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.  ...