Headworx

It seems we are on the verge of shifting manufacturing back from China. Labor cost won't matter anymore. A month ago I had a very interesting conversation with an owner of a factory in Germany. His factory is fully automated and the work is done by robots. One of the products they make are smart light bulbs for IKEA. He says his costs are lower compared to Chinese factories and quality is much higher (the failure rate of finished products is an order of magnitude lower). On another note Elon Musk says he can increase the speed of the Tesla production line in Fremont, California, from the current five centimeters per second to one meter per second. Assuming 6 meters per car, it is 5 million cars per year, per a single production line.  Almost what all Ford factories globally could do in 2016 ( 6.5M ). It seems with robots and automated assembly lines, there is no more issue of labor costs and scale. For some products (such as our own smart lighting), manufacturing is one co...

Offline seems to be finally coming to maturity. Which is a real joy to me, as I continue spending long hours either airborne or in places with spotty or no network coverage at all (such as high mountain treks). On one end increasing number of applications support offline mode for mobile devices, which is synchronized with the "master" cloud contents / configuration. Among them are: Pocket (great for offline reading and seamless synchronization with the a continuous flow of news through services like Feedly) Kindle (great for purchased books as well as private PDF documents) YouTube (with the recent introduction of the YouTube Red service that has the "save" option built in, exceptional for online courses and instructional videos) Lightroom (with the recently introduced offline edit feature) Netflix (introduced recently the "download" option) Gaia GPS (fantastic support for offline global topo maps) All these apps would be probably not that m...

With the advent of Bluetooth mesh networking, the evidence is clear on Bluetooth becoming the center spot for convergence of services and standards using low power radio technologies. Mesh is bringing the natural set of use cases such as lighting control and sensing. But Bluetooth has already been used in variety of other related areas such as (to name a few) location beacons or asset tracking. The recent announcement of the joint effort by EnOcean and Silvair to align the leading energy harvesting platform with Bluetooth Mesh is yet another evidence of this convergence really happening. We had a very interesting panel on this convergence subject at the DOE 2017 Connected Lighting Systems Workshop in Santa Clara last week. And to me is just crystal (pun intended) clear now. Bluetooth is THE low power radio of choice for indoor applications. And possibly for many outdoor too. Those who disagree, please give me a single reason to use different technology. Before Bluetooth mesh ne...

The Sony RX100-V is an unexpected beast. The key difference comes from the 315-pint phase-detection AF system. First ever in a compact camera. It is blazingly fast. And accurate. And takes 20MP RAWs at 24fps, enabling a completely new shooting technique: press the shutter and keep it pressed for a while while the camera takes some 60 shots. And keep repeating. Chances are, among the 60, there will be one just great, not possible with a standard single shot technique. It is enough to say there isn't a seasoned DSLR in the world that can accomplish this. The "only" drawback is that after an evening session you'll end up with probably close to 2000 pictures. And this is where the tedious part starts. Or was starting, because now it seems Adobe has finally closed the loop with the new "Enable offline editing" feature in Lightroom Mobile. So here is my workflow now: Keep the shutter button depressed creating hundreds or thousands of RAWs at will. Import ...