Headworx

Over decades of my software journey there has always been the underlying hardware. And I have had this opportunity to work on software that was always benefiting from understanding the hardware. Since the years of ZX Spectrum through the era of spinning disks, when you had to understand things like rotating platters and an elevator of data running up to the read/write head, up till today's complex and challenging, still resource - constrained embedded SoCs. But just recently I realized for some young generation developers, the world looks like there is no hardware. I mean, you need a screen and a keyboard, and an Internet connection, but... that is it. The rest is just software. Create a Github account, create an AWS account, write some code, commit, start an AWS instance and voila, you have your software running. Where? What a question, ask the DNS service, it will give the IP... With the advent of the Windows Virtual Desktop , it runs all the way to... the desktop. I gues...

Being immersed every day in software business and living in a developed country with abundance of everything (but time), we tend to lose track of what is really important. I sometimes realize this myself and remote lone trips to uninhabited parts of the Planet help keep this contact with reality. For example you realize that drinking water is much more important than a charged powerbank or a low latency Internet connection. This is BTW why for several years now I've praised the mechanical water filter that's been making a day-and-night difference, allowing to (almost) stop worrying about drinking water everywhere. Well, everywhere except deserts and seas. Access to drinking water on a sea trip is a big problem. Which may be  counter-intuitive - after all a sea is water. But humans die of dehydration drinking it. It all comes down to salt. Kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water, so to get rid of the salt ingested with a sea water you need to urin...

I praised iPad Mini as the digital backpacking assistant. It runs Gaia GPS extremely well and serves as a photo backup device (and a photo browser). Performance of Gaia on iOS was the key reason I selected the iOS device to carry with me on remote trips. But recently I have been facing another dilemma. As I've been getting more and more involved with astrophotography , some of the tools used for this hobby are not available on iOS. Namely this is the PoleMaster. Deep sky photography is about capturing very faint light. To collect a decent amount of this light, you need to expose for long periods of time. Long enough that you must compensate for the rotation of the Earth. There are tracking heads that rotate in the opposite direction to the Earth's rotation, but the catch is the axis of rotation of the head must be precisely parallel to the axis of Earth's rotation. Meaning you need to align the axis in the field. A procedure to do that involves Polaris (how lucky ...

Our civilization relies entirely on access to energy. To the extent that humans may really become extinct if a major energy disaster happens. At the same time there are more and more examples of devices and subsystems that harvest energy for their own use. Not looking very far, we are using Bluetooth kinetic-powered switches in our office. On the outside they look just like regular wall switches, except that there is no hole in the wall behind the switch. It looks effectively like a front plate of a switch - the "plasticky" thing and when pressed generates enough power to wake up the processor, do a number of fairly complex computations (security!) and send several packets over the radio. It essentially lives forever. A number of developments have been recently announced in the area of RF (radio frequency) energy harvesting. Wiliot has launched its 2nd generation RF-powered Bluetooth tag (includes sensors and works by harvesting RF noise). If they work as advertised wi...

Time flies - it has been almost 5 years since I moved over to Truphone . It has it little quirks, but overall has been stellar in what it offers: a morphing, multi-instance SIM card with multiple numbers and global plans. Being abroad is like being at home. Almost no strings attached. I almost forgot what roaming was. So last week, when driving up the Pacific Highway 1 from Los Angeles, I was surprised to receive a data usage warning. It said I had only 200MB left of my 2GB bundle. After requesting a detailed log and analyzing it, I found a peak during which the phone was able to set up and tear down almost 200 data transfer sessions within a 10-minute time window. Each session was billed as 5MB transfer. That totaled to 1GB. 1GB mobile data in 10 minutes. I don't have any detailed application activity logger installed on the phone, so can't really tell what happened. Checked with Truphone and they told me they were rounding up data sessions to 1MB. Which is A LOT! Bu...