Headworx

TSLA has been one of the most "emotional" stocks in 2022. Rising for no reason to absolutely irrational  levels and then dropping like a stone. What is interesting is what were the drivers for that behavior. The fall is probably much easier to explain: it is back to reality. Recession is on the horizon and as a car maker Tesla does not have any inherent advantage. The autonomous driving software does not work (not a surprise, as this is one of the most challenging problems to solve) and the rest - batteries, electric drive trains, software subsystems are equivalent to many other EVs. To be honest (without diving deep into the details), it is a car like may other cars. Some like it, some don't, but in the end there is nothing special about it. In other words, the competition has caught up and now it is a matter of individual taste, and even more importantly, even a decision to own a car at all. The rise was driven entirely by hype and led to the 2022 peak of irrational exu...

The legacy - originally Japanese - photo camera business has been increasingly challenged by smart phones. This is obvious now to almost everyone and it is hard not to admit the SLR, and even the mirrorless cameras, have become a niche of a niche of a niche. Of course this was inevitable, as many (most?) people are just fine with the photo quality offered by today's phones. And the problem is the overall user experience - from taking a photo to having it corrected and archived or shared with others. Nothing has changed there for the last 20 years. Clumsy cables, memory card readers, unintuitive software. I remember it took me many hours of tutorial videos to understand the concept and the basic features of Adobe Lightroom. On the other hand anyone can start using Apple Photos or Google Photos without any learning nor training. My curiosity has pushed me recently into making time lapse video clips. It is a pain using a DLSR. You need to manually calculate all exposure parameters tha...

I have found myself in a pretty unusual situation - between a hammer an a hard place. It started with a super ordinary transaction at Best Buy, purchasing an Apple gift card. The gift card did not work, saying "the code is invalid". I reached out to Apple support and after going through the usual checks "have you typed in the code correctly?" a human support person pick the issue up and quickly explained to me that "this gift card was cancelled at the place of purchase". And that the only option was to contact the Best Buy store. I tried Best Buy's online chat but the agent was of not much help either. He was apologetic, but the conclusion was to ride back to the store and "the customer service will help you". So I did. Actually the store manager happened to be the customer service person, so without being forwarded like a hot potato, he quickly produced the "POS transaction fingerprint" (a log file spanning 6 pages when printed) an...

As briefly mentioned in the Nov 6 post , it was time to replace the dying battery in my iPad. Apple does not do that. I mean, they do, but instead of replacing the battery they sell you a new iPad (the same model and configuration) and you give them the old one. This is clearly because of the super low "repairability" score mostly due to the "Gobs of adhesive hold most everything in place, making all repairs more difficult.". A local non-Apple-authorized service shop offered the battery replacement so I was eager to accept this offer. It took them a week after which they returned me the device with a new battery but broken WiFi (and Bluetooth). There was clearly something wrong with the 2.4GHz antenna, as WiFi reception was bad and Bluetooth was choppy. I returned them the device, they kept if for another week and returned in the same state - broken WiFi. Clearly they did not have skills nor testing tools / procedures to to fix what they broke. And I was afraid the...

The advertisement of the new Volkswagen T-ROC highlights variety of technological features as differentiators and advantages. Among them are touch controls on the steering wheel . This definitely LOOKS cool. At the same time Ars Technica reports that " After complaints, Volkswagen will ditch capacitive steering wheel controls ". Touch controls work for screens. Period. I have not seen any other implementation of touch which trumps old school mechanical. Be it mice with touch scroll-wheel emulation or the Bose glasses with touch-based volume or the car steering wheel. Or even the original iPods. Capacitive touch works in laboratory conditions. But it breaks so easily in real life. Drops of water and gloves are the most typical issues rendering capacitive touch inoperative. Of course this is the only technology today which works for touch screens, so there is no alternative. And we basically know we should take gloves off before operating a phone and that it does not work when...

The key problem with the Internet is trust. Or lack of it. There is tons of information. It is just almost impossible to tell for sure what is real and what is fake.  Interestingly it is much easier for machines to verify what to trust, because of the established authentication protocols based on widely adopted cryptographic standards. For humans it is just a jungle of click-baits. Ultimately what we verify is what we see. And what we see is rendered by applications, displayed on screens. And very often what we see looks legit while it is not. The whole problem of scam and phishing.  And it takes years to build the trust. Then, as Elon Musk demonstrated during his week at Twitter, it is just a moment to ruin the reputation. [For those who were not following: Twitter had had a "blue mark" program for high profile celebrities and institutions. Musk started selling this mark for $8 to anyone, without verification. So there was an eruption of imposter accounts, all granted the Tw...

Passkeys have been heralded the final nail into the password coffin. And I do agree this is a great step/milestone and I'm really looking forward to have this enabled across all devices and all applications. But as lots of us will benefit from this rare development which increases both security and ease of use (typically these things are opposite), there is the growing "layer 8" security attack surface. Which is the attack on people who are unfamiliar with how things really work. Probably most of the vulnerabilities will lie around the ownership and protection of personal devices (which are now holding all the keys). Just to illustrate the issue. The battery in my several years old iPad has been dying and I decided to have it replaced. The standard Apple procedure is "give us your old iPad and we will give you back a refurbished one". I did not like this procedure as it required erasing the old device and reinstalling everything on the new (refurbished) one. Ev...

More and more processes are now handled by all-interconnected digital services. But despite doing this for many years now, the process failures resulting from infrastructure errors happen all too often. Or maybe this is just me and my bad luck. As it seems I would be one of the most valuable manual testers, as I tend to uncover all sorts of errors almost every day.  What is interesting though is how companies react to these errors. There are three most common behaviors here: We have not seen this error. An error is not an error unless a frustrated customer files a support ticket. So let's make the ticketing process difficult and we reduce the number of tickets even more. Ah we are sorry this happened to you. Let's try once more. We don't really grasp all that I stuff and do not know how to avoid or fix the errors, but maybe if we retry the process it will work this time or the customer will not complain anymore. We have zero error policy and we do go after any trace of an e...

Stadia, the revolutionary online gaming system launched by Google in 2019 is the last victim of the product axing policy. It joins the Google Graveyard, the resting place for wonderful applications like Google Reader, Google Inbox, Google Travel, Google Music and many more. What is even worse, when Stadia hits the graveyard next year, it will create an environmental problem by bricking thousands of game controllers people bought to use with the service. Some time ago I was nagged by a Google representative to switch our cloud operations from AWS to Google. My answer was simple - "never". No matter how good the offer was, there was always the risk they would kill the product forcing us to invest in porting it to another cloud platform. I simply do not trust Google when it comes to their product strategy. One day a product exists and the next day it may be axed, like it happened with many. This is why we use the Atlassian suite for tracking software issues and documentation d...

The recent global increase of energy prices has redefined our perspective. Suddenly many people started paying attention to what they do, how to conserve, and in general what energy means to our lives. It turns out everything depends on energy. Which of course is not that surprising, but we simply were not paying attention to this fact when energy was cheap. Of course there is a lot of lament in the media, but that is not relevant. Media needs crisis and lament to thrive. So just ignore it. The good news is the expensive energy will undoubtedly result in overall reduced consumption which will lead to reduced manufacturing and reduced energy use. The media will call this a recession, which of course has a negative bias. But does not have to be that negative at all. We cannot continue growing the economies infinitely based on the finite resources (the planet Earth). It is just not possible. So are we at the end of growth? Maybe. Or maybe not there yet. But definitely there has been some ...

Wow it has been 16 years since I proposed the Universal Supply Bus (USB) to be the common charging standard and then of course to be upgraded by USB-C . This seems to be super obvious to everyone now. But not everyone remembers how it was "before" - basically every accessory unit had its own power brick. Seems unthinkable and stupid now. But you still have the recollection what it was in the form of Apple devices, stupidly pushing their own "lightning" agenda (but only for iPhones, as iPads and laptops have been USB-C for 5 years now). The EU USB-C mandate is official this week. By the end of 2024, all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port. From spring 2026, the obligation will extend to laptops. The new law, adopted by plenary on Tuesday with 602 votes in favor, 13 against and 8 abstentions, is part of a broader EU effort to reduce e-waste and to empower consumers to make more sustainable choice...

PC monitor vendors have been slow to recognize the opportunities provided by fairly established technologies, namely USB-C (considered here as a set of technologies) and the leading operating systems. I don't have hard numbers, but it is safe to say majority of users today have laptops, and desktop computers niche is supported by the ever shrinking audience of elite gamers.  So if the assumption of proliferation of laptops is correct, computer monitors are just add-ons for work or home working environments. One problem with using an external monitor in the past was the ugly reality of the number of cables and power supplies needed. Monitors used to have their own power bricks and then when setting up a desktop environment, you needed to connect a keyboard, a mouse, a set of speakers, a microphone, a web camera. And probably on the same desk you had a phone/watch/tablet charger. That resulted in adding a power strip and an external USB hub (with its own power supply). All this has c...

Hotel TVs are one of the artifacts of the past. No hotel probably even thinks of providing a room without a TV. Sure, you can have a room with a shared bathroom or without a window. But there is always a TS set. I wonder who watches them. These days most people watch their personalized content. Typically they are just fine with the endless scroll on social media but some do watch YouTube or other paid (subscription) Internet-based video services. And then they arrive at a hotel and do what? Watch the broadcast TV? I don't think so. At least I don't do it. Although it would be nice from time to time to watch something from a bigger distance and on a bigger screen (bigger than my 10" iPad). Some time ago I added a nice 90-degree USB-C - to - HDMI adapter to the cable bag  (other than that there have been no updates, and I'm very happy about the "cable" things have stabilized, mostly due to the USB-C all-capable standard). This adapter has two use cases. The pri...

Despite photography (electronic photography) continuing to be a category where most consumer product investments go, managing a photo library remains an unsolved problem. It works at a basic level thanks to mobile apps like Google Photos, but anything more advanced is full of process / conceptual gaps and a serious content management challenge. This is the reason why the compact / prosumer camera segment died. People simply got lost in the complexity of managing the photo sets, including how they access the photos on the road (when they do not have access to a computer), where / how they do edits and how they backup and share the photos. Things are super simple if you just have a phone. You take a photo, it gets geo-tagged and time-stamped automatically and gets uploaded to the cloud. Then you do some retouching edits and they are applied with an option to undo/redo on all "copies" (local / cloud) of the photo. Timestamping always uses a properly synchronized clock because th...

My trusty phone is aging. It's got a new battery and still works for days on a charge. But things start working slow. I believe this is is mostly due to the size of RAM (4GB) as most of "today's" phones have 8-12GB. RAM is being filled up with apps and when a new app is started, it takes time for the memory manager to clean up the RAM to make room for the launched app. And the other day I found what you can see on the attached screenshot - a configuration panel which controls which apps are loaded on startup. Clearly too many. I started turning them, off and then I realized most of them I did not actually used anymore. This led me to take a while (and yes it was a long while) to uninstall unused apps. I probably got rid of 80% of the apps. Of course I could remember why they ended up being installed but very often it was just a momentary use, contributing over the years to the app clutter. So there were apps I no longer used at all and there were apps I no longer used...

- "So you did not manage to release the product by the end of December as planned?" - "We didn't as almost half ot the month was eaten by the holiday season - Christmas and New Year" Oh how many times I heard that... Due to the surprise of Christmas and New Year happening barely a week from each other at the end of December we could not complete this or that. Yes, some people are really surprised Christmas in on Dec 25 and New Year starts on Jan 1. This is not a joke. This is a fact. Same with Summer holidays. There is always lament about the backlog after returning to the office after a week or two of vacation absence. Another surprise. People often talk about personal productivity tools. As you may know , I do not use almost any of that. Instead, I have developed a discipline of walking thorough the calendar, day by day and seein how much I would be able to accomplish in a day / week / month ahead. That helps me offer reliable commitments and avoid overpromisi...

Continuing the series on designing for longevity, a couple of thoughts on skimping on hardware.  Of course less capable chips are less expensive. They even do not need to be less costly to manufacture, but simply a smaller / slower chip is positioned to be a lower cost part in comparison to high end parts. But because most of the products today are defined by software and software upgrades, contrary to hardware upgrades, do not have negative impact on the environment, it is fundamentally important the hardware should have room to accommodate such updates for many years. Skimping on hardware is simply a false economy. Typically we are talking about sub-dollar or single-digit dollar amounts for a chip versus the costs of replacing the whole product built around that chip. One example is my (now 7 years old) Philips Android TV. It has a nice 55" 4k LED panel and a good set of speakers. Unfortunately the Android subsystem (which was already limited at the time of purchase) is complete...

Solid state electronic components seemed to me like a liberation from the problem of wear and tear. Any product containing mechanical parts has been subject to wear and the limited lifetime of those mechanical products has been something obvious and natural. Solid state has brought the new concept of "no moving parts" and to many it was like "finally these products can live forever".  Unfortunately "forever" for typical electronic solid state products means just a couple of years. And capacitors are in most part responsible for this failure. Initially I thought this problem applied only to electrolytic capacitors , which I have been regularly replacing in some of my aging gear. Recently, however, I have experienced a couple of failures of the so-called "actor" modules in my smart home system. These actors are small electronic cubes mounted in walls behind regular wall switches. They are a great way to upgrade an analog electrical installation to ...

It seems people are still underestimating the role (embedded) software plays today in delivering high performance and robust products. From the Bluetooth mesh turf I can say the common wisdom is the "stacks" are all equal and the product performance is defined by the Bluetooth specification  Actually it is quite the opposite. The specification offers a lot of room for innovation. That has always been the principle of Bluetooth SIG - make the spec such that people can go and implement the requirements and the independent products will work together. In particular Bluetooth has been avoiding so called "golden implementations" - products that all other products try to align to. Instead the specifications are tightened and polished to the level that enables many-to-many interoperability of products from different vendors. But interoperability basically means "it works", while how well it performs (throughput, scalability) and how robust it is (e.g., does it re...

The effects of longevity tend to be very often underestimated and overlooked. But this is a fundamental mechanism influencing economies, extraction of natural resources and quality of life in general. For humans longevity, known also as life expectancy, has had a profound effect with progress of medicine in the last 100-200 years. The number of people on Earth has been growing not because there are so many new births, but because we live so much longer. The life expectancy doubled or even tripled. During the early industrial era, an average life expectancy in Liverpool, England was about 25 years. Now it has more than tripled. It is not uncommon we have 4 generations alive - grand-grand parents, grand parents, parents and children. Simply speaking the same birth rate results in 3x the number of living people. The same applies to manufacturing and consumption. Businesses want to manufacture more. So the logic is simple - reduce the longevity of products. Then to have the same amount of ...

This week a good friend of mine decided to shut down his factory and close the business. After 27 years. It was a great factory manufacturing super nice glassware for tier-1 customers and also providing employment for many workers in the town. What killed it were the high energy proces, in particular the natural gas which skyrocketed in Europe, especially after the Russian invasion on Ukraine. Glassworks are super dependent on energy, as it takes a lot of it to melt glass. So this is not unexpected they struggle to survive where energy proces are high and thrive where energy is cheap. It probably makes much more sense to craft a glass bowl somewhere in, say, Kazakhstan, and ship it over to Europe, than pay Kazakhstan (or Russia) for the energy to manufacture the same bowl in Europe. At the same time the lighting control software business has accelerated significantly during the same period of time, with energy savings being the key feature driving sales. It turns out that adding a smal...

CNN featured an article with an interesting (and honest) perspective on Bluetooth: " Why Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades ". The short story is: we love Bluetooth when it works and we hate it when it does not. Unfortunately still after 20 years we often have reasons to hate it. And this is almost entirely due to bad implementations. People tend to blame the overarching technology and the brand when a particular product does not work. While the issues are typically with the product itself. And yes, bad implementations have plagued Bluetooth since the very beginning. It all probably started with Microsoft simply ignoring the existence of Bluetooth, until (if I remember correctly) Windows 7, when it finally offered native Bluetooth support. Before that Windows users were forced to use 3rd party Bluetooth drivers with varying quality. Android only recently has made a serious bet on Bluetooth, finally realizing this is one of the featur...

Things always look clearer in perspective. And at the same time we typically do not see when something moves on continuously at what seems to be a very slow speed. Living in a city you basically wake up everyday and the city everyday is the same. No change, no progress. But move out for a bit longer and come back. Then the changes are clear. If there are changes. Since the pandemic eased out this Spring, I have returned to fairly frequent business travel. I know, I know, this is bad for the environment, but to my excuse the result of that travel is makin much more good for the environment - through the massive energy savings our software enables. So I feel absolved to some extent. And yes, the pandemic has done a loot of good for the environment too, by enabling videoconferencing as the primary means of doing business. But still some things work a lot better when you meet face to face. Especially conventions and trade shows when you meet new people. It is still hard to meet new people ...

It is not often in real life that technology (governed by the underlying laws of physics) makes a perfect fit for an application. But it just happens to be this way when Bluetooth mesh is used for commercial / industrial sensor - based lighting control. Light fixtures (be it office - type "troffers" or industrial "high-bay" fixtures) are organized in a grid layout. The spacing of the grid is in the range of 10x10 ft in offices and up to several times that in warehouses and over factory floors. These grid configurations result from lighting - related requirements. Now each light fixture becomes a radio mesh node. And when we apply the radio propagation principles for a given type of space (use the Bluetooth Range Estimator ), it turns out we arrive at the magic number of 200, which is the typical number of mesh nodes within a single-hop radio range. IOW on average there are 200 nodes able to receive a radio transmission from any other node. So why is the 200 number i...

I do not believe in electric cars. In fact they are one of the biggest lies out there today. They have very little in common with protecting the environment. The life-time carbon footprint of an electric car is more or less equal to a traditional car. So switching from an ICE vehicle to an EV does not move the needle. And speaking of mobility in the context of the climate: there are many super easy things which could move the needle: stopping buying new cars would be the first. Some people do that every 2-3 years. That is completely irrational, in particular considering they often complain how bad the new car is compared to the old one. Or simply driving less. 3 weeks ago attending an industry convention in Bellevue, WA, I was the only passenger on a public bus to the Airport. The bus is $3.25 and the ride takes 50 minutes. Comparing to $35 and 40 minutes by Uber. It must be a monumental effort to take this bus, as clearly nobody was able to do do that. Or nobody cared. Back to EVs - t...

Las Vegas is fabulous. You know that even before you arrive, as this is exactly what the flight attendants tell you when boarding a LAS flight. Of course. It cannot be anything else but fabulous. And the Vegas fame aside, it really was fabulous for us las week at LightFair International, the first grand industry trade show after COVID19. There was desire and energy in people to meet face to face and shake hands. We saw that back in March at New York's LEDucation. Which was the indicator of the LightFair to come. The booths were crowded for all three days - we has meetings up until the last hour. And of course mornings ad evenings were busy too with joint breakfasts with customers and after hours parties. It has been so encouraging to see that much energy in people and so many happy faces. This all means the lighting industry is back up to speed and guess what is the leading theme these days? Energy savings. Of course. LED retrofits are becoming no-brainers and with lighting control...

Early May this year I was reading (or rather listening to - to be precise) the Endurance (Shackleton's Incredible Voyage) by Alfred Lansing . The story is truly incredible and the overall reflection is this was probably the last one like that. The last major expedition without radio communication. Something that simply is not possible today. Even when the first daredevils fly to Mars, their every minute will be covered on the Internet. There were many fascinating aspects of surviving on pack ice. I highly recommend immersing in this book. But probably the most striking has been the realization that a trip like that - a trip of a lifetime, is not possible today. Thanks to the radio communications and GPS satellites the world is no longer an uncharted area to explore. I got so fascinated with what (and how) they did, that I decided to learn using a sextant for navigation. Of course not to drive from one city to another but to restore that skill of finding geographic coordinates base...