Headworx

I checked my Top Gear Picks 2017 post and to my surprise there are (almost) no changes to that list for 2018. This may be the sign that things have stabilized on the tech front. Or that I am aging.... I'm still using the Blackberry KeyOne . That simply means no one has come with anything phone that I could consider an upgrade. Has the smartphone industry stalled? I think I know what phone would get me excited. It'd be an iPhone XS Max, with the Google Pixel 3 camera and a USB-C port. Or the Google Pixel 3 XL with 512GB storage. Each time I turn to the Pixel phones, the lack of decent storage options puts me off. Apple, on the other hand, although it does a very proper job with the cameras, is not taking the computational photography to the level Google just did. So in the meantime i will keep enjoying the Blackberry... I'm still using the iPad heavily. Actually at the time of writing it is the 11-inch Pro with 1TB storage. While it is a technological marvel, I'd...

Testing ha become a native part of any system development. Especially for software systems (what is not a software system today, after all?). And the common sense is that there is always not enough of testing and that most systems ship with bugs that surface while the system is in use, wrecking havoc or causing minor inconveniences. One, often forgotten part of testing is user manuals and procedures. Test systems are built by engineering teams. Manual tests are run by engineers. And the engineers usually "know" how the system under test is expected to perform. Missing the gap that may exist between a system and its manual. This happened to us last week, during a fairly routine procedure of testing the integration of our software into customer's product. The product was line powered (230V~) and simply exploded after power up. We found later there was a bug on the label, where terminals for N (Neutral) and L (Live) were shifted so both L and N led to the ground plane,...

Actually the title should be long lasting battery - powered devices. It is just my afterthought on the convenience brought by portable devices that last long. I praised Garmin watches for some time and I really do love the fēnix 5 plus family for their long battery life: 2 weeks easily. Withings has taken it even further, promising 25 days of the Steel HR Sport watch. Almost a month - this is remarkable. The Blackberry Android phone goes for 3 days (or 2 on heavy use), and 10% of juice left is nothing to worry, as this means several hours of operation until it really dies. This is what keeps me from "upgrading" to more flashy phones with more powerful processors and more vibran displays. And this is still the part why I love DSLR cameras - they can keep going for a week of intense shooting on a single battery. Unlike the current generation of mirrorless that barely handle a day... Long lasting batteries combined with the ubiquity of the USB-C connector capable of Power D...

For an airline, there are a number of mission - critical systems. The list probably starts with air traffic control that allows any plane to fly. Then there are network / schedule planning, maintenance and variety of other systems. So how does a consumer - facing web portal rank on that list? Well, I think it pretty much is a mission critical system for an airline today. Certainly none of the low cost airlines could do without that, as they completely offload any customer - related processes to that. They are also restricting travel agents from having middleman access (which in some cases might server as a backup...). Legacy airlines seem not to be entirely reliant on their web portals, but the question is how much does a broken portal affect an airline company performance? Certainly it seems Lufthansa does not consider their web portal important for their business. Being a Lufthansa frequent flyer, with close to 200k miles traveled in 2019 alone, I use (or try to use) that por...

The IETF-103 was a great experience for me. I am somehow new to the Internet Society and it is a great experience watching and participating in the discussions. I am - of course - mostly interested in developments around the Internet of Things and low power wireless. Coming from the alternative world of Bluetooth, where I landed as a result of my ultra practical approach to solving real world problems, it is very interesting to see how the same (or similar) problems are being discovered and attempted to be solved by people coming from the highly structured and cleanly layered world of wired networking. Some highlights that were particularly encouraging to me came from the ROLL working group (ROLL stands for Routing Over Low power Lossy networks). For the 2nd time in a row I heard voices arguing along the lines: "this is radio, you cannot use the wired network paradigms here". So true. At Bluetooth mesh we have been designing for that since the inception. With the initial...

Nikon's release of the mirrorless Z-series back in August was greeted with mixed opinions. Most were pointing out that Nikon was "late to the mirrorless party" and "lagging behind Sony" who had the head start. And most were comparing autofocus and battery life performance against the competition. While the comparisons were not bad for Nikon, the fact is that they are not that meaningful. Sure, comparing the A7R-III vs the Z7 shows the latter still needs some homework to be done in the autofocus or battery department. But that all can be fixed. In this model, by improving the software, or in later models by improving teh software and the hardware. What most people seemed to overlook was the importance of the new Z-mount. The lens mount is by far the most difficult part of an interchangeable lens camera to change. You cannot do it every year. Well, you even should not be doing this every 10 years. Actually the Z's predecessor, the F-mount was introduced ...

So Apple keeps calling the high end iPads "Pro" and people again try making the case that this can really be a laptop replacements. Unfortunately it cannot. One way of dealing with this is to stick a finger into a pencil sharpener. The other is to use a mouse. Or a trackpad. When they are finally supported by iOS. Controlling a cursor precisely with a finger is exactly where tablets fall short. Regardless of improvements the vendors try to include. Even discoveries like this one do not come close to selecting text with a mouse. Like we all do on laptops or desktop computers. Lets face it: the iPad continues to be the best content consumption device. I personally use it for several hours every day. And even more when airborne. My favorite apps are: Feedly: the best selection of news I follow; Pocket: works great with Feedly - whenever an item grabs my attention I "pocket" it (note "to pocket is used as a verb here - not many apps get to that level!...

With the advent of IPv6 we have been promised the native Internet technologies reaching each grain of sand. Which is a great vision. Unfortunately, as in real life, there are significant engineering challenges that prevent that vision from becoming a reality. I should even say that this is not an engineering problem. It all can be done. It just costs too much. Like carrying shipping containers on board of cargo planes . IP-based protocols are by nature heavy. Or should I say - heavier. Heavier to operate and heavier to manage. Simply speaking a "grain of sand" end node may not have enough resources to fully participate in an IP-Based network. One example of such a resource is a real time clock (RTC). It is necessary to provide proper IP security, as certificates, that are the foundation of IP-based security, require the nodes to have a notion of time. An RTC is not a problem for a laptop, or even for a smartphone, but it is a significant added cost compared to a sub-d...

The news of the first batches of commercially available Bluetooth mesh devices working seamlessly together have circled the world recently . This is a powerful demo indeed. Two independent products from two competing companies who never met before, taken off the shelf, work seamlessly together. It seems simple, while it is not. Actually, this is the first time ever, it happened. The details can be traced down to the two Bluetooth listings: the D038467 by LEDVANCE GmbH (who make the Sylvania light bulbs based on the Cypress Semiconductor module and stack) and the D039781 By Nordic Semiconductor (who offer a Bluetooth Mesh Profile subsystem loaded on the NRF5 development kit). These are totally independent implementations of the Mesh Specifications. And the products "just" work together. Some may say we had this before, with Z-Wave. This is true, but only to some extent. Z-Wave really succeeded as a standard facilitating interoperable products, but with two caveats: ...

Device maintenance is probably one of the lowest hanging fruits on the IoT tree. It is easy: if a device is connected, it potentially can inform about the state of its health.  Or even if it cannot, a loss of contact with it may just be a signal that it has just died and needs to be checked / replaced. This REACTIVE - but automated - maintenance is a huge improvement when compared to non-connected devices, which have to be periodically checked by humans if they work or not. The concept is very broadly applicable, from lights in hotel rooms to soil moisture sensors. Upping the game, the next step is PROACTIVE maintenance. We can track parameters like run-time hours and knowing a device is nearing its rated lifetime, send a service team over to replace it before it fails. Proactive, while better than reactive, is not ideal. Very often a device (or a part of it) is replaced too early and sometimes it is replaced too late, after it fails. Because rated lifetime is a projected avera...

USB Type-C is the revolutionary connector that will dominate computers, phones and peripherals for the next 20 years (or more). There are the usual growing pains , as with any advanced new technology that comes around. But once all the wrinkles are sorted out, there is this clear benefit of having just one socket, one plug, one connector, one cable to do it all: power, data, any direction. That unification brings with it one significant change: power is not power anymore. It is power AND DATA. Also Video Out is not just video nor out anymore. It is video AND DATA. In other words, plugging your phone or a laptop to a power source you consent to have a data connection with that power supply. And by plugging the same phone or a laptop to a projector in a conference room or on a presentation podium you consent to have a data connection with that other device. This was not a problem before: power was just power and video out was just video out. There was nothing to worry except you co...

Computer malware is no longer software - based. With the recent Bloomberg story on malware chips being implanted into otherwise legitimate hardware, the era of software - only virus attacks is officially over. It is almost like a poison injected into a grocery product. How do you protect yourself? Well, you cannot, on your own. In the end it all comes down to trust. Where do you buy your gear? Is the brand trusted? Do they have all supply chain processes and procedures in place? Apple is one of the companies that has started addressing this problem seriously. With the custom T2 chip introduced in the most recent lineup of MacBooks, they finally offer a secure boot option. That means the computer will only load a trusted operating system . And that also means (although they are not vocal about that), that the T2 is capable of verifying the components and subsystems inside the computer are trusted . This last option may not be popular among folks who would like to have freedom o...

The announcement of the L mount by Panasonic + Sigma + Leica was probably the most unexpected news from Photokina. And hours later Sigma confirmed what the Foveon fans were dreaming of for years: the full-frame Foveon body . I have been urging Sigma for that move for years . Citing the (discontinued) Fuji S5Pro as an example: open the Foveon opportunity by making it compatible with a wider array of lens (and bodies). Foveon is a great concept and it produces phenomenal results in good light. Unfortunately due to its multi-layered construction it has not been able to keep the pace with the sensitivity advances of bayer CMOS sensors. Frankly speaking, there is nothing that unleashes creativity better than a high ISO camera coupled with wide aperture lenses: the Nikon D850 coupled with the Sigma 14mm f/1.8 behaves almost like a black hole - sucks all the light in, making it possible to shoot Milky Way hand-held. But in a good light nothing comes close to the Foveon sensor - it p...

USB Type-C is a very complex connector. Attempting to be a jack of all trades and the master of all, it certainly has a potential to be the one. Apple manifested this potential by removing all other ports (but the 3.5mm phone jack) from MacBooks two years ago. But the potential is one thing and the reality of the transition and the learning curve is the other . I have been using the 2018 15" MacBook (with Windows 10 as the primary OS) for a couple of weeks now and the Type-C reality is still far from what it could / should be. I learned a while ago that the quality of cables mattered the most. The first surprise was that Type-C does not automatically mean USB 3 (or 3.1) in terms of speed. Majority of "ordinary" Type-C cables can only do USB 2 speeds (480Mbps), which is 10x slower than USB 3.0 (5Gbps) and 20x slower than USB 3.1. To get decent speed with a peripheral, buy only cables marked "SS" (SuperSpeed - 5Gbps) or SS10 (10Gbps). Everything else will c...

It's been almost a month since my vacation escape to - what is considered by some - one of the top trekking places on Earth - the Caucasus mountains of Georgian Tusheti. Looking at the equipment I took there was one surprising aspect: the mobile phone stayed at home. I took the iPad Mini and the Garmin inReach Mini instead. The inReach served as an emergency device and also allowed my close relatives to track me passively for their piece of mind. On my end it was completely silent and invisible except from providing (essential in mountains) weather forecast service. The device is almost perfect - waterproof, only slightly bigger than a watch, and lasting for 5 days on a charge (with location updates sent every 30 minutes over a satellite - that is really not bad!). The iPad served as a general mapping (Gaia) and communication device. It turns out, except for emergency, occasional email works better than a phone. And there is no signal up there, so why would one need a  phon...

With some hesitation I decided to upgrade my faithful Garmin watch. For the last two years I have been using the D2 Bravo - the "aviator" variant of the fēnix 3 platform . And I have to say it's been amazing what Garmin managed to add to the D2 Delta, which is based on fēnix 5 plus. The most notable new outdoor features (I have skipped one generation - the fēnix 5, so some of them are not exclusively the "5 plus" additions) are: The battery life has been increased significantly (this was BTW my key motivation for the upgrade) The satellite navigation receiver is now Galileo - capable There is the new blood oxygen saturation level sensor (I am still learning how to use it) The watch can connect to the inReach Mini, so the bi-directional satellite messaging and weather functions are now available on a wrist. Plus there are some "urban" features like Garmin Pay (NFC) and Music (the watch can now stream music directly to Bluetooth earbuds). And ...

A couple a weeks ago I posted on authentication and how important it was from a security standpoint. One example (other than GNSS) is car entry / access. Today all cars are opened / closed wirelessly. The older ones require a press of a button on a key fob, the newer ones are "automatic" in a sense that it is enough that the key fob is close to the car. A digital handshake takes place and the door is opened. The automatic key fobs have one drawback though... they do not require any explicit action (such as a press of a button) - that is the whole purpose of this system. Which opens an interesting vulnerability: a thief may bring an "amplifier" that will amplify the signals between the fob and the car, making them both "think" they are close to each other... and voila: the car unlocks. You can see how easy that is - on this video : one guy brings the signal booster close to the window and the key fob (that probably lies somewhere on the kitchen table) ...

Surprisingly there have has been not much fanfare after SpaceX received the U.S. FCC permission for Starlink . Chances are you are not aware of this development either, as the media have not picked it up. But in my opinion this is one of the biggest development in global communications recently (or may be ever?). Starlink is a satellite - based Internet. But it is unlike anything we have seen so far. It will consist of 12 thousand communication satellites. This is an incredible number, considering we currently have about 1/10th of that in orbit IN TOTAL (including military, Russian, Chinese etc). And now a private company plans to launch 10x of what the humanity has done ever since. Starlink is also probably the only system of that scale that gets a permission. It is extremely unlikely that another company gets approval for another set of 10 thousand+ satellites. I am not sure when the Starlink idea was born, but it can easily be that the whole existence of SpaceX is because ...

I have recently found this interview with Tony Fadell . Very interesting to watch and learn how great tech stories such as the iPod, the iPhone and the Next started back in the past. The video is more than an hour but I highly recommend watching it. One quote I memorized (citing from memory now) has been this: anything world changing takes a decade; anything less may be a good business but does not change the world... Indeed. But a decade is typically much more than an average investor can bear. That is probably why it is so hard for startups to be in a world changing game. They can never sell such a long story (especially if it is a world changing story, so inherently hard to believe) to investors. On the other hand it is rather foolish if investors expect a world changing results (not just a "good business" in shorter period of time). Wonder what world changing startups is Tony now investing in....?

Satellite connectivity has always been exciting because of the whole globe coverage. But it was bulky and expensive. DeLorme (now part of Garmin) revolutionized this category now for the second time. The first time was in  2014 when they introduced the inReach and flexible two-way messaging plans that could be suspended when not used. That dealt with the "expensive" part. Typically it is a couple of weeks in a year when outdoor travelers need satellite communications. And the plan suspension does exactly that - you pay when you need the service. I have been a subscriber ever since. The second part - the "bulky" remained some sort of a problem. The inReach was not that bulky, but it was adding its almost 250 grams to the backpack. But with the launch of the inReach Mini the bulky part has completely gone. It is now 100 grams and barely bigger than a smartwatch. Garmin also paves the way of using Bluetooth to network devices around a person wearing them. The...

There was this old story in 2007 on a hackers running an FM transmitter that was injecting spoofed RDS-TMC messages fooling GPS navigation systems. Fast forward to 2018 and we have a similar device that injects spoofed satellite signals . Both attacks have roots in the lack of an authentication scheme in GPS. Authentication is often thought of as a less important security feature than encryption. And actually it is otherwise. This is probably because in analog (protein /  human) systems authentication is always implicit. When a person we know calls us, we not only look at the incoming call number. We recognize the voice and other contextual information around that call. Such as was she supposed to call me, was the subject of the conversation known / expected etc. Simple machines do not do such implicit secondary authentication checks. They rely on explicit authentication checks. And if the checks are not present,  the recipient probably has to blindly trust the message. W...

Reading various projects and proposals it still strikes me how wireless architects apply wired design paradigms. That of course leads to sub-par performance. One could say it is like attaching wings to locomotives and hoping they would fly. Wireless, and especially low power wireless, is different. Wireless is inherently lossy. There are a number of reasons to that. In wireless there is interference. The wireless medium is shared, and unlike wired (that is isolated), wireless messages transmitted concurrently on the same frequency collide. And there are many ways to deal with this: implement a multiple access scheme (TDMA, CDMA, CSMA to name the most common) or accepting the fact there will be collisions and designing for that. Multiple access schemes are expensive in many ways, including power (you need clocks or complex heavy math or run a receiver before transmitting). A system that does not implement any multiple access may be equally, or even more effective. But the design m...

It all started on November 7, 2000 with the publication of " How Digital Is Your Business? " by Adrian J. Slywotzky, David J. Morrison and Karl Weber. It was revolutionary then and is bread and butter now. Since then the digital business models have dwarfed the analog ones. But as humans are analog (have flesh, built of atoms), there will always be great analog businesses. The catch is, though, most of these analog businesses need digital faces. And the survival rate will be closely related to how good and quickly they adapt to the new digital normal. Some will share the fate with dinosaurs, for sure. Last week I was in San Francisco for a few days, moving on to Montreal. My Montreal flight was scheduled for Saturday morning and I was expecting a USPS package to arrive (according to their tracking info) on Friday by the end of the day. Anticipating things may go wrong on the last mile (they sometimes do), I decided to redirect the package to the SFO Post Office and inte...

Well designed apps make night and day difference compared to traditional services. I wrote about Gaia GPS , which is a niche, but experience changing in the category of exploring wilderness. This time the blog is very much down to earth and everyday use: Uber and Revolut . I took a taxi to the airport in Montreal. Yes, a regular taxi. It was a kind of an emotional move, to support local community. On the way I was wondering if the driver would accept a credit card (I realized I have not used cash for more than three months now...). There was no "Visa / Mastercard" marking anywhere. And not that long ago a taxi from the Frankfurt International Airport (the financial capital of Europe) required a cash payment. It turned out he had a terminal but something went wrong. When instructed to remove the card, I followed the prompt, and the terminal printed the card was removed prematurely. The driver complained and tore off the paper slip, exactly when the machine changed its min...

Although I feel like I'm repeating myself, it seems the concept of distributed lighting control is so new, that we need to talk about it over and over again. This whole concept builds on the strengths of Bluetooth mesh: addressable information and concurrent multicast (many-to-many) communications. And the whole idea can be implemented thanks to the Moore's Law: it is possible today to move the control logic and algorithms to the edge nodes. Making the central "control box" obsolete. In lighting control systems this approach is disruptive. It renders the whole category of products - legacy lighting controls - obsolete. A legacy lighting system consists of sensors (they may be standalone - room level, or integrated into fixtures - luminaire level). The second building block is the controller - a box (a computer) that collects information from the sensors, processes and sends control commands to drivers that in turn change the output, dimming the lights down or ...

4-engine jest airliners are disappearing from the skies. You have probably heard last year about the retirement of the United's ageing Boeing-747 fleet . Lufthansa have been retiring their fleet of A340s . Now the first Airbus A380 is going to be broken up for parts , as no airline wants it, even though it is only 11-years old. 2-engine design has clearly won, emerging as the preferred option, offering the best setup: price points, reliability and fuel efficiency . A single engine has never been an option - you need redundancy in the air - engine shutdowns are not that rare (e.g., the Swiss 777 on Feb 1st, 2017 , the AF A380 on Sep 30th, 2017 , and the LOT 787 on March 28, 2018 ). But they are rare enough that having two engines provides the expected reliability, considering the failures are not correlated (today it appears they may be in the case of the RR-powered Dreamliner that has just had the ETOPS downgraded , but that is considered a temporary problem). Three engine ...

Machine systems that anticipate human expectations are the long lasting dream: a smart home that anticipates the inhabitants, an automatic gearbox that learns the driving style of a driver, a music service that streams music matching the mood of a listener. This concept, however, is far from reality. Smart homes are often irritating, cars with manual stick are still popular and people like to hand-pick music to listen. There are two reasons for that. First is the feedback - or the lack of it. Programming the behavior of a smart home is extremely tedious, unless you can do this on your own. I was doing that at my smart home several years ago. Ended up with hundreds of rules and exceptions based on very complex decision engine. For several months I was fine-tuning the rules based on careful observation of expectations and every day annoyances. I think it is fine now, but no way for that system to be converted into a mass market product. It is just too complex. Of course you may say...

Congestion is a very known problem today. Who has not been stuck in a traffic jam recently? We have cars and streets again as an analogy illustrating the behavior of wireless mesh networks . It is a very good analogy - after all streets form a mesh and have limited capacity which depends on how wide they are and how quickly cars can move. That maps directly to number of wireless channels and the transmission speed of a wireless links. And of course to the size of cars represents the size of network messages. You can move more tiny scooters than heavy trucks through streets. Congestion is the key problem in mesh networks. It is frequently forgotten in discussions about performance. But the truth is that link congestion is what really limits the performance of a wireless mesh network. When a link between two network nodes saturates, the network cannot handle any more messages. And mesh networks tend to saturate the links very easily. This is due to their topology - messages are forw...