Headworx

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 ...