Headworx

COVID-19 in Europe and North America is now like a raging fire. Especially in the US the situation is extremely alarming. It seems like both the government and the citizens are clueless on what to do. March 16th was the day when the number of non-China confirmed cases exceeded the number of China cases. What was more alarming, was the trend curve, almost vertically growing up for the non-China cases. And as of today it continues to do so, leaving the Chinese cases far behind... I'm writing this blog on Mar 28, and we have 650 thousand cases, with the US and Italy have exceeded China and Spain, Germany and France not being far behind . United States has two fundamental problems with the coronavirus epidemic. Historically this country was considering itself safe due to the military power and the legal system. Unfortunately now neither the soldiers (even with drones and satellites) nor the courts can stop the virus from taking the death toll. America has been always very preci...

There is an interesting webinar published by Chess Wise on their mymesh network. It is a good and informative webinar, but at 9m30s mark it really caused my eyebrows to rise . This is when they started discussing security, explaining and defending their proprietary "by obscurity" architecture. "...we inject our secret keys into the modules..." Excuse me, what? First of all, there is nothing like injecting a key. You can inject a COPY of a key, but not the key itself. What it means is the OTHER COPY of the key stays with the company. In other words: Chess has access to all networks. By design. Many other people can too, as it is unknown what security measures and processes they have internally to protect the keys. Do their employees have access to the keys? are the keys backed up? Who has access to backups?  How can they ensure there were or will be no leaks? What would you say if the manufacturer of your door lock (or a local locksmith) had copies of keys for...

The Big Data book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier (a must read, BTW!) starts with a ground breaking story of Google predicting the spread of H1N1. By just analyzing what (and where and when) people input into the Google search box, the company was able to develop a precise, real-time model and an accurate prediction of the spread of the disease. Here is the paper that created a splash among health officials and computer scientists: Detecting Influenza Epidemics . That was 11 years ago. 11 years in computer industry is like eternity. It was before AI, before machines were fluent with natural languages humans use, before all-mighty smartphones that everyone has now. No, the illustration attached to this blog is not a map of the coronavirus spread. It is the map I keep routinely getting from Google. This one is my 2019 travel summary. Of course it is a high-level overview, but you can zoom in, down to a street level, or the flight# / assigned seat (Google Now always ...

One downside of moving to a bigger and more powerful 15" laptop (a 15-inch MBP) has been a bigger power brick. Before I had happily enjoyed the much smaller FINsix Dart . And even though the Dart supports USB-C/USB-PD, the output power (65W) was not enough to power the MBP. The genuine Apple 87W adapter has two issues: it is big and heavy (relatively) and has only a single output. With my passion to optimize cables and power bricks, I went on a shopping spree trying to find a better alternative. On the way I backed the 4-port, 100W HyperJuice on Kickstarter . It is a nice and convenient power unit and many will appreciate the legacy USB-A ports. To me, however, it was too little (or actually too much) too late. I do not have ANY USB-A gear anymore, passionately cutting the A-plugs and replacing them with C-ones . So while the HyperJuice was smaller than the Apple and had multiple ports, I saw the potential of shrinking the brick even further, by going with a 2-port USB-C onl...

Support for attachments from Files in the recently updated GMail app for iOS has been one of the greatest iPad developments ever. Initially, when Apple introduced Files, I was (naively) hoping it would be automatically available across all apps. Unfortunately not. It turned out the decision to use Files or not is an individual app vendor decision. And for reasons you may anticipate, Google was resistant to support local files, forcing people to use Google Drive instead. Fortunately they must have been watching usage statistics and discovered that users discovered that not being able to attach files from Files to email in GMail WAS driving their decisions on whether to use GMail or not. So now we have it. (drumroll.... ). In GMail - pick the paperclip icon and in the second section for “Attachments” you now have a folder to open the native iOS Files picker. It seems so straightforward and obvious and easy. It is even hard to imagine this might have been missing. The addition o...