Headworx

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...