Headworx

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...

My mother has recently decided she wanted a proper smartphone, mainly to be able to take photos and have a decent mobile screen to see photos the family has been sharing with her. But there were other reasons too. She's been increasingly more using WhatsApp and maintaining that application on her old hybrid LG Wine was a pain due to very low memory (4GB) available on that phone. Technically the Wine was running Android. I thought iOS might be a better choice for her due to less options, lower overall complexity, and overall less places where something could go wrong. an I found a factory refurbished iPhone 6 could be bought for a very decent price - in the range of $250. Also my experience in running a full Google ecosystem on an iPad was telling me she could continue running Google apps on the iHardware. The migration was not that smooth however. Exactly two applications that I do not use on the iPad - Phone / Contacts and WhatsApp gave me head-aches. It seems that Apple...

Windows, Linux. iOS, Android are collectively referred to by Bluetooth as platforms (platforms enable other applications). And up to a certain extend a platform defines what an application can or cannot do. For example iOS is very restrictive and allows only a very limited set of Bluetooth functionalities. You can do more with Android, but still certain common behavior (like pairing) is defined by the platform. So speaking of pairing, there has always been an assumption it is for using private devices, forever. There is no concept of a rental car and no concept of a shared conference speaker. If you pair with a car, the pairing is persistent (keys are stored on both ends) long after you return the car at an airport. Many cars even retain contacts databases they download from drivers' phones. Conference hands-free speakers behave the same way. Which leads to many unexpected behaviors, like them taking over a conversation long after you finished using them, just because you happe...

I have installed recently the Meural Canvas to serve as a photo frame. It is a very nice display, probably the best I have seen, to serve as a large photo frame. It comes with many quirks, but does the main job of displaying photos really well. The high resolution matte display with wide viewing angle is worth paying a premium price for this gadget. Unfortunately when analyzing the device features before making the purchase I overlooked one aspect - the display is 16:9 while most (essentially all) of my photos are 4:3. And there is no sensible way to automatically adjust the display to handle the format change properly. It either stretches the proportions or adds vertical bands (that may be configured to be white, gray, or black). Neither looks good. So I went off to Adobe Lightroom to see what can be done about the format change. And I have to say I like what I've found. Lightroom is a powerful photo library tool. The fundamental concept it has is storing the base images,...