Headworx

Thread - the wireless mesh networking protocol - is self-healing. This has been one of the highlights of Thread since the beginning. And the concept works. Sometimes. And the other times it leads to the network breaking up.  So let's see what it is all about and what is the problem. The key difference between Thread (and similar mesh networking concepts) and Bluetooth Mesh is that Thread is really aware of the network topology. There is the concept of the network in the first place. The network has a Leader and Routers. And is formed. Nodes join the network. It all means each of these actions can be reversed. The network may lose its Leader. And Routers. And nodes may drop off. So the network may transition from a "healthy" state into an "unhealthy" state and then try to go back to the healthy state through what is know as healing. Everything nice on paper so far. Now let's dig deeper. It all happens automatically. How? The nodes in a Thread network keep ...

I was going to write about some serious matters but that is going to be postponed until one of the upcoming weeks. I am now at an airport after spending lovely / funny 5 hours recovering from a canceled flight. Flight cancelations are not that unusual and I seem to attract them frequently, so this rarely raises my tension. Just don't fight or get angry at things you don't control.  So I was supposed to be on a 6am flight from Krakow to Frankfurt and then to Chicago. That means getting up around 4am (yes Krakow is a lovely airport which takes about 15 minutes to pass the security check, or even less for the priority line). But I woke in the middle of the night and saw a notification from Lufthansa about the canceled Frankfurt flight. They offered an automated session with a bot to rebook. A rebooking bot is such a nice idea. Click, examine the available options, select one that suits you and voila - you are booked on a new flight. Unless you aren't. The Lufthansa bot confirm...

It seems overall the pandemic has had very positive impact on our lives. By "our" I mean the wealthy people living in the western civilization. The civilization of well developed countries, with broad/easy access to vaccination programs, and the civilization where the basic survival needs of the citizens are fully taken care of by the states. The civilization where entertainment and consumption are the key necessities people are after and time is the key scarcity. We have more time now at our disposal, thanks to the pandemic.  Or thanks to the remote / hybrid work mode we have globally adopted. Teleconferencing is here to stay and while people are still keen to get together in the office or at conferences / conventions. they clearly do not wan to do that every day. Because in so many cases staying at home and doing the work to be done is equally (or more) effective. And saves us the commute time. The pandemic has freed us from the daily commute in traffic jams. Of course the ...

User authentication is the most unsolved problem of the Internet today. For 30 years we have been lost in the passwords jungle. Hardly anyone understands and is able to navigate this jungle. We give our passwords left and right, lose them, recover, use 2-factor authentication on a single device and so on. Web service providers are trying to get more and more sophisticated which works very often against them. So is all hope gone? Maybe not. The three Internet giants, Apple, Google and Microsoft, have just announced to " Expanded Support for FIDO Standard to Accelerate Availability of Passwordless Sign-Ins ". Which sounds promising, but personally I'm a bit hesitant to call it a victory. What is good is they declared they wanted to work together on an open standard and cross-platform support for it. That is very good news. Because regardless is so-called FIDO2 will technically meet the challenge, with the commitment of the big 3, there clearly be FIDO2+ or FIDO3, which wil...

One thing why electric cars (and hybrids too) are more energy efficient is the regenerative braking function. To slow a vehicle down you need to convert its kinetic energy into something. In internal combustion engine (ICE) cars it is converted into heat which then is dissipated into the environment. In electric and hybrid cars (a portion of) the kinetic energy recharges batteries. This process is not fully efficient (e.g., in my electric scooter it is a very small percentage which goes back to the battery), but it is more than zero, so there is gain, especially when driving in a city or in a jam when frequent acceleration and braking takes place. Regeneration itself has a very broad meaning, but in the context of consumption  typically means re-consuming, or consuming the same thing again. It can be either through repairs or by refurbishing / reintroducing the same thing into the sales channel. The good thing is people are slowly becoming aware of how bad consumption is and there ...