Headworx

Google sent me this "Christmas gift" message three days ago. Yes I had heard the rumors. And it is both sad and surprising. I have been using the OnHub WiFi for several years and it has been great and flawless. After experimenting with several WiFi access points, this one has been the first one to fully cover the house. And I never ever needed to reboot it. It has been invisible. The best technology is invisible - it just works. But due to the support / end-of-life policy I will have to go through the hassle of selecting / installing / troubleshooting a new device while trashing the perfectly functioning one. This is the insanity of the Internet era. I can - to some extent - understand the upgrade cycle of devices which do gain significant functionality. Smartphones are among them but even they hardly need replacements every year or two. But WiFi? At some point it is just good enough and replacing an access point just does not make sense. Vendors really do need to start think

Cloud-based is the new normal and it works most of the time. The problem, however, is when it does not. And these things tend to happen when we need them the most. Not long ago Tesla went down preventing people from opening their cars . Then Amazon outage kept people out in the cold as they could not enter their (dis)connected homes. Cloud is nice and solves a lot of problems. Provided it is available. This is why features considered foundational should run autonomously without any cloud connectivity. It is a bad idea to connect switches and sensors to lights via cloud. But people are doing it, as from the integration perspective this often is simply easier. But latency is introduced, which contributes to bad user experience. And worst of all, the Cloud becomes the point of failure for even the most basic functions. Bluetooth mesh has been winning the markets since it became available in 2017 and the most prominent feature is the resilience of this system. This is due to the groundbre

Being still a teenager I was learning the colors of life as a seasonal worker on a farm in Scotland. It was a great experience, first and foremost because in Poland we were still living behind the iron curtain and having the opportunity to visit "the other side" was very rare and unique. And it was a great lesson on all fronts, from self - orientation to how true economy worked. Accommodated in tents we were still finding our milk frozen on some mornings, but the prospects of the well - paid farm job (considering the black market currency conversion rates) were keeping us warm. During the course of the season we moved from picking strawberries to raspberries and some other less profitable farm jobs. The contract obliged the farmer to keep us employed for several weeks. But that did not prevent him to announce one day there was no work anymore. No work for £1.25 (the originally agreed rate) that was. "But plenty of work for 90p" - he was encouraging us. One of the 90

Musk's letter asking SpaceX employees to work over the Thanksgiving weekend raised my eyebrows. It is a typical example of greed and hunger for success which results in objectification of humans. All fueled by greed. This email can be translated as follows: If you give up your family life and the most important holiday, me and my fellow investors will get even richer from this project which destroys global resources to deliver services people would be happy to live without. Satellite internet is not something we desperately need or cannot live without. There are plenty of alternatives. And even in places where there is no Internet, let it be. Nobody has said the Internet must be available in every remote corner of the globe. Starlink is a business idea and as such is conceived to make money and make the founders and investors rich. Like every other business. The problem with Starlink is that it in fact does not solve any burning problem, while bringing multiple concerns with it. 

Statistically, Americans do not travel . And this is why there is no rage about the geographical restrictions on electronic content services. The United States are bearing the critical market voting mass here and countries like the United Kingdom alone do not matter .  In the old days, after buying a CD record, I could put it in a portable player, circle the globe and the music would continue playing uninterrupted. But these were the old days. Now we have changed the conduit - from physical discs to wireless streaming and suddenly we learn the hard way about the legal restrictions. For a consumer, how is an ABBA song on a physical record different from the same song on a music streaming account? Yet there seems to be hell of a difference to the royalty collector (or the middlemen), such that they restrict where you can or cannot listen. Which probably is not a problem for those who do not change a zip code throughout their entire life. But once you start moving, you quickly hit a wall.

Remote controllers for audio-video equipment have been one of the biggest failures of the industry. The failure comes from the fact they are designed by engineers (and UX is not involved) and in a purely engineering fashion they aim to expose every piece of (often not used or even not understood) functionality. On top of that, to do some very basic tasks, like playing a video, you need to operate two or three remotes - one for the display, one for the audio equipment and one of the video source device. It has been like that forever and even the introduction of the bi-directional digital AV interconnection standard (HDMI) has not solved this problem. HDMI has a great but little known feature called CEC , which is designed to solve the multiple remotes issue. And as I wrote before, it is little known and even less used / implemented. Even Apple, a company which is proud of its user experience - first designs, failed to recognize CEC until generation 4 of their Apple TV product (4 is the

It seems nuclear fusion has finally entered the investment horizon of private capital. Notably Sam Altman put $375M into Helion . This kind of reminds me of the very very early days of SpaceX, when space transportation was still the domain of states and governments, considered too risky and too capital - intensive for the private sector. But as the SpaceX story tells us, when the private sector moves in, we can expect rapid progress and innovation. The most known nuclear fusion project today is probably the ITER, started in 2007, with the budget reaching probably the order of $100B and still NOT being able to deliver overall positive energy balance . ITER clearly is a brute-force solution to the problem, somehow comparable to the Apollo space program. Throw any amount of money and energy in and don't care about the return, just reach the goal. This is not what any private capital wants. On the other hand there probably are hundreds of alternative methods to extract nuclear fusion e

Children often think they become invisible when they close their eyes. Unfortunately this remains true for most adults dealing with much more serious problems. Take electric vehicles (EVs). The common wisdom is they are "green". And their owners consider themselves contributing to the greener planet and conscious of the global warming problem. This is so hypocritical.  Just because a car is electric does not mean it is clean or environmentally friendly. Where does this electricity come from? Well, most likely, from a dirty coal-burning, global-warming power plant . This is the reality today. Many people just don't want to see/hear it, closing their eyes while trying to believe electricity comes from a socket in a wall. And not from a fossil power plant. But the fact is fossil fuel production is set to soar over the next decade . And EVs are significantly contributing to that. The key problem here is not really if the car is electric or hybrid or combustion. The problem is

HTC has come with an interesting twist on virtual reality glasses with the recently launched Vive Flow.  Judging by the specifications, which clearly compromise performance for weight and comfort, the Flow is probably the first video headset for the masses. I mean not for hard-core gamers, but for those who would enjoy just viewing a movie or a YouTube video on a wearable big, virtual screen. They unfortunately have made some weird design choices, making the Flow compatible only with a small selection of Android phones. The Flow has a USB-C input, but that is only for power. And supposedly they use WiFi / Miracast for video transfer. Why oh why? I wonder why they just do not support the USB-C alternate mode, making them plug-and-play compatible with just about everything, including iPads, MacBooks, Windows, and - of course - Android (but without a need of a special app). The glasses could just present themselves as a display device when connected to a computer or a tablet or a phone. B

It has been barely two years since I got my pre-ordered Boosted Rev scooter , hoping to have this dream machine last for many years. Unfortunately the company went from boosted to bust (pun intended) right after. Well, I thought, the sky still did not fall, so I went shopping for some extra batteries and tires, as I expected them to degrade over time. The first replacement battery I got from China, and it arrived dead, while the seller disappeared. I tried to refurbish the battery and then together with the battery specialist I realized things were not that straightforward. It turned out Boosted spent a lot of effort to make things unserviceable. At least not by 3rd parties. There were several protections implemented - the battery included a charging circuit - called Battery Management System (BMS) which locked up if disconnected from the cells. Replacing the BMS did not help, as the Boosted Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) could be unlocked only when the original BMS is in place. All

Apple has been proven it is not a technical challenge to have a Type-C port in iPhones. We have been hearing all sorts of stories that the connector is too big or it would stop innovation. Now an engineering student made a USB-C iPhone as a side project . One interesting note on Ken's write-up is " it turns out that Apple sells the Lightning connector to the MFI manufacturers for $2.8. Then those manufacturers build the cable around that connector. ". So it is not about innovation nor technical issues. It is about the $2.8 Apple can collect on each lightning cable, it would not after moving to USB-C (which would be good for all of us and help the Planet). Elon Musk has been selling the "Full Self-Driving" vaporware even as he clearly knows this would not work. But he is intentionally misleading the customers, to fuel up Tesla's profits and company valuation. Bitcoin, a financial instrument which is helping with illicit transactions, is also an opportunity

It seems we are facing a long term energy squeeze. There are some macro trends and some local events leading int that. The most impactful macro trend is the increasing rate of consumption of goods. We buy things and throw them away. And even if we recycle the materials they are made of, the recycling itself requires energy. Shortened lifespan of goods is multiplied by the number of people buying and throwing them away. The population growth we have experienced over the last 200 years can mostly be attributed to the average human life span which has doubled, or even tripled (in many cases) in the last century or so. In 1843 the life expectancy in Liverpool, UK, was 25 years. Yes, 25. Of course this was the extreme, but only  between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled .  Then there are several events we can call local - such as droughts in China, which ave led to reduced output of Chinese hydroelectric power plants. That, combined with growing energy consumption, has led

I think not many of you have heard the term HDMI CEC. It stands for Consumer Electronics Control , which again, does not say much. It is a very useful standard though and helps audio-visual devices function much better and become much more friendly and easy to use. But there are two problems with CEC. The first: not every piece of equipment implements it. Some do and some don't. And the second: every vendor has it's own name for this feature. Anynet+ (Samsung), BRAVIA Link (Sony), EasyLink (Philips), SimpLink (LG), EZ-Sync (Panasonic) to name just a few. In other words, a jungle. CEC is one example why things should not be optional in standards. HDMI as such does not have the best reputation. Problems with cables, connectors, version compatibility, copy control have earned it the "problematic" label. Sure it is better than VGA, as at least pins in cable connectors do not bend, but overall HDMI has not solved the "Looking for an active signal source" problem

This may sound strange from the gadget guy, but - I think - to some extent this can be felt by long time followers of this blog. There are less gadget reviews, which reflects my personal shift away from pulling a "buy it" trigger whenever something cool or smart appears on the radar. This has partly been the result of the pandemic - more time with the nature, slower pace, more time to think and observe etc. And partly from the fact I have moved to a small rustical cottage in the woods, which is full of vintage items I try repairing in my spare time. On the photo here is the Standard Micronic Ruby SR-Q640F I listen to everyday. It is 55 years old, probably the finest, tiniest AM/FM radio of all times. This hobby of rejuvenating vintage electronics has brought me the perspective of how long devices can last. And yes, some of them do last very long (which is always a relative thing). Out of computing accessories I have been using for many years - is the ScanSnap S300 . Still as

Passwords are probably the most unsolved user experience issue since the beginning of the Internet era. The biggest fail. There is one thing that keeps them alive, which is (the recovery) email. Email is - in the end - the last resort when we mess with passwords, by simply forgetting them. The problem with passwords is that by trying to make them more secure, by enforcing policies of "difficult" passwords or policies to change them frequently, we force users to keep them stored in plain text either on easily accessible electronic notes or on post-its. And any web service which is accessed less frequently, we probably start with the "forgot password" option which emails us a recovery link. Then there are password managers which themselves are a mess. I have always had issues trusting them fully. Probably one useful thing they offer are statistics. E.G., Google Chrome tells me I have about 300 passwords to various web sites. 300 is obviously not manageable in any way

The cable bag has been shrinking and this is thanks to the progress in standardization of connectivity and power supply options. Namely: the single Type-C connector (including Thunderbolt, USB 2/3 and Power Delivery) to rule them all. USB has had a fascinating ride for the last 25 years and has probably been my favorite connectivity technology (alongside Bluetooth of course :). So here is my cable bag, the H2/2021 edition. May items may actually be considered quite old, but the bottom line is USB-C has been working for me extremely well. And the world is catching up. RAVPower PD Pioneer power supply. 2 ports / 90W / half the size of the genuine Apple brick. This one is quite old but you can find several similar ones today. Generic EU (and UK if you know how to use it) wall socket adapter. JCPAL 1.5m (6ft) USB-C power and data cable. This one stands out, as it is rated at 100W (5A) power AND does USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 data transfers, while still being sturdy and flexible. And also has a nice

There seems to be this big misconception about the "Pro" devices, mostly introduced by Apple's push of the more expensive and feature-rich variants of their products. So we have not only the "Pro" MacBooks, but also "Pro" iPhones, "Pro" iPads, "Pro" AirPods". And Pro of course means business (as opposed to leisure). But in fact this is all so misplaced and (again) mostly serves the marketing (and sales) to siphon more money for the products. Let's face it: there is very little "Pro" things you can do on an iPad. Not to mention an iPhone or, especially, AirPods. The concept of "Pro" comes from "professional use" or - in other words - using to conduct a profession.  This originates with traditional professional tools, like workshop tools (made of better steel) or electric tools like drills (made to withstand more cycles / working hours). Yes, a mechanic in a workshop will most likely benefit from

Despite the much heated discussions recently on fully autonomous driving, there still seems to be the belief the Level 5 is within reach. For those not familiar with the terminology: Level 5 is full self driving everywhere (=not geo-fenced), in all conditions. In other words: you can sleep while the car drives to the destination, wherever it may be. This of course has been fueled by Tesla and Elon Musk who has actually been selling the "Full Self Driving" option for some time. And people have been buying. Snake oil again. Stupid customers is one thing, the other thing is investment fund managers who are not able to distinguish the grains from the chaff. Based on the (correct) assumption that convenience sells , they have lured crowds to put money in their funds, without doing proper due diligence. The investment thesis is "AI will solve it, because AI solves every problem, e.g., it can play chess or go". But actually there is the fundamental difference between a gam

Climate change is not news anymore. And we - humans - should really get together to do something about it. I'm in the middle of the excellent book on history of Poland by Brian Porter-Szűcs -  Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom (or the Polish version: Całkiem zwyczajny kraj: Historia Polski bez martyrologii ). He has super accurate remarks on capitalism / consumerism in general: The basic logic of capitalism is to sell, ether by meeting existing consumer desires or by using advertising and marketing to create new desires. The latter is particularly important, because growth depends on an ever-expanding wish list of manufactured goods.  The relentless push to generate new desires leads to planned obsolescence and massive amounts of material waste , but that is not deemed an inefficiency because it happens after the point of sale. That same attention to marketing and sales ensures that customers are very well treated, but it also requires that they rapidly become disillus

Digital technologies - in general - have introduced lag. A lot of lag everywhere. This is because of the "layered" architectures, where every layer does its own "processing" and it all keeps adding up to the end-to-end lag. Lag is against user experience. And we try to fight it wherever possible but it keeps coming back. Gamers, for example ( it's not you soldier, it's the lag ) not only strive for low latency Internet, but also shop for low latency monitors (yes there is a lag between the video output of a PC and the moment when the screen is physically updated) and select wired mice over wireless ones. In lighting there had been no lag in the analog times - a switch was closing the circuit and the current was flowing through the bulbs immediately. Then early wireless lighting systems got very bad reputation due to their poor design and poor technology choices - slow radio links and back-and-forth communication with the central controller. Bluetooth mesh ha

Being entangled in day-to-day challenges and information noise, it is easy to lose proper perspective. So sometimes it is really good to take a step back and have a serious look at fundamentals. Surprisingly (or may be not...) the question of "protocol wars" keeps coming back on many occasions. People feel unsafe, still trying to bet on something new or want to be reassured about a decision they have made. So Bluetooth mesh in commercial buildings. What makes it so good and why it is here to stay (and grab majority of the market)? Well, without diving into the details it is sufficient to say that it just works. And it is secure and easy to use. This does not sound like a rocket science. But actually is there is a technology that is so seamless to the extent that we simply forget there are any challenges related to it, and it is easy to use, you have a winning combination. So what are the challenges of low power wireless in buildings (and in professional lighting in particula

Nobody noticed that we have transitioned to a virtual world. It is not that obvious unless you try to come back. That is what we did at Silvair last week, with the first all-hands-in-person day since the pandemic. On one hand it was great, as the hum has returned to the previously empty office spaces. Conversations by a coffee machine. And seeing real people, not just their avatars. On the other hand it proved to be really challenging. Do you remember the times when you had to fiddle with a projector? Swapping cables, inputs, resolutions. Yes it is way easier to share a screen today when on an online meeting. Trying to do that to a group sitting in a conference room is challenging :) And it is still even worse when some attendees are still remote. As there is usually one speaker/microphone in a conference room and event the most advanced ones have difficulty picking up comments from the other side of the room. The first such meeting we had was delayed by 15 minutes "due to operati

Air pollution is widely known as a big environmental problem. There are code requirements, monitoring stations, and news services report the ppm values raising alerts when the norms are exceeded. Noise pollution does not get this level of attention. We're somehow used to it. Probably because it is everywhere and one needs to be really lucky to be able to escape it. Cars (in general), and combustion engines (in particular) have been responsible for most of this. And this is not just driving. I remember not long ago spending a night on a beautiful campsite - that night was really ruined by power generators used by a number of RVs... This should really be prohibited - a very comfortable camping van can be supported by solar panels only. I've become even more sensitive to the acoustic noise problem since (as a result of the pandemic lockdown) I moved to the woods, living in a small cottage. The silence here is amazingly rewarding. But being spoiled by these unique conditions I find

The audiobooks on the run saga was about me trying to use my smart watch (the Garmin fēnix series) as a Bluetooth audiobook player, to eliminate the need to carry a phone on trail runs. Long story short it did not work as advertised and after the long exchange with Garmin support they replaced my unit, which solved the problem. Until the problem returned. So the problem itself was the Garmin watch could not multitask. It could play audio, or it could record an activity (such as a Walk or Run), but not both. This seemed to me like a resource problem (such as insufficient memory to run both tasks), but Garmin insisted they had never had such issue and therefore the hardware unit must have had been faulty and they replaced it. This resolution was not convincing to me at all , but I could not dispute the facts. The new unit was able to play audio while recording an activity. I must have had accepted this fact, agreed with Garmin and put my "insufficient resources" theory to rest

The irony is that people who care about (backing up) their data tend to lose it... Most just don't care and this approach is good enough. After all Google Photos, iCloud and similar services will take care of device backups automatically. And so will any of the messaging or social sharing sites. I do know some people who rely entirely on WhatsApp as their backup for photos and other stuff. That just works, as long as you do not have any special needs (such as storing certain file types or making sure the photos are not down-sampled). Then there is a group of those who care a bit more. They purchase premium tiers of the cloud services, enabling them to store full resolution photos and other files by either manual uploads or automatic mirroring. And then there is the very paranoid group who do not trust the cloud services. They take the most effort of setting up and maintaining local backup devices - most typically in form of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. All in faith of be

The world is obsessed with improving user experience of interaction with tools, machines and services. This is of course driven by the economy (the smart elite) manipulating the crowds (too lazy to thing or make effort). Designers cry rivers over badly designed microwave dials . Hey, is this really a problem? Except that this model will not sell as good as the ones which have more intuitive design? I would not mind having one like that in my kitchen. A little bit of daily brain exercise would help us maintain the primate status... The brain needs exercise as much as the rest of the body (or perhaps even more) to stay fit. Bad UX helps :) But of course other than consumer appliances, there are areas where good UX is important. Like safety critical systems. I remember my first paraglide flight, with an instructor and using a winch. During the pre-flight briefing he explained to me the two safety releases: you pull the one on the left to release the winch rope and you pull the right one t

Back in April I indicated how  quality (and performance) have been the most invisible features of a product  while people have been taking for granted. Ease of use is probably the second most invisible feature. Although some do seem to appreciate that. But only if they have previous experience in the field, something they can compare against. Otherwise it things are simple and just work, they do not get much attention. If things are simple and just work, the users just do not appreciate the underlying problem being solved is actually difficult. Like flying. Commercial air travel is probably one of the most complex accomplishment: ultra mature and ultra complex technology (materials, propulsion, predictive maintenance, navigation, safety) combined with ultra wide scale operations (pilots, traffic control, airports, security, connections, booking) on a global scale. Millions of humans do this every day and very few really appreciate the complexity. Actually most of them complain on secur

Considering a number of business strategies it seems the best businesses are the ones addressing customers' convenience. People are soo willing to pay for that. Some assorted examples from the history are automatic transmissions, fast food chains, processed food (in general), drive-through, services coupled with smartphone apps (food delivery, personal transportation), one-click shopping with recommendations, car navigation, TV channel fishing and so on. Humans are lazy and they think they are smart when taking a bait (and getting on a hook) to make their lives easier. We can no longer cook, shift gears, read maps. We feel smart and self-satisfied while becoming less curious, less critical and less informed. Pushing ourselves into mental slavery ruled by elite masters (supported by an army of lawyers), who ruthlessly exploit our diminishing willingness and capacity to think. And it has not been like that just recently. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapiens : hunter-gatherers s