Headworx

Computer upgrade used to be a fairly traumatic experience. Especially on a Windows machine (I don't have too much experience with OS X) it usually meant many hours of re-installing applications and re-configuring drivers for all peripherals such as printers. And only recently I realized it no longer has to be. A simple method we decided to try when upgrading my son's machine. He was using a 2010 Mac Mini running Windows 10 on an upgraded SSD drive. The Mac itself still performs very well, but the graphics performance - never a strong feature of Macs - has been absolutely inadequate to run most of 2017' games. Weighing his budget carefully he found an option to buy a 17-inch refurbished Lenovo Y-700. A beast of a laptop. Refurbished meant "no operating system included" - but we figured out the license of his Windows 10 copy running on the Mac was perfectly adequate to run on the new machine. After pre-allocating a whole day for the migration process we care...

In November last year the battery life of my Blackberry Priv started deteriorating rapidly. I could barely survive a day on a charge and it was getting worse. I got used to recharging it mid-day. Desperately looking for a replacement battery (still have not found one) and possibly another reason that might have been the root of the problem. I knew I could try to factory reset the device but during that busy time I just could not afford spending a couple of hours reinstalling all the apps. And then magically on January 15th the heavy drain stopped. You can see it on the burndown charts. One shows the phone barely lasts 6 hours the other shows it can comfortably live for 27 hours. Barely a 450% difference. The worst thing is I can not figure out what was the reason. It behaves now like it used to a year ago. Unfortunately the Android battery diagnostics do not help much. I suspect the reason may be the LTE (4G) option. Desperately looking for a way to minimize the drain it has...

Reliable communications is challenging. Even more when it is wireless. The roots of the problem are interference and collisions, collectively known as noise. When a radio packet travels through air it very likely meets other packets. Or other forms of electromagnetic waves. Interferes with them and collides and may become so distorted that a receiver will not recognize it. And the message does not get through. Some systems implement so called reliable delivery mode. The principle is simple: request a confirmation message from the destination. If it does not arrive, try again. And again. This works but is not always effective. First, it increases the number of packets in the air, so they may cause new collisions with other packets. Then it introduces delays and even more noise. Before a next delivery attempt you need to give the network enough time to deliver the message back and forth. And the intermediate relaying nodes to process the messages and the recipient to execute the comm...

I'm packing my bags in colder than usual Las Vegas to return to much colder Poland. The CES is (almost) over and has been somehow disappointing. The formula of a broad show from phone cases to self driving cars has been aging. Crowds lining up for a free beer at some stands and old diesel coaches stuck in jams between LVCC and Sands just add to the mixture. We need a new formula. But having said that, there are some items worth mentioning. DJI is becoming my hero company. A Shenzhen - based startup that conquered GoPro and took over Hasselblad - one of the most respected brands in professional photohraphy. Their new Mavic Pro is just incredeble and makes it to the top of my "I want it" list. It folds down to a size of a water bottle and has all drone goodies you can imagine, including 27-minute flight time, dual satellite connection, collision avoidance sensors and stabilized 4K camera with 7km streaming range. Garmin continues to be the #1 pick in smart watches...

Another trip and another tedious work on combining photos from several sources into a single coherent album. I decided to leave my workhorse laptop at home. It has the Adobe Ligthtroom installed and is where I do the complete "professional" image processing. So here is the gear we have on the go: - a Nikon D5500 DSLR set up to record RAW (Google Photos plays nicely with Nikon RAW); - a Nikon D750 DSLR set up to record RAW on one SD card and JPG on the 2nd card. The JPG setting is for historical reasons while sharing RAWs was not an option. It is probably not needed now; - three Android phones and a Pixel-C tablet (each taking a photo from time to time) - a (relatively old)  MacBook Air with Chrome and Google Photos uploader and a USB-to-SD adapter - a Garmin fēnix watch used to capture the GPS locations for geotagging the DSLR photos Initially I planned the trip without the MacBook, which is the only computer with a real, file-based OS in the setup. But despite t...