Headworx

Just a couple of weeks ago I was joking telling the Logitech R&D engineers to go home , as the MX2 Anywhere is already the best mouse ever made. But it turns out there is one very big pain point that can be - albeit unexpectedly - solved by a creatively designed mouse. The pain point is that mice don't work with iOS devices, such as iPads. Apple does not support the Mouse Profile over Bluetooth. They have (economic) reasons to do so, because mouse support is for many the missing link between an iPad becoming a computer. And Apple thinks that would be bad for them... But the good news is that iOS devices have very good Bluetooth implementation and support other device types very well. So here is what Swiftpoint has done: it pretends to be something else, not a mouse (I have not had time to sniff the traffic, so this is just a guess). But the bottom line is - it is a mouse that works "even on iPad". There is a small (*) explaining that it works only in selecte...

Privacy is a swinging topic. On one hand we seem to not care at all with open social media every time and everywhere. But on the other hand we start to understand. And care. Privacy is also a very important topic from a system design perspective. It is very delicate and has to be taken care of since the very beginning. In wireless networks we talk a lot about security. Key exchanges, encryption, authentication. But how about privacy? It is not all that rosy everywhere...While the modern wireless systems seem to had learned how to do proper encryption (and that includes learning basic things like a nonce), many of them don't protect privacy properly. Or even at all. The culmination of misunderstanding of privacy was at the dawn of IPv6, when we were triumphant saying that every grain of sand could have an IPv6 address, not to mention humans of course and all their [connected] belongings. The addresses would be static - of course. That means every grain of sand could be traced....

There is something going on with flash memory. It is getting more affordable than ever. This SanDisk offer on Amazon makes the case for a micro-SD card slot in a phone. Apple charges $400 for an upgrade from 512GB iPad to 1TB iPad. That is $80 per 100GB. Expensive. But the SanDisk price at $60 for 400GB means 100GB is $15. Yes you can have 100GB of flash storage for the price of a breakfast in a street cafe. This puts whole lot of things in perspective. My entire photo collection (in RAW format since 2012) is 500GB and that includes dozens of night sky exposures for stacking. I guess  typical amateur photographers don't do that. My entire music collection is 100GB. It seems an SD card is an evolutionary product. But the capacity/price shift recently has been revolutionary.

V. Altounian/Science As noted last week, things have settled a bit. It clearly seems the next big thing is going to be Artificial Intelligence (AI). Or maybe it is already and we have just failed to notice? AI has learned to cheat its creators and that is the real proof of the 'I' in AI. But leaving AI aside, here are some more down to Earth expectations that may happen or I wish would happen. GaN is proliferating into digital power components. The nature of this material is much higher power density it can support. It has already been used in the LED industry by Soraa, founded by Shuji Nakamura, the Nobel laureate. Now we are expecting a new lineup of power bricks, led by the Anker Atom serie s. Shrinking power conversion components and making them more efficient has a huge impact. Everything does power conversion. So if we make this "everything" a bit more efficient, the impact is huge. And as is the case with GaN, convenience comes bundled: less ballast to c...