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'...