Headworx

It is hard not to be a fan of USB. The standard keeps evolving at a great pace, maintaining compatibility with the early devices created some 20 years ago. It has also grown to become the standard for power delivery to all sorts of devices. It takes some juggling to be able to interconnect the ultra wide selection of things equipped with USB interfaces, although with careful approach the number of plug adapters can fit in a match box. Here is - what I believe - the USB-of-all-trades set for road warriors, enabling connecting anything to anything in (almost) any direction. It starts with a tiny Type-C to micro-B cable. This cable is extremely versatile, even allows using a (Type-C) phone to charge an accessory such as a smart watch (hey iPhone, can you do this?). The cable of course can be used to connect a Type-C host to any peripheral with a number of simple adapters Lacking a Type-C port on your laptop? Use this USB 3.1 A to Type-C converter. micro USB to 30-pin Apple adapte...

The Samsung T5 is a beast. 2TB in a matchbox. And you can fill it i about 2 hours. This relationship does not sound shocking, as there were times in history of computing when you were able to fill a hard drive in 2 hours. It does not until you realize how much 2TB is. It is 250 DVDs. It takes 10 seconds to back up a dual layer DVD with this drive, or around 1.5 second for a CD. It maintains continuous write throughput north of 400 MB/s. The only thing I don't quite like is the drive's form factor. It requires a cable and the cable supplied by Samsung is bulky - bigger than the drive itself. But USB cables are universal and it is a piece of cake to find a slimmer alternative, right? Wrong! Expecting some issues I ordered three different USB 3.1 A - to - Type-C SuperSpeed cables on Amazon. They arrived yesterday and I found them all not working as expected. While slimmer and nicer than the original one, and while the T5 never reported any errors, the transfer speed dropp...

I have just returned back from the 3-week trek to Upper Mustang and this is a great moment to revisit the A-Z list of gadgets published last week. Actually the post with gadgets was written a month ago, as I did not have access to the Internet while crossing the Kingdom of Lo. Honestly, this was my longest OTG experience since the Internet was invented :) The absolute gold award goes to the Sawyer water filter (W). Drinking water is at the very bottom of the hierarchy of needs and the Sawyer works like a miracle, delivering an abundance of purified drinking water. It does not require any energy source either, other than squeezing a bladder (X). The silver award goes to the Garmin smartwatch (O). It proved extremely useful, tracking our progress every second and providing many useful statistics such as altitude and distance. It is also very helpful during long ascends and descends to control the pace and remaining distance. As our schedule was typically around 10 hours of walking...

A: Nikon D750 Camera. The workhorse since 2015. Now with the Sigma 24-80 f/2.8 Lens. B: Laowa 12mm rectalinear wide angle lens. Amazing for wide angle. Kickstarter. C: Spare Nikon batteries (2). The good thing about a DSLR is batteries last quite long. D: μUSB Nikon battery charger. I still don't understand why batteries DSLRs bodies cannot charge batteries...? E: ND and CIR-POL filters, 82mm. F: Lens cleaning kit. G: Nikon wireless remote. Helps getting steady shots on a tripod. H: Trailpix tripod (uses trekking poles as legs) with Gitzo GT1550T mini head and Neewer FXC-25 Arca-Swiss adapter. The lightest combo I could find. I: Sony RX-100-V. Backup camera and great panoramas with no effort. Almost makes the D750+Sigma obsolete. Maybe they should have stayed at home? J: Magnetic filter ring adapter for the Sony Rx-100, with C-POL filter. Essential for high altitude. K: Spare battery in a convenient Sony μUSB charger. L: Aple SD-Card reader. To browse photos on somebody's iP...