won't be able to charge it while having headphones plugged in. The same applies to Apple devices, the only difference is they will have the Lightning port. On iPhones and iPads that is, because on MacBooks there is the Type-C USB (but Apple fans can afford having two sets of headsets, can't they?). Unless Apple drops Lightning and adopts Type-C across the product line (which it should)....

USB Type-C is probably the most promising wired technology developed recently. Small, reversible connector, huge bandwidth (up to 10Gbps), huge power (up to 100 watts via USB-PD or Power Delivery standard) and even high definition video via built-in Display Port (upt o 8K@60Hz). But today it still shows all signs of immaturity. Not diving into the high data transfer rates and video over Type-C, the biggest hurdle are chargers and cables. Even official Google Nexus Chargers Could Be Dangerous . Not long ago I bought the Intel Core m3 - based Compute Stick with the idea to drive presentation projectors in conference rooms. It comes with Windows 10 preinstalled and has plenty of power to run it. It also comes with a very clever concept utilizing Type-C: it is powered via a Type-C cable, while the power supply acts as a USB hub exposing two SuperSpeed (blue) sockets. The problem with this very smart concept is the cable that weighs twice as much as the computer and is 3x bulkier...

Physical things wear our and break. This is the nature of our world. Systems made of physical things are supposed to keep running uninterrupted. To do that they have to be designed in such a way that the components can be replaced effortlessly. Maintenance is not incidental. It is a process. As things are getting smarter, one of the fundamental design goals should be self-maintenance. Of course database software is not able to replace a failed hard drive. A lighting system will not screw in a new light bulb when an old one fails. But failures - in most cases - are not instantaneous. Usually a deteriorating state of a component can be detected before it stops working completely. Alerting humans and giving them enough time to react. This was one of the very pleasant experiences I had a few weeks ago. If you can call a hard drive failure a pleasant experience. But hey, hard drives do fail. But when a NAS system I run in my basement detected this condition, with enough lead time to b...

The most annoying aspect of the Apple Pencil is there is no way to carry it. Apple never took care of this problem and neither did various sleeve / cases makers. Even the premium ones, like Pad&Quill . They however realized their mistake. In an attempt to fix it, designers at Pad&Quill rushed to create an addon pencil holder , but missed again: I don't particularly like the proposed way of attaching it to the Oxford case. Fortunately the holder is flexible to attach anyway you like. And I think I've found a better place for it. At least it works for me much better. It extrudes nicely when forming a kickstand and it feels almost like taking a pen from an inkwell. And then it folds back when the case is closed.

When I was starting my adventure with low power wireless mesh networks back in 2010, radio range was the key problem. Companies developing wireless standards were looking into ways to extend the range by allowing light bulbs route messages between each other. This had been the foundation of Z-Wave and ZigBee and later Thread. Hopping a single message from A to B via C and D seemed to be the Holy Grail when the number of "smart" devices in a network was in the range of single units. Or tens of units.  In 2014 Gartner said the average number of smart / connected devices at home in 2020 would be 500 . And I believe they are close. With proliferation of widely adopted standards, such as Bluetooth, there will be nothing stopping us of putting sensors everywhere, especially for applications like occupancy sensing and asset tracking. A typical home requires not more that three "hops" for a low power radio packet to travel from one end to another. Which gives us rough...

Another summer vacation. Another set of photos. Another hours spent keeping them all organized. It is gradually getting better but still is tedious. The whole process reminds me a data warehouse. Aggregating data from variety of sources, cleansing, merging, until an acceptable result is achieved. It all starts from the fact almost any digital device today can contribute to a photo collection. A camera will take pictures. And provide time-stamp information for each, which by the way is always inaccurate. Either because the camera clock has drifted or it reset itself completely as the camera has not been charged since the previous vacation, or simply the time zone has not been set correctly. I used to have a habit of keeping the camera clocks on GMT, but this no longer helps merging together photos from several sets, as some photos (increasingly more) are taken with smartphones, and smartphones stamp them with local time, not Zulu. Phone camera apps also try to geocode the photos...

There is the common wisdom GPS works outdoors only. Which used to be true. But the performance of consumer grade navigation devices has been surprising recently. This post is an addendum to the last week's Garmin fēnix story. The fēnix (or the D2 Bravo in my case) exceeded my imagination on GPS capabilities. A number of times, as a passenger, I tried to log a track of a flight. Sitting at a window I tried holding a phone close to it but every now and then it was losing the signal. The fēnix on the other hand works effortlessly even on an aisle seat on the lower deck of a 747. It even keeps working in a lavatory which is situated centrally within a fuselage, far from any window, inside an all-metal plane. On a 9-hour trip across the Atlantic it logged about 26 thousand waypoints, which is about one measurement per second. The "Fly" activity application was continuously showing instruments panel displaying altitude, speed, heading and other data, almost as I was sittin...

Garmin surprises me nowadays. One would think they'd be doomed facing Google Maps and Apple Watch. It seems though they are doing pretty well, exceeding expectations in many areas - such as smart watches. The fēnix 3 , also known as the Tactix, Quatix or D2 Bravo is a very successful smart watch platform. All watches share the same hardware (with some options such as the wrist - based heart rate monitor, sapphire glass or titanium shell) and have a number of accessory options (mainly wrist bands). They start at $500 for a model without the heart rate monitor and can go as high as $900 for the aviation - oriented titanium version. The watch does what usually a smart watch is expected to do: has downloadable apps, customizable screens, can control a music player, display variety of notifications etc. And has a very good companion software app. But there are several features that make the fēnix platform stand out from the crowd: Reflective color, always-on display. This has be...

Continuing our work on wireless IoT standards, security - related items contribute to about 70% - 80% of the total effort. It is difficult and complicated, especially when dealing with very resource - constrained devices. We very often deal with contradicting requirements. "It has to be secure" (of course). "It should cost less than $1". "It should last on batteries for ages". Etc. Meeting all the requirements is a challenge, but certainly possible, to some extent. One interesting problem that is coming up in discussions is mal - things, or devices that are legitimately introduced in a network, but start misbehaving. In the end, nobody can be sure a lightbulb does not contain malicious code that once given access to a network, will start playing dirty tricks, such as broadcasting "all off" messages repeatedly to the whole network. It is the same problem corporate administrators have with their LANs. And the only good solution seems to be isol...

Bluetooth 5 has just been announced. The specification will be published within a few months, so still we can only talk about it to some level of details. But what we do know officially there will be a "double speed" option which essentially means the raw data rate will double from the current 1Mbps to 2Mbps. Bluetooth has also announced quadrupling the range. Doubling the data rate and increasing the range are usually contradictory to each other. Normally you increase the range by slowing the data rate and you are able to increase the rate when your link budget can accommodate it. So reading into the Bluetooth's announcement one feature becomes apparent: adaptive data rate. Bluetooth 5 is the first low power radio that can go faster or slower depending on the application requirements. Which is absolutely phenomenal and brings incredible flexibility to product designers and system architects. The double data rate will play a very important role in the increasingly d...

There is this huge inconsequence at Apple: USB Type-C vs Lightning. Add the plans to get rid of the 3.5 mm audio jack and you end up with a total mess. Imagine I'm a pure Apple guy. The latest Macbook and the latest iPhone. Two different chargers, two different cables. Also after the 3.5mm audio jack is dropped, that means plus two sets of headphones: one Lighting (for the phone) and the other one USB Type-C (for the Macbook). The only way for Apple to make a sensible transition away from the 3.5mm audio port is to fully adopt USB Type-C by replacing the 3.5mm port with the Type-C port. Releasing a dual - port (USB Type-C + Lightning) iPhone and start phasing out the Lightning port. Lightning is the new FireWire would be a really smart move. Lightning is just another FireWire. No future for it - USB will win again. You can't change the wind direction by blowing at it. It is a tough decision but Apple was making such before: FireWire to USB and PowerPC to Intel. And by t...

I've had some fun tuning the iPad Pro. First, I wanted a nice (but not too bulky) leather case for it and after shopping around I selected the Oxford . The interesting part of it is the iPad is stuck to it, not framed by it. But is still does not provide a way to kick the Pad up in a portrait orientation (none of the cases I found do). I decided to rip apart my (broken) Kindle Voyage Leather Origami Case and use it as an integrated kickstand. With a help of a leather adhesive it works perfectly. Then the Pencil. Dbrand offers the Pencil skin that makes it look... well... like a pencil. It is a nice set now. Much more classic than the boring Johnny Ive aluminum / snowy white style. Finally the Dbrand Pencil Kit included extra spots for the pen cap, and I used it to cover the front camera. BTW: Apple should offer iPads without the front camera. I think people would be willing to pay some extra for this un-feature.

Last week I briefly mentioned an Android phone could be configured to broadcast a Physical Web URL beacon. Technically this is done by programming the Bluetooth controller chip to periodically advertise a Service UUID and a Service Data PDUs according to the Eddystone format . Practically, today this can be done with a help of the Beacon Toy app . To receive the beacons, either on Android or iOS, Chrome Browser v49 (or later) must be installed, with the Physical Web option enabled under Privacy settings. Physical Web supports only https:// URLs and they cannot exceed 17 characters (with some encoding ), so generally the links should be short, or a URL shortener (such as https://goo.gl ) should be used. Proper http forwarding is supported, but some services (such as LinkedIn) make tricks rendering their shortcuts incompatible with Physical Web (hey, LinkedIn, this is your wakeup call!). So with the Beacon Toy it is just a few clicks to have your URL of choice set up as a Physi...

In my case it is a constant process / hobby: to optimize the set of travel accessories. It is also a multi-year, multi-million-mile experience. So here it is: the Headworx Cable Bag, 2016 edition: MicroSDHC card with an adapter. Handy for quick file transfers and backups. Apple Pencil charging adapter. Probably the weakest point of the Pencil. Micro-to-Mini USB adapter. Some things still use the old connector. MicroUSB-to-30-pin Apple adapter. Some things still use the old connector. MicroSD-to-USB adapter. Doubles as a pendrive. Fido security key. For Google 2-factor authentication, in case I had to use a public computer and my phone with the Authenticator App was broken. Zolt Charger . Being much smaller than the stock laptop charger, it has revolutionized this cable bag, as I could get rid of a phone / iPad charger and a power splitter - now I never need more than a single outlet, when charging a laptop, an iPad and a phone at the same time. Euro adapter for the Zolt. The ...

Here is what 12 years of evolution brings to pen / tablet computing. 2003 Compaq TC-1000 vs 2015 iPad Pro. Both are 12 inch screens. Both run 6 hours on a battery Both capable of running Microsoft Office. Both have detachable keyboards and can be used as tablets. Apple pencil is slimmer and longer compared to the Microsoft pen. But the pen has an eraser. The Compaq could be configured with up to 1.20 GHz processor, 60 GB storage, 2 GB RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and was running Windows XP Tablet OS with excellent support for pen input, including background OCR and indexing. Not that very much different than the iPad... For some reason we are running in circles... I have a feeling Microsoft has wasted most of those years... Because now very few remember how pen computing was on Windows 12 years ago. But wait, Windows Ink is coming back this Summer. And the Huawei MateBook seems like a perfect device for the Ink. Time to switch back?

I'm pretty happy with the battery life of the Blackberry Priv . It is not that I travel without a backup power bank, but generally I do not run into troubles. But from time to time the phone can drain a lot of juice even before lunch, just doing nothing. Chasing the battery draining ghosts I installed an app called GServiceFix and it seems to have cured the disease. Which is scary... Scary, because I've had this problem on other phones and other versions of Android. It probably started with the LG G3 running KitKat and continued on the G3 upgraded to Lollipop, was present on the Priv running Lollipop and now has been noticed from time to time after upgrading the Priv to Marshmallow. A strange plague rooted somewhere deep in the Android OS, popular enough that someone takes an effort to build an app that cures it. But looking around I'm finding more questions than answers about what the GServiceFix really does and why the fix, proven working by many, has not found i...

I have not checked the status of a smart home landscape for some time. Wink went down a while ago, Revolv left their users stranded. Now I'm hearing SmartThings hubs playing random games with their users . At Silvair we had an ambition to develop a similar platform back in 2012. And we did deliver on a small scale having a trusted group of satisfied users. While the F&Home system is not running the most popular protocols, it has one simple advantage: reliability. I installed it in my home 4 years ago and it has been running now uninterrupted for almost 1000 days. No blackouts. No random behavior. Just doing the job. There is this fundamental difference between what it takes to build a system that works sometimes and a system that works always. An order of magnitude in time / money / effort. Or two orders of magnitude. It is almost like making software that behaves like hardware - rock solid and dependable. Happy path is easy and you can demonstrate it to the market, custom...

Great products are usually really simple. Take a laptop power supply and two USB phone chargers and mix them together creating one simple package: a small universal travel charger. With three ports and no bulky cables. The Zolt addresses precisely my obsession in minimizing the travel gear, including the (specially handcrafted to cut down the weight of the power cord) Lenovo part. A laptop port and two high power USB ports, all intelligently balanced to prioritize phone charging is exactly what I need. The idea is so simple that it is hard to imagine why laptop manufacturers or leading aftermarket accessory brands like Kensington or Targus never introduced a similar concept. Including Apple who does crazy optimizations when it comes to devices being less bulky and wants you to carry three power supplies: one for a laptop, second for a phone and a third one for a watch. And the problem is not just the number of bricks to carry. It is also the number of power outlets available. Bein...

Almost every new gadget now carries the "Connected" label. Light bulbs, bathroom scales, toothbrushes, toning belts, door locks, you name them... And in most cases the only thing they are connected to is their companion smartphone app. You can read a scale in an app. You can turn lights with an app (a different one). You can manage your abs toning exercise program with an app (yet a different one). And so it goes. Consolidation efforts by Apple (HomeKit, HealthKit) and Google / Nest (Works with Nest) are not getting any meaningful traction. Hero multi-connectors emerge from time to time (Revolv promised to save the world two years ago, then was Wink and now Amazon Echo). Actually the Echo has the most chances, but it is still in the infancy when it comes to serving a wide range of products, albeit the pace of new partnership announcements is very promising. I've been repeating this for years but it is worth repeating. We need standards. Complete standards. Not just a ...

Google Drive has usually been considered a cloud file system. And actually it is a very clever document / data hub, enhanced with a number of built-in viewers and import options. And it keeps evolving rapidly. Just recently a new "Scan" option has been added to a mobile version of Drive: it takes a snap with a camera and converts it to an indexed PDF document. It is an extremely powerful feature that has just arrived "overnight" and probably many have not noticed (yet). A typical flow involving the scan function is: On a phone, launch the Drive and "+" to add a new item, choose "Scan", the camera will be activated. Take a snap of a hotel bill (or any paper document). A PDF version lands in the Drive instantly, optimized for contrast and clipped to your preferences. Go to a computer and search for "Hilton". The PDF will be located and brought up in a preview built-in the web app (no need to launch a PDF viewer or download the doc...

The amount of money spent globally on repeated tasks of parallel Android / iOS development is alarming. Every software, and soon every hardware company will be double spending on efforts of creating mobile applications for the two platforms. Thanks God Windows and Blackberry are gone. But should a good technology arrive, which allowed writing code once for both platforms, we could probably stop global warming by cutting the workforce by half. Or we could accelerate global progress by giving these smart people something useful to do, instead of repeating what their colleagues have been doing for the other platform. The more I think about this the more I cannot understand why this problem is not solved. It's been 8 years since the iPhone 1 and the first Android release. The hardware, the system paradigm, the connectivity model, the user experience on both is identical. Yet we still continue writing two apps every time instead of just one that compiles and runs on both platforms. ...

There's been rumors the terrorist's iPhone would be cracked with a help of NAND mirroring. I doubt this can be done. If it could it'd mean the iPhone design is not that secure. The root of the problem the FBI has is the contents of the NAND memory is wiped out after 10 unsuccessful PIN code attempts. I think this is a simplification. If the memory is protected, it is encrypted, likely with AES-256, which is unbreakable (unless there is a backdoor...). Encrypting information is always the easy part. Protecting encryption keys is the hard one. I don't know how iPhones protect encryption keys but I believe the keys are not stored in an external memory. I believe they never leave the application processor. And really "wiping out the contents" of an iPhone means wiping out the encryption key. Without that key and assuming AES-256 holds, even zillions of copies of the external flash would not help. This brings me to an interesting IoT - related observation:...