Headworx

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 com...

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...

Bi-directional power interfaces are finally maturing and getting standardized. On a personal device level this has been possible thanks to USB-C ports supporting USB-PD (Power Delivery) technology. I can use my phone to charge my earbuds. Newer phones can do this even without cables, offering reverse wireless charging. The thing with energy is that there are times when it is fully abundant (a phone at home) and there are times when it is very scarce (a long hike-through trip). And it is very similar on the grid level. Thanks to wind and photovoltaic power there are times when we almost don't need any traditional power plants. But then there are periods (say chilly but windless winter evening) when we are hungry for any kilowatt produced by polluting coal plants. The grid-level solution is around the corner thanks to the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technologies.  In Germany Nissan has teamed up with Fraunhofer and Bosh for the pilot i-rEzEPT project . A Nissan Leaf serves as a larga capac...

It seems funny to admit I have been fascinated by cables and connectors . But it is much deeper than that. Back in the old days personal computers were plagued by the cable mess. Each box had a dozen or so different cables hanging out with as many as five separate ones (power, VGA, USB, audio in, audio out)  necessary at the same time to connect a monitor. Other accessories, like mice, often required separate communication (RS-232) and power cables. Because each cable had its own purpose. The power cable to deliver power, the vga cable to deliver video (but no audio), the usb cable to deliver data and the audio cables to deliver audio in one direction (hence two were often needed). Things started to converge with inventions like HDMI (audion and video in one, but no power) and USB, especially when the latter started enabling more than 2.5W (5V at 0.5A) of power. It was 15 years ago when I first called USB the Universal Supply Bus . USB had (what has been HDMI's biggest drawback) a ...