Headworx

My music library is organized with iTunes. And it has nothing to do with iPhones. The roots of this reach deep to the early 2000's - exactly to the year when the first iPod was released. This was when I started digitizing my library, which involved setting up variety of playlists. The playlists are a significant investment of time and effort over many years and since the very beginning I was struggling to make the portable to several non-Apple environments. The first was the Squeezebox , powered by the Slimserver software running on a Slug . Hey those were the days! My entire multiroom audio is still organized with the Slimserver at the center and a number of Squeezeboxes around it. The magic of the fluorescent displays is one of the kind. Slimserver has been designed with iTunes compatibility built in, but it was not always a smooth integration although recently it's been working flawlessly. The second non-Apple environment has been Android. And here the experience was e...

The concept of the ICN (Information Centric Networking) keeps gaining popularity. It is seen as an evolution of the Internet, away from a host - centric paradigm, to a network architecture with named information as a focal point (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-centric_networking ). While this is a very scientific definition, it all is very applicable to building automation. Building automation is all information centric. Yes, many systems today depend on unicast device addresses to (a) interpret what is reported by sensor nodes and (b) send commands to actor nodes. But the ICN approach will allow them to walk away from this unnecessary level of complexity, driven primarily by the old networking paradigms. Named information is what matters. The underlying messaging paradigm is publish-subscribe. Users (Internet of Humans - IoH) or things (Internet of Things - IoT) interested in receiving specific content subscribe to it, while content owners advertise their content ...

EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) has standardized the usage of crypto processeors embedded in credit cards to authenticate and secure transactions. In short: it defines how a chip card works. Before EMV a card was passive. It carried a set of numbers and strings: the cardholder's name, the card's number, etc. All the values could be read from the magnetic stripe are by just looking at the card. EMV has changed that by transforming cards from being passive storage of characters and numbers into active computers equipped with secure electronic memory. Without going into the details, EMV makes sure the actual card is used for a transaction (as opposed to a set of data associated with the card being used). This essentially means you cannot create a copy of an EMV card and use it, while this was perfectly possible with pre - EMV cards. EMV has essentially made card fraud impossible. And there are no known hacks against EMV cards. It is a great example of how properly architecte...

Smartphones continue grabbing the digital photography land. With an exception of some extreme / niche requirements (and yes, there are still many), it is very irrational today to have (or - especially - buy) a digital camera. As I said, there are many exceptions: I want to photograph a night sky (-> buy a full frame sensor camera); I want to have the best possible image quality (-> buy a full frame or even a medium format sensor camera); I want to use specialty lens: wide angle or telephoto (-> buy an interchangeable lens camera); I want my photographs to have a shallow depth of field (-> buy a large sensor camera). Etc. You can spot the common theme here: it is either a smartphone or a full frame camera (DSLR or mirror-less). Nothing in between (with very few but notable exceptions like the Sony RX-100V that still produces better photos than the latest iPhone and that includes the panorama mode and extremely fast autofocus). The digital photography business is being...