Headworx

One thing the pandemic proved wrong has been the lockdowns would lead to a collapse of the global economy. Many are scratching their heads trying to figure out what is going on and why both stock markets and consumer confidence are high. Is it just a temporary effect of governments printing money? Or is it more permanent? And if permanent, why have we realized so late? Or perhaps this is only possible now? Time will tell if we are still facing a crisis or not, but one thing the pandemic has proven right is we are extremely efficient. We have the Internet which keeps us connected even when we cannot meet. We have automated and semi-automated manufacturing lines spinning all sorts of magic. We have automated harvesters taking care of crops. Energy is becoming more and more abundant and should be completely free within the next 20-30 years, especially when nuclear fusion is mastered at a commercial scale. The development of the COVID vaccine itself is a huge feat. As first groups are gett...

It seems organizing the first level of support is one of the most tricky parts of any business. Big or small. There are conflicting goals for Level 1: withstand the wave of support incidents and pass through as few as possible to higher levels or product / engineering teams, while still keeping the suffering customers happy. Level 1 I typically consider a test for my patience. as almost never they are able to provide any useful solution. They offer suggestions like "remove the batteries" or "keep the reset button pressed for 30 seconds" or "here is the link to the manual". I wonder if this is useful to anyone these days, as resetting devices and searching the internet for answers is probably what people are doing anyway before even trying to contact dedicated product support. Passing Level 1 requires a lot of patience. It is like the Snakes and Ladders game. You try moving up and they want to keep you down. I found they often do not read what you wrote the...

There is the common wisdom the private sector is way more efficient when managing investments. This may be true when it comes to low risk projects. But whenever a high risk project is considered, the private sector typically stays as far out as possible. And I do mean very risky projects, or projects which do not have return on investment quantified at all. Examples? Columbus sailing to America. Or Magellan circumventing the globe. It s right the oceans were ruled by Dutch and British merchants, but that was only AFTER sailing routes had been established and it became a regular business to build ships and start trading with far away nations. Landing man on the Moon. Or even the International Space Station. True, there is SpaceX now, but firstly it is an exception and secondly there is a regular business to launch payloads to the orbit. The particle accelerator at CERN. Or the tokamaks. All are state funded. Is nuclear fusion not promising? It is, but the payback horizon is just too far...

I'm fond of technology items that work forever . Of course forever is a bold claim and it is probably impossible to design anything to run forever. But today's world is full of single-use crap or e-services brought to the end of life, resulting in gigantic, environment-harming waste. I suppose in this world, anything that runs fine after 10 years since being manufactured qualifies as "almost forever". Look around: how many (technology) things around you are 10+ and still doing fine? How many are 20+? As a hobby I collect vintage transistor radios. The very old ones, like early 1960's Sony still work today. My favorite, which I listen to for several hours a day is the "James Bond's" 2FA-24W . It is probably around 55 years old. And works great, never serviced (on a USB-rechargeable 16340 RCR123 3,7 V cell). Interestingly much newer models such as the ICF-PRO70 (20 years younger) needed a full surgery to replace all electrolytic capacitors with new o...

It seems all odds are against Nikon. It is not only Sony who was first to realize the mechanical mirror in professional cameras was a thing of the past. This mirror was the "R" (reflex) in DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) and was redirecting the lens image to an optical viewfinder, when composing, and then was lifting up to let the image be captured by a sensor. That was needed in the "film" era. In the digital era, a viewfinder can be fully electronic, coupled with the sensor, so no need for the mirror. Nikon did not have this reflex Sony had (pun intended). So they too moved to the "mirrorless" era, albeit a couple of years late. That lack of reflex costed them a significant loss of the market share. In the market which itself is shrinking heavily due to the invasion of smart phones. So you may say Nikon has been hit by Apple. And surprisingly Apple has got involved again in competing with Nikon indirectly via Intel, one of the key Nikon's customer....

For years ARM has been following x86 systems. It has been leaner, more energy efficient, more flexible to integrate, but always slower. ARM-based systems (ultrabooks, Raspberry Pi, the low-end Microsoft Surface) were always slower. Some quite frustratingly slow. Anyone who wanted proper performance, had to settle for an Intel-based (including AMD) system. Probably the only exception has been the iPad. Especially the Pro line has always been blazing fast. But probably no one expected the M1 MacBook to be such a blast, beating any Intel-based system on the performance ground. And maintaining the usual ARM advantage of energy efficiency. With Apple M1, for the first time ARM means sheer power. And this is the end of the era for Intel. The Intel architecture has always been inferior in the performance-per-Watt category. But it is the M1 which has for the first time beaten Intel on pure performance. And of course it will be only up from here.  It is unlikely Intel has any trick left up ...

As reported last week I continue enjoying my daily physical activity. The Autumn has not been bad at all, actually it is beautiful and magical in the woods. And I continue to spice my trail runs with audiobooks - took advantage of the Amazon Prime day and bought a deeply discounted annual Audible subscription.  The Bose Frames are phenomenal. Although - I admit - they result in some funny situations. One morning before dawn I met a park ranger. He looked at me asking "why do you wear sunglasses walking in the woods in the night?". "I use them to listen to books". He did not look convinced. Books you read, not listen to (in general). And even if you listen, you use headphones, not glasses. And wearing sunglasses in the night appears awkward to say the least. Conventional thinking :) If it is dark, it does not matter if you wear dark glasses or transparent ones :). Generally it is complicated to explain to "ordinary" people. The iPod Nano has been a great B...

It seems it has been not only my original idea. Isaac Fitzgerald reported in The Guardian it changed his life . Mine probably too :) To my defense I can say I started 4 months before Covid, so last week it was my round year. And I clicked over 3500 km. Probably more, as there were days when I did not wear my GPS tracking watch or it simply refused to track (an update on the Garmin story is due). I would not also go to say it's changed my life entirely, but it is a good habit. Back in the pre-Covid months, I enjoyed exploring the cities I visited. Now I've moved to the woods and it has been equally nice experience. Waking everyday at 4.45, going out at 5, coming back at 6.15 (on weekends I do a longer, 3-hour loop), experiencing all seasons with the nature first hand. It is also a great time to listen to books. Or just think. And - surprisingly or not - my thoughts have mostly been about the pandemic, seeking some hope it would change our lives for better. The slowdown has help...

The reality of the pandemic is you are on your own with many things. I experienced this last week when my hot water boiler died. Electric boilers die of age, usually because there is a limescale buildup on the heating element, increasing the thermal insulation. As a result the heating element reaches higher temperatures and finally it burns out. And as I know there is no practical way of descaling a water heater. I ordered a new one online (this part was easy) just to find there was no one willing to come down and install it. The new one has a bit different dimensions and hookup, so the water pipes had to be adjusted to match. So I decided to give it a try myself. After all there was nothing to lose. I started with watching a series of YouTube videos on plumbing using copper pipes. It all looked promising. Then I ordered (online) a starter kit - a butane torch, a pipe cutting tool, soldering wire and metal brushes. The whole set for about $20. I was amazed, after soldering the first jo...

Interference is one of the most important factor defining performance and scalability of wireless networks. When a data packet is sent by a transmitter, it may or may not reach the intended receiver, depending whether it interferes (collides) with another packet or not. I discussed this many times , pointing the compact nature of Bluetooth mesh packets helps these networks scale better. You have asked for precise numbers. Here they are. To make comparisons fair, I took a light dimming message in Bluetooth mesh and Zigbee. The one that is sent to set the dim level of a group of lights to certain value. The shortest form of such message would be 4 bytes (on air we call them octets): 2 octets for the message opcode (dim) and 2 octets for the value (assuming 16-bit resolution). In practice things are a little bit more complicated (Bluetooth mandates sending a transaction identifier and Zigbee mandates sending a transition time (Bluetooth has transition time as optional, as the light may h...

iPhone 12 still has a lightning port. Apple has moved EVERYTHING to USB-C. iPads (even the basic ones; the Pro went USB-C a couple of years ago), the new HomePod mini. Even the new Beats Flex earphones are USB-C. So the software for USB-C is ready (as the iPads prove). The accessories have gone USB-C. MacBooks are entirely USB-C. The iPhone12 is not. How come? I'm not really buying the story they make $$$ licensing the lightning connector. It is peanuts. They make more money by removing a power supply from the iPhone 12 box. So why o why? Perhaps it is as simple as moving to USB-C would delay the schedlue and iPhone 12 would not make it for the "holiday" season. The other conspiracy theory is they want to get rid of any connector in iPhone 13, staying with [the new] MagSafe only. This may have legs, as they might have realized nowadays [most] people use the phone port for charging only. Files are synced from the cloud, sound went Bluetooth a while ago. That means a phone ...

The standard business model in the wireless semiconductor industry has been the silicon vendors charging for their SoCs (Systems on Chip) and offering software stacks for free. The problem is the stacks are of a poor quality. What is worse, they suffer in the areas which are difficult to identify and almost impossible to fix by a typical product company. So trusting the underlying stacks, the vendors continue building products and then ship them, exposing themselves to potentially significant brand damages. If a company X ships a product based on a silicon / stack vendor A or B, and that product fails to perform, it is the X brand that suffers, as neither A nor B brands are identified. X very often has no competencies to judge the performance (or other hidden problems), as they are pushed by A's or B's sales people pitching the products datasheets. The datasheets have a list of features and nobody asks about the performance of the software stack, somehow assuming it all works. ...

The COVID pandemic has a clear impact on videoconferencing solutions. And the outcome has been quite profound so far. First of all it is clearly a technology for the mass market. A simple tablet or a laptop is sufficient, proving the fancy "systems" from the legacy companies like Polycom or Cisco are no longer needed. Then it proves the mobile 4G infrastructure is absolutely sufficient to run high quality video calls. I have been doing just that since the first lockdowns in March. After decommissioning the poorly performing ADSL line I bought a 4G router in a local T-Mobile store and have been running 6-7 hours of teleconferencing calls every day. It is ultra stable, with up/down speeds of 20Mbps and latency around 25ms. Who needs 5G? On the accessories side Jabra absolutely rules with their Jabra Speak line. Nobody comes close, especially for the price they offer. They definitely have some secret sauce when it comes to echo cancellation and voice clarity. And then is the sof...

Me to Bose customer service: Subject: Prescription lenses for Bose Frames Message: How can I order prescription lenses (-3.25 / -3.50) for Bose Frames? Reply: We do not offer prescription lenses. Of course I know you do. Just "not for this (European) market". Get yourself a fake US address (such as the MyUS.com ), buy them via the US Bose Online shop and you are good! The workaround: I knew it would end up like that, so when making my buy decision, I already had a plan B. Which has been - use the prescription insert from my adventure sunglasses made by Rudy Project . The Rudy system is one of a kind and works extremely well - I have tested them in Himalaya, Tian Shan, cycling, windsurfing... And it is so simple. Unfortunately the Bose Frames are not Rudy - compatible, but it turns out with a help of a Velcro strap (and small cut-outs in the rubber nose pads) the fit is very good. The workaround works so well that I canceled my plan to get prescription lenses via an US address...

I remember the first time I switched on the Bose noise cancelling headphones - the first model that came out, some 20 years ago. It was a jaw-dropping experience, as flying on a noisy jet aircraft, I suddenly found myself is a quiet library. And then when I played the music, I was teleported to a concert hall. Have been using them - the original QuietComfort and then the wireless (Bluetooth) QuietComfort 35 ever since. 2020 is of course a non-fly year, so the headphones sit in my suitcase waiting for the vaccine. But thanks to the travel cuts I have now much more time to walk in the countryside, which I enjoy a lot. Recently I have brought back the idea of listening to audiobooks on the run . It is an interesting saga of technology (or rather product) failures, which I will continue describing soon. But this week it is not about a failure, as the next product from Bose I have tried, is bringing similarly jaw-dropping experience. The Bose Frames. I opted for the 2nd generation sporty ...

Last week I announced the success with streaming Audible from the Garmin fēnix to AirPods . Unfortunately have been unable to repeat this stunt anymore. Problem Description Hi, recently I wanted to play audio (MP3) over Bluetooth (Apple AirPods) when hiking. The music function on its own works fine - the watch is streaming audio to the AirPods just fine. The Hike activity on its own is fine too - I've been using it every day for couple of years. Unfortunately trying to do both audio and activity at the same time does not work. If I start the activity first, then trying the music function either tells me there are no music files on the watch (there are) or (even if it finds the audio files) the "play" button does not start playing. If I start music first (and it is playing), then after starting the activity the "distance" counter does not move (stays at 0.00), only the time counter is moving. After numerous attempts to sort this out (about a dozen of c...

Some things seem to be obvious. And they can indeed be obvious. Such as listening to an audiobook during a daily exercise run. And probably they even can be obvious to do on some platforms. I don't have an Apple watch, but I presume there is the Kindle (or Audible) app for it. So that a synced audio narration can be played via headphones connected to the watch, with no phone present. Yes, I do not carry a phone with me on my daily trail runs, but hey, all the latest generation smart watches are advertised they can play audio over Bluetooth. So why not? Actually even for the Apple platform, the obvious part is not entirely obvious, as due to the platform restrictions you cannot "add" (purchase) a narration to a Kindle book directly on an iOS device. You need to use browser or add the narration using a non-iOS device, such as a PC or an Android phone. This is designed to be easy: Purchase a book -> start reading -> add narration -> switch to listening But on iOS yo...

Bad implementations are a big risk to standards, especially to emerging ones. Users can never experience and appreciate the specification of a standard directly. Only via products that claim compliance to the standard. Of course there are tests, but at the standard qualification test it is impossible to conduct the most important tests: quality, stability. And also user experience is almost always out of scope. "Bluetooth never worked for me" - told me once a man responsible for smart home strategy at a tier-1 platform provider. And it did not matter how much I could pitch to him the virtues of Bluetooth mesh. "No... Bluetooth does not work. It has problems connecting, it has problems with interoperability, I don't like this technology." he kept on repeating.  He left the company since then and I'm now hearing they like Bluetooth a lot. But I could not even blame the guy. It was his experience. He certainly was unlucky to experience badly implemented produc...

I love Nikon cameras. Yes I know. I am a dinosaur. I'm spending a night under stars now at the top of Babia Gora, watching (and memorizing through heavy glass on sd cards) the wonderful arch of Milky Way spanning over the Tatra mountains. I tugged here on my back two full frame DSLRs and a 15kg worth of lenses, tripods, heads and other photographic equipment. People don't do that, unless this is their bizarre hobby. "Why bother taking all those pictures if you can find better ones on Google?" asked me once a tour guide when going to the Antelope Canyon. The problem is that just few hobbyists like me are not able to support the dying digital camera business. Some seem to be excited by the news of Sony overtaking Nikon to secure 2nd place right after Canon. But the truth is they are all dying a slow death. The death caused by the lack of software innovation. "Software?" you will ask... aren't they being forced to the niche corner by smartphones and drones?...

A file still remains the material artifact of ownership. Even though a file is not physical - it is just a sequence of bits, you can own a file. Have it on a hard drive of your computer, back it up to a USB pen drive, upload it somewhere etc. It clearly is yours . Handing over the file to a service which promises to continue serving you the content of the file may mean giving up the ownership.  This is exactly what happened to Google Music. It lured users (including myself) to upload music files they owned to continue listening to this music on any device, thanks to the synchronization feature. I uploaded the entire music collection I owned and enjoyed this music syncing automatically to my Android phone and to my iPad. But of course I kept the copies of the files. They cane up handy when I realized that to listen to music streamed from my Garmin watch, i needed the files to be actually uploaded over USB to the watch. And they are handy again as Google continues the tradition of dr...

Making software that works is easy. Making software that works most of the time is harder. Making software that works all the time is extremely hard, Getting to the "all the time" goal is almost an asymptotic curve, with time, cost, patience and perseverance on the other axis. So this is more a mindset, the road to quality rather then a point at which quality can be achieved.  Running a purely software company I often feel the pain others like us have been going through, Microsoft perhaps is the most obvious example.  PC hardware is much better now and test / qualifying procedures are much stricter now. But roll back to early 1990's and some of you may recall hard drive controllers that worked with only certain motherboards, interrupt conflicts etc. This chaotic hardware landscape was the main reason behind the bad press Windows was getting, especially in comparison with Apple. Apple was lucky to have full control of the hardware. Or I should not say lucky - it was just t...

One thing that COVID has taught us is things we had considered serious before, are not that really serious. A flight does not need to be on time, as long as it lands safely. And if a web service is down for an hour (or a day) it is not the end of the world. There is this notions of schedule, being on-time and several "nines' of availability. Especially in the Western civilization. Things are different in Latin America, for example. The other day waiting in Nazca (Peru) for a night bus to Arequipa, I witnessed a conversation between a (Western) tourist and the local clerk in the ticket office on the bus station. She wanted to know "precisely" when the bus will arrive. The clerk was explaining politely that the bus left Lima at 3pm and keeps going. And that it was 450 kilometers stage, so considering the unknown road conditions, it could be here withing 1-3 hours. The tourist could not believe why the bus line could not be more precise. And the bus was simply doing it...

Apple has been buying chips from Intel. But now we have learned Intel cannot make the latest generation chips, as they are lagging with the 7nm process. And what once was a heresy at Intel: outsourcing chip manufacturing to a 3rd party fab, is now seriously being considered. And TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is probably the most likely candidate for that assignment, as they are already manufacturing AMD processors using the 7nm process. Now TSMC is probably one of a few potential big acquisitions targets for Apple. Apple likes making everything in house. SO not, especially with the cost-optimizing move from Intel to ARM, Apple might want to own the world's most advanced semiconductor fab. Which may mean Apple will be making Intel processors for Intel. Such turn of events is quite probable, especially as with Intel's manufacturing setback US has effectively lost the semiconductor crown.

The COVID pandemic, and the travel bans and lockdowns in particular have just proven our (global) economy is (mostly) digital now. The impact on businesses (airlines and cruise lines excluded) has been much less than initially feared. Of course this is far from over yet. But still it would be hard to imagine so many activities and developments just going on. Despite the complete change in way people and businesses interact with each other. The Internet has saved us (so far). Which means two things: We are more resilient (globally) to events like pandemics. We are more vulnerable to disruptions (or a collapse) of the global information / communication network. It may be that it is easier now to kill  the civilization with a serious software virus than with a biological one. Or just by cutting a bunch of undersea cables...

Faster is not always better. Or rather - it is very often not the raw numbers but the overall usability of a product (or completeness of a standard) that makes it a winner. From my own turf: what has made Bluetooth mesh the winning offering is the inclusion of the complete set of application layer models . This is what enabled the rapid adoption of Bluetooth mesh in buildings. But back to Thunderbolt 4. It is not faster than Thunderbolt 3. But it includes a number of enhancements that will make the products using it much better. The ones I like the most are: Longer cables. Version 3 has been limited to 60cm. Above that amplified optical cables must be used, and while they work just fine, they are expensive. $50 for a cable is a lot. Version 4 addresses that, enabling standard cables up to 2m. Mandatory power delivery an remote wake-up. This makes Thunderbolt 4 a very clean and interoperable interface for all sorts of laptop docking station. This will not only be the domain of high end ...

Long Term Support is another aspect that true standards bring much confidence into. This is especially important for commercial buildings, as the systems, once commissioned, will stay there not for years, but decades. When proprietary systems are considered, it is unlikely their manufacturers will maintain full backwards compatibility for an extended period of time. The reason is cost, and when you do not need to care about a broader audience, it is easy to make a decision to deprecate older versions. For customers this means the proprietary system which look nicely today, will have to be scrapped prematurely, as soon as one of it components ages and stops functioning. And while manufacturers may claim 5- or 10-year support, such period of time can hardly be considered long term. So how about 30 years? Open standard-based system is probably the only assurance you will be able to find compatible spare parts when something breaks. The original vendor may be out of business or will have s...

June 2020 was when another cross-SDO liaison group was formed. IP-BLiS followes the SDO convergence reinforced recently by initiatives like the OneDM (which proposed the SDF data definition language and served as the launchpad for the Project CHIP ). This was then followed by DiiA (the DALI Alliance) announcing cooperation with Zigbee, Thread and most notably Bluetooth SIG . Standards organizations working together is always a good thing. But listening to the IP-BLiS pitch , there is some insufficiency in what they aim for. Because IPv6 alone does not solve any interoperability problems. And also there are cases (energy harvesting, low latency secure multicast), wthen an IP-based approach doesn’t meet the needs of the market. And I would even go further by saying that IPv6 is not needed to achieve interoperability. Why? Because it is just a Layer 3 (the Network Layer) technology. So it can be used to run thousands of incompatible and not interoperable applications and services on to...

Even though 4K screens have become a norm in offices and homes, and laptops offering increasingly higher resolutions, a second screen is often handy. I have been using the iPad (with the Duet app ) to serve me as a second screen on the road. But at home I've found it cumbersome to keep connecting the iPad. Also very often I run some multi-hour monitoring / diagnostic processes and keeping iPad hooked all the time is not the best idea. On top of that every now and then there is a need to check (or work with) and equipment that requires HDMI screen. Such as the Raspberry Pi. Searching for a solution I found this gorgeous UPERFECT 15-inch portable screen . It is touch enabled, and has a (mini) HDMI input and two universal Type-C ports. And it is super slick. On top of that it works exactly as advertised. In my setups the two configurations I use it most often with are: A secondary (or tertiary, if you count the laptop's display) monitor. All it requires is a proper USB-C connectio...

It is not often that a perfect match is found. But this is the case between Bluetooth mesh and DALI. One is wireless, the other is wired. One distributes the control functions, the other has it centralized. Both are used for professional lighting to control lights and capture data: usage statistics, energy, sensors. I have been working with Bluetooth mesh and DALI for many years. Initially we had the idea to keep the DALI system architecture and use Bluetooth mesh as a wireless carrier for DALI. But over the years, as Bluetooth mesh has been pushing the intelligence and control functions to the end nodes, another approach started making much more sense Let DALI pick up from where Bluetooth stops:at the edge of a luminaire. Luminaires today are fairly complex. Long gone are days of a hot tungsten wire - replaced now by a network of electronic drivers with built in intelligence and sensors. An LED driver is a networked node. There may be just a single one inside a luminaire or there may ...