Headworx

I love photography. And I love a no-compromise gear that allows taking great photos. To the extent that I often go on multi-day mountain hikes with a (relatively) huge DSLR and a bright telephoto lens strapped to my backpack. But the Nikon D850+70-200 f/2.8 combo is NOT with me all the time. And there is so much truth in what they say - the best camera is the one that is with you. I like telephoto perspective. It also helps taking aerial "window seat" type photos. My "other" set (when I simply could not afford lugging the D850 and the big lens is the D5500 (APS-C) + 28-300 (translating to 42-450mm range) zoom lens. At 1.3kg it is about half the size / weight of the big one. But still at 1.3kg it is more than I can carry - for example - for my morning city runs. I have always been skeptical about the current wave of mirrorless cameras. They are not that much smaller / lighter. Having some spare time I recently visited one of the countless camera stores in Tokyo...

Thanks to Internet in general and e-commerce in particular, package delivery should be the most healthy growing business. Parcel companies should be the best organized by investing in IT. And it is hard to imagine how bad they are at it . I buy a lot of stuff around the world from my computer and it has been interesting to see how the couriers struggle with deliveries. Some of these companies make some improvements. For example UPS has recently allowed paying custom duties using electronic payment systems. Before they required cash (!) or bank money transfer. FedEx seems to be the most behind. When I order private stuff that will likely result in going through customs, I am obliged to provide my residential address as the delivery address. So without any notice the delivery courier knocks at my apartment's door during working hours, when obviously nobody is home. But only after this first delivery attempt they even allow to redirect the package to a place they are likely to...

2019 has been a breakthrough year for Bluetooth mesh. 2 years after the adoption of the Bluetooth mesh specifications, we finally started seeing real market traction. It has been a looong ride. I remember the first ideas about running a mesh network over Bluetooth LE started circulation around 2012, the year when the Zigbee - based Philips Hue was released. We loved the Hue and we hated the bridge that was attached to it. But the idea of running a mesh network over the Bluetooth radio was very strange and most people were like "why would you want to do this?". We had our rationale, which I was explaining many times... User experience, scalability, security were the key objectives. And clearly the mesh has delivered on all these fronts. It came, however, with a price tag: complexity of the stack. Bluetooth mesh is a great low power mesh networking system. This has been confirmed by more and more organizations using it in their products. But from the implementation perspe...

Recently I have gone through - what seemed at a glance - a "simple" exercise of adding security to a UDP-based transport system. The approach looked very straightforward. UDP is a standard protocol. It can go over variety of transports such as Ethernet, WiFi or Thread. And it is very easy for a Node A to communicate with a Node B over UDP. That was the starting point. Then came two (equally benign looking) requirements: It must be secure The destination is a multicast address And somehow implied was the latency requirement: it must be fast, such that the delays are not visible to humans (we are talking about a lighting application, so the assumption of latency / jitter is 100ms or less). In other words: low latency secure multicast over UDP. Still does not sound like terribly hard to do. In the "IP world" we have the layered architecture and standards for everything, after all. Security over UDP? Simple... just use DTLS. Yeah... but is it feasible ...

After 15 months of almost not being used (*) my MacBook Pro went to a service shop. The keyboard had become very unreliable (double strikes or no strikes at all on some keys) and an orange blotch on the display. I am told the repair will take up to two weeks. To fix the keyboard they have to replace the top-half case assembly (that includes the touchpad and batteries. And then goes the display with the lid. Not counting a Nokia (yes, Nokia) 17" active-matrix LCD I bought back in 2000 (it cost about a much as a family car), the MacBook has been the most expensive piece of computer equipment I have ever had. And I say (*) have not been used much - I dock it at home and dock it at work and use external keyboard / screen, so probably both would fail much sooner if I was using them (as designed?) everyday to full extent... And I bought it primarily for the performance specs - big bright screen, accelerated graphics, lots of RAM. I knew it would come with Apple's Jony Ive'...

Security has become the major focus of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the IoT networking protocols in particular. In this space we have a narrow league of standard protocols (Bluetooth mesh, Zigbee, Thread, LoRa) and still a long tail of proprietary options. E.G., many of the proprietary protocols use standard radios, such as 802.15.4 or Bluetooth LE. In particular there are a number of "mesh" systems running on top of Bluetooth LE. They had been developed before the official Bluetooth Mesh Specifications were adopted and there are still multiple brands / products using them. The key challenge with proprietary protocols is assessing how secure they are. Well, I should say, they are NOT secure, unless proven otherwise. There is no other way to assess security of any system / design other than an independent review. Regardless of what the vendors claim, unless the protocol is truly open and the specification is publicly available, you should stay away from it, security ...

This is an update to the blog I posted back in 2016 . I do lots of conference calls everyday. And my trusted audio gear has been the Jabra Speak 510 . It works over Bluetooth. It  also provides great audio quality. But it could not do both at the same time. For the audio to be good, ti needs to connect to a computer over USB. To my surprise I saw it working without the tethered USB connection. Digging deeper unveiled it working over Bluetooth, but using the special Jabra Link USB Bluetooth dongle. Digging even deeper the dongle appears to implement a full Bluetooth Audio stack and presents itself to the host computer as an audio device (a sound card), not a Bluetooth adapter. So clearly it seems the Jabra implementation of Bluetooth audio is superior compared to the Windows implementation: you cannot achieve good audio quality pairing the speaker with a computer, but you can (using Bluetooth) if you use the Jabra dongle. In other words, the reason the Jabra dongle exists is ...

Decentralized architectures (in networking) have many flavors. It is a very broad term to describe anything from block-chain to information-centric networking and building automation too. Some aspect of the decentralized approach are working very well. From my own experience I can say the decentralized lighting control scheme proposed by Bluetooth mesh has been playing very well for us. As with every new architecture there were some new challenges, but they are all nicely solved now and the whole concept allows for building very efficient, no-point-of-failure lighting/sensing networks . Within certain research circles there is a vibrant discussion on decentralized social networks. It revolves around the SSB - Secure Scuttlebutt protocol. The promise is huge: we don't need no Facebook. So you see how attractive this can be. Almost like Bitcoin was attractive to make banks obsolete (which never happened), SSB-based applications like Patchwork have been promising the Facebook-les...

Some of you may remember The Net (1995 film) with Sandra Bullock. Her records in computer databases were altered rendering her losing her identity and inheriting bad criminal record. Societies today rely extremely heavily on computerized personal records and it may be difficult - if not impossible - to prove the reality is different from what computers say. On my busy travel schedule, last June I arrived in Denver, Colorado, for some business meetings and my onward flight was to Seoul, Korea. To my surprise, I could not complete the on-line check-in procedure at united.com. It was weird, as I fly with them a lot and they have all my data stored. But the on-line system refused to issue a boarding card for me, suggesting contacting the ground staff. The staff asked me for a Korean visa, which I did not have. Of course being a Schengen citizen I don't need one, for a stay of up to 90 days (I intended to stay for a week). But the United computers were not aware of this exempt ...

Most full-featured smart homes are failures. Users hate them. The key reason - based on my observations and the experience with my own full-featured smart home is the behavior of the "system" quickly starts irritating the users. The reason is there are very static (even if complex, still static) behaviors. Configured with certain scenarios in mind. And people at home are fairly dynamic. By dynamic I mean their behavior (and expectations) change. The simplest example is a party, that usually lasts long into an evening, and people are caught by the HVAC switching to the night mode and lights stopping to react to motion sensors (as they are programmed not to turn on when you turn in bed) and so on... The other day I wanted to program my water heater timer to avoid it heating the water 24/7. I programmed the week-day hours (morning showers) and afternoon/evening cycles. Then it all failed when on another day I had to wake up early for a morning flight and went to the shower...

Since the dawn of press the era of information push has been evolving. Followed by analog radio and then television. Before that there were only libraries in castles and monasteries and they required special effort from those who wanted to access information. The dawn of the Internet promised the end of the push era, as anyone, with little effort could start looking for what they exactly wanted instead of being pushed things they never knew they might want or care about. But it seems this even this little effort to search and follow is too much for most people. Push is stronger than ever in the Internet era. Web pages and mobile apps are bombarding users with push information and it seems this is the default model accepted by most societies. Personally, I enjoy more than ever the pull opportunity that is still present in the Internet.  Long live RSS readers ! I continue to fine - tune my list of RSS sources to exclude "marketing" sites that update frequently with trus...

The technology race often results in compromises. On-screen keyboards allow for full-screen phones but offer sub-par typing experience and there are enough people who care, to be a market for phones with physical keyboards . In-ear "truly wireless" earbuds are super convenient but they do not offer the best possible conversational audio quality as the microphones, however good they are, are simply too far from the mouth. I was facing similar dilemma while on the road with my trusted Bose QC-35 headset. QC-35 is a great pair of wireless cans and I consider wearing them to be at least a half-way upgrade from economy to premium (or even business), as the comfort of flying in silence with subtle music in the background is significant. Bose unfortunately still has not been able to develop a microphone array that offers good listening experience on the other end of the line. They simply pick up too much ambient noise and too little primary voice to be considered good for part...

Spending last weekend in a middle of nowhere, I decided to spare a couple of hours to download a large set of deep sky photos to my laptop computer (a MacBook Pro, running Windows 10 OS). There was no lone power in this middle of nowhere, so of course I did the work on a battery. Not sure in the end if this battery thing was the cause of what happened next or not. After returning to the civilization on Sunday night, I knew there was little charge left, so plugged the power adapter and continued some other work. When all of a sudden Windows alarmed me of a very low battery level. The MacBook was not charging. Broken wall outlet - I thought and put the adapter in an adjacent socket. Nothing. Tried about 5 other outlets in the room - nothing. Of course the outlets were good. Broken cable? Or the adapter is broken? Tried another (phone) USB-C adapter and cable an no sign of life.  Plugged the original MacBook adapter to and iPad and it started charging normally. The verdict was c...

The Boosted Rev scooter is probably going to be on top of my list of 2019 gadgets. Yes of course it is a gadget. Despite the truth that it helps preserving the environment (I use this 1.5kW electric vehicle now to drive to work instead of my 250kW fossil fuel Subaru) and decreases my contribution to traffic jams that plague the city, first and foremost it is a fun toy. It is by far the best engineered scooter I've had an opportunity to drive. Limes, Birds, Jumps.... even the extremely successful Xiaomi, are all a far cry from this one. I'm not sure which feature I like the most, but probably the overall handling is what differentiates it from the crowd. And it also looks great. Despite its weight and power, it is extremely easy to ride. It has a wide platform that sits low (this is not a cross-country scooter) that contributes to the overall stability. It has wide inflatable wheels that, despite of the lack of a full suspension, deliver very smooth riding experience. And...

The discussion about pros and cons of running IP protocols to the end nodes in capillary mesh networks is as hot as ever. And as ever there are two camps: the IP camp absolutely wants to do it pointing the benefits and the no-IP camp that says "do it when needed, but not as the default option". Speaking of benefits - there is effectively just one: no application gateway, or in other words, no translation of the application layer when bridging a low power capillary mesh to a LAN network or the Internet. If an end node on a low power mesh network runs IP protocol, the application may use it and the gateway that connects this low power network to a backbone will just be a simplified bridge (or, more precisely, a border router). On the other hand when the end node does not run IP, but some other transport protocol, the gateway connecting to the backbone must understand that protocol and do some sort of translation. So the gateway becomes more complex. The reason for not r...

Living in a 4G-covered world blurs completely the notion of local ("I have it on my device") versus cloud ("I can access it with my device") origin of data. 5G (low latency) and Starlink (outreach) will contribute to that blur even more. So most people just don't care. But there are situations (some more and some less severe) when local matters. I seem to be one of the few who really care. Perhaps frequent travel is the reason why. Starting with those "less severe" situations, we typically have commercial flights and roaming. Many airlines offer "online" experience today, some with decent speeds, some completely terrible. Some even add most confusing business models on top - I remember flying Swiss from ZRH to LAX (en route to Las Vegas) when I realized I should look for Cirque du Soleil tickets in advance and had hard time figuring out how many kB of data I should purchase from the airline to safely book that ticket.... Still, for p...

I have recently stumbled upon goTenna . It is a great concept for off-grid peer-to-peer communications, but as other similar inventions, will likely die in its current form. The way goTenna works is there are goTenna Mesh "dongles" that pair with phones over Bluetooth LE and the dongles talk to each other forming a mesh network using proprietary sub-GHz radios. That allows groups maintain communication among the members, as long as there is a "path" between any two, meaning the single-hop distance is not more than a mile or so. The problem with this approach is that you need a physical goTenna device. I imaging only few people on the planet have them. What if every phone had that built-in already? This was the dilemma I was facing back in 2012-2013 when looking for a next generation mesh networking technology. I knew phone integration was a must. So how likely was it to convince the mobile phone vendors to include yet another radio? Chances were close to zer...

I've been naive. Naive thinking people would stop continue doing stupid things. Especially when in comes to security. Wrong. They would not. My home internet runs on mobile technology - LTE. After knocking on many wired Internet providers' doors, we gave up and brought an LTE router. The upgrade was instant, from 2Mbps DSL line to ~35Mbps LTE. That has been working fine, but looking for improvements (mainly in the stability of signal strength) I decided to experiment upgrading the setup. There is the interesting Huawei B2368-66 device that has the entire LTE radio (including a SIM card) in an outdoor package that connects over a PoE-enabled CAT-5 cable. It looks professional and works as intended. Only when setting it up I realized I was given the "user" password, which the device prompted me to change (good practice - of course!), while I anticipated there was also an "admin" password. After contacting the carrier, they told me they would not give the...

Boeing's 737-MAX story is probably going to be the biggest fail of 2019, with the flight ban unlikely to be lifted anytime soon. I would be far from blaiming Boeing doing all that deliberately, as many are saying. Something else happened instead. Boeing was caught off guard. 737 was the most successful program in the company history and whatever they would planning was considered an extension of that success. It turned out, however, the MAX changes touched deeply into the architectural design of the aircraft. And the MCAS system went from an auxiliary augmentation feature, never considered flight - critical, to becoming absolutely critical. And Boeing failed to categorize MCAS as critical, as it should have right after the planes were grounded. So first they fixed the angle. Then they added the input from the secondary AoA sensor. And now they are reportedly redesigning the system to make use of BOTH flight computers simultaneously. Redesign after redesign after redesign. That ...

I wrote an enthusiastic blog on Skyroam's Solis a few weeks ago. Unfortunately it turns out things are not so rosy. I was hoping to have them solved (or at least handled) by their support team, but this is exactly where the company has been struggling the most. The first problem with the Solis, which I openly mentioned in the review, was the USB-C port implementation. It is likely that it suffers from the same problem as the Raspberry Pi 4 : it can be charged only with a simplified USB-C cable or with a dongle that cuts out the full USB-PD negotiation. Fair enough. People make mistakes and designers fail to test their products properly. This can happen. But then this is exactly when a support team should kick in, handling the case properly to keep the customer happy. Unfortunately Skyroam's team falls way short of that. I can't remember any other support team driving me so annoyed, ever. The first thing that Skyroam has been doing repeatedly is closing support tick...

Continuing on the digital business theme , it is an interesting reflection when looking at the airline industry. I still remember the trauma of being stranded at the completely frozen and shut down Munich airport . When it took me over six hours in a line to a transfer desk, where they rebooked me on a next day flight and handed out a bottle of water and a blanket. Things are better now. Typically apps take care of missed and rebooked flights, saving us from lining up in multi-hour transfer desk queues. But it is surprising how even simple things are still not handled by the airline apps. United recently revamped their app nicely, so for example, it shows now a current gate of a connecting flight. Lufthansa, on the other hand, does not: you land and the app shows "Gate: --" and you need to observe monitors or talk to the ground staff. United has also (finally) moved one step forward in digitizing their business: the app can guide you to the gate, notifying the gate...

Believe it or not, there are people who do not care about the thickness of a screen bezel in a phone. Or about the size or shape of a camera notch. I am probably one of them. And I am not alone... The Kickstarter campaign launching the Unihertz Titan phone went fully funded in under 30 minutes. This phone is big, at 300g and 92mm wide, but that also promises a really great keyboard experience. Has Blackberry been finally outpaced by a startup? I believe there are many Passport users among the initial backers. The Titan is even bigger and 50% heavier. But has almost 100% more battery capacity, which effectively lets you leave a power bank behind. We are yet to see how Unihertz delivers on the promise. I hope I will be able to report back in December when I get my early backed unit. In the meantime I'm sticking to the original KeyOne , still admiring its versatility and battery life that has been absolutely liberating. During the to years of using it, I remember running out...

AI is all the buzz these days. We are stunned by AI software beating Go and chess human champions and promised self driving cars and self caring machines anytime soon. But one of the key problem with AI (and, actually, with any "I") is maturity. Intelligence must go through a learning curve to mature and become intelligent. For humans this takes years. Years of continuous feedback stream: both positive and negative. And while the chess-playing software can use all the power provided by GHz clocks and GBs of memory, this is simply not possible in a self-driving scenario. Feedback in a game of chess is straightforward: you either win or you don't. So the software can try all possible ways and strategies and improve on each iteration after winning (or losing) a game. Self-driving cars would do the same if we simply let them all loose and allow to crash on each other. But for practical reasons this sort of feedback is not possible. A car cannot crash and try again and...

I have been very proud of my Ultimate Portable Astro Setup . I has worked very well for may trips now and I somehow lost my vigilance. The most recent astro trip was almost a failure. Failure caused by an unattended software update that happened to the Huawei tablet that is used to polar-align the equatorial mount . The update somehow changed how the USB-C port on the tablet interfaces with applications, resulting in the Polemaster camera not being recognized by the mPolemaster app. IOW something that worked beautifully and flawlessly before, no longer does. Luckily I had my little Blackberry with me and could run the polar alignment procedure using the phone, although due to the small screen that was tedious and not as accurate as when using the tablet. Going back home I was thinking what to do next. Of course I could wait for Huawei to fix their Android distribution (the EMUI), but considering how things are going between Huawei and the US government, this may take some time. I...

California is specific. And so is almost the entire North American continent. Everything is the same there. Oh I mean there are mountains and desserts and lakes and there is even Canada in the north, a country that is a little bit different. But generally, once you learn the rules how the world works there, it works the same everywhere. I mean everywhere across America. North America, that is. Travel and meeting cultures is the biggest payback from my hectic business travel schedule. And I bless that work I've been doing partially because it offers this enormous opportunity to visit variety of places and meet variety of different people, religions, and cultures. And that gives me a really great perspective. Yes America is a big country and a big market. Probably big enough to support variety of products and services that are doing extremely well just serving that market. And then it is still surprising how many American products and services have conquered the world. In compu...

There are rather few things that irritate me. But among those that do, are news headlines about things that are delayed. News headlines are a category of their own, with the goal to manipulate readers or trick them to red a story that often has little substance.Actually, when it comes to sources of information, I've been on a continuous hunt for really good ones since the dawn of the Internet. But back to the delayed. As an example: search the net for "777x delayed" and you will see a bunch of headlines. So delayed against what? The journalists' or the public expectations? The company is developing the most advanced passenger aircraft. This is not a repeat of what has been done a number of times in the past. So how can there be a fixed date against which the delay is judged? It is ready when it is ready. Simple. The "delayed" term puts a kind of a blame on the hard working engineers. Do we really want them to rush? Speaking of things done repeatedly. I...

Back in 2018 I commented on LinkedIn that [short range, low power] wireless war was over and Bluetooth won. At that time this true statement of fact could not have been backed by hard data points. So the technology supremacy debate has continued and is still active. But to me that was obvious then. Partially based on the fundamental physical characteristics of Bluetooth LE, such as speed, power consumption, spectral efficiency - each being superior to any competing technology. Partially based on the allocation of frequency bands, where, again, Bluetooth offers much more and is globally unified. Partially due to direct connectivity to phones and tablets that Bluetooth allows for, creating the simplest, most streamlined user experience. And partially because Bluetooth is all on fire, when long term evolution is considered. People who are not inside this development tend to judge the situation by looking in a rear view mirror. "Bluetooth has never been used to control lighting sy...

Mobile data while roaming is both salvation and a nightmare. It helps a lot from the moment you touch down at a new place. But due to astronomically high roaming charges, travelers very often fear to turn it on, trying to rely on sporadic open WiFi hotspots. Companies like Truphone have solved most of that already. I have been using Truphone for 5 years now , with a great success. But most is not all and even Truphone with its global plan covering more than 100 countries, while covering "most", they still do not cover them all. Fortunately, there are several companies addressing the roaming data problem. When planning my recent trip to Kazakhstan, I decided to go with Skyroam , selecting their Solis device. The idea is simple: it is a personal WiFi access point that magically links to the cloud in a way that costs you around 8 EUR per 24 hours. And you can connect multiple devices. I selected the Solis for two reasons. One was the battery lifetime, advertised to be...

I've moved completely to USB-C and I really do like it. Small connectors, universal cables. All in all a huge reduction of bulk. I am down to 2 power bricks - the big Apple 87W and the small Anker 30W. And three cables: the long 2m Apple to power the Macbook, a shorter and lighter 1m (also Apple) to use with the small Anker charger and a short 50cm SuperSpeed (10GBps) do connect to backup drives or hook up an iPad as a second screen to the MacBook that runs Windows 10. At some point I was even looking to replace the big 87W Apple power supply with a different one that would have two USB-C outputs, but after weighing the options I decided to get the 30W Anker Atom-1. It is very small and very powerful an in many cases (like on a plane) the small brick is way more convenient to handle. With that, all new gear purchasing decisions have USB-C charging at the top of the checklist. Which - it turns out - is not enough. Recently I've pulled the trigger on the Skyroam's Sol...