Headworx

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...