Headworx

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.