Headworx

Personal achievements are usually noticed when some spectacular results happen. This is most evident in sports, but equally in other competitive disciplines. Like entrepreneurship (which can be considered a sport too ). But often what really matter are the mundane everyday tasks and small accomplishments. Surprisingly, over time, they accumulate to results, which are not that negligible. Doubling results over a year is not a small feat. But is increasing the numbers by 5% month over month even worth noticing? The simple math tells us both are equal. Yes, 100% over 12 months means just over 5% month over month. A twelfth degree root of 2 (100% growth) is 1.059 (5.9% M/M). 5.9% is absolutely nothing to write home about. But the thing is - it accumulates. I remember learning this accumulation mechanism during my first serious job. It was picking green peas in Somerset, England in mid nineteen eighties. We were paid by the quantity picked and I was making a bit over £10 a day. A friend of...

It is quite straightforward to dedicate the last two blogs of the year to summarize the 12 months which have just been passing. So today a short reflection on the business (Silvair) side and next week on my personal front. Both have been challenging, required a lot of commitment but ultimately delivered great rewards. Those who follow our quarterly reports can see how 2023 has been shaping up to be a yet another year during which our key business indicators have doubled. While it does not sound like landing a man on the moon, I really like the consistency and the fundamentals. Also I've been hearing recently the "business" environment in commercial lighting has not been that great (some major companies are reorganizing and laying off staff). So it is even more reassuring to continue our solid growth. And it is not just the numbers. Bluetooth SIG relaunched the Mesh focusing (via Bluetooth NLC) on the Networked Lighting Controls segment. That resonated really well. And eve...

Modern phones (not just iPhones) offer the indisputable advantages opened by computational photography. Ars Technica has recently had a good writeup on these . Low light performance is probably the one I enjoy the most, as the phone in my pocket can produce images rivalling the advanced techniques which require carrying heavy gear (tripods) and a lot of post-processing (selective stacking). With a press of a shutter button an iPhone can do all that automatically, in-place, hand-held. But for those willing to experiment a little bit more, there are many creative photo gadgets to accessorize the phone. Again the popularity of a fairly narrow set of models invites the accessory manufacturers to offer clever add-ons. Despite the fairly niche audience, the accessories offer their designers a great ROI, as they will still be selling in high numbers. Pictured here are two examples: the flat-folding credit-card-sized magnetic tripod from Peak Design and the case+lens combo from Moment .  ...

On Saturday, Dec 2, I was about to leave for the airport (KRK) which was the starting point on my KRK-FRA-SIN-SYD journey, when a message from Lufthansa arrived saying the KRK-FRA was canceled. I looked up the Internet and all became clear - the MUC airport closure due to heavy snow started the system avalanche effect. MUC serves close to one thousand flights a day, so even a fraction of those redirected to FRA would ripple across the whole network of connections. Well, despite the global warming, winter happens. But then I did not envision how the physical snow would ripple through the (supposedly modern) infrastructure of computers, apps, AI chat bots and bot-augmented call centers served by humans. In short: nothing worked and it was a super long chain reaction of failures. Chat bots were restarting, losing context and taking several minutes to respond to user interactions, Web servers were unavailable, crashing over exhausted resources and call center wait times could be counted in...

My switch to iOS had something to do with how the system handles pictures. In every application you can copy a picture to teh system clipboard and then paste it in any other application. That includes screen captures, which after simple trim or retouch can end up just in the clipboard, not messing up the photo library. To my knowledge this is not possible on Android (well, maybe it is after installing some clever apps, but on a plain Android no copy/pasting photos nor screenshots). But this time I wanted to discuss a bit more the iPhone (Pro) photo taking capabilities rather than how the system handles pictures. Of course I was expecting a big jump from my 6-years-old Blackberry to iPhone 15. After all phones' photographic capabilities have been the area of the most progress. Both on the physical/hardware size as well as the computational aspects. The improvements start from things almost unnoticed (unless you did not have them before), such as water/dust proof construction and sap...

Despite all the progress in all categories where technology is involved, we have not moved much on the energy production front. Surprisingly, it is still the bad old coal and oil, which we burn to propel things, make living comfortable (HVAC) and light our nights. Widespread nuclear, not to mention small scale fusion, is still the thing of a distant future. And it will probably keep getting worse before it starts getting better. But production is not the biggest energy issue we are facing. The real issue is distribution - or - to be precise - the power transmission grid. It is already saturated today. And the reason is: electrification of everything. Total electrification, pushed as the center of the politically correct "green" agenda means we need to triple the electricity capacity. TRIPLE. See the recent discussion between Lex Fridman and Elon Musk : So energy usage right now is roughly one third, very rough terms, one third electricity, one third transport, one third heati...

eSIM is not an Apple-specific feature, although Apple's push motivated mobile carriers to properly support it. It can be used as a regular SIM card, but without the physical SIM. The installation process, rather than using a paper clip to open the SIM card tray, is to use the system feature or an App. In my example I have been using an eSIM from Truphone, which is supported by a very convenient app. But maybe before we dive into the details - what is the problem eSIM is solving? Well, it allows to buy a SIM card without buying a (physical) SIM card. And that makes things super convenient when, while traveling, you want to buy a local SIM card to have inexpensive internet access. Data roaming charges are still a nightmare, especially as the speeds reach hundreds of Megabytes per second. That is very often $50 or more PER SECOND for Internet access (and you thought your hotel's WiFi at $9.99 per day was expensive...). That is why people swap SIM cards before landing on internatio...

Everything comes to an end and so does the x86 architecture, probably taking down Intel with it. Arm has always been an alternative but coming from the low end, had never been considered a real threat to Intel-based desktops. Until Apple unveiled the first Mac based on the M1 processor in 2020. That was a shocker, as the Apple silicon - based machines could outpace the Intel - based ones, run the emulated x86 code, and particularly shine in performance-per-Watt.  Energy efficiency today rules everything. From buildings to transportation to computing. But we were reluctant to embrace energy efficient designs when it meant performance penalty. With the rise of Apple silicon, that penalty was no longer there. So essentially Windows remained the only market for Intel's x86 chips. Microsoft tried exploring alternative architectures, but the Windows RT launched in 2012 never gained much popularity - it was slow (due to slow processors) and had very limited compatibility (the x86 emulatio...

I have done quite a lot of travel in the last two weeks. Actually it was a full RTW circle: Poland - Hong Kong - California - Indiana - Washington - Poland. Was using the iPhone a lot for all sorts of things. The battery life has proven to be sufficient. Which is a big relief. I purchased a small universal power bank (the Anker 622 , which is both magnetic and cable and can charge other devices over USB-C too). And I have not used it, which actually is a good thing :). What has really proven to be the strength of the iOS platform is its market leading position which forces vendors to prioritize applications and services to support the Apple devices. You simply cannot afford not to. To get around Hing Kong you need an Octopus card. The issue with the Octopus is you need cash (yes, cash!) to purchase it (unless you have an account in one of the local banks). Now there is a virtual Octopus for Tourists (an iOS app which integrates with the Apple Wallet). The app actually allows you to to...

If I was a judge in a contest for the perfect design for technology products, the Foolography Unleashed would be my pick of 2023. I backed this project two years ago on Kickstarter, it really took two years for it to be developed, but no regrets. Even more: it surprises me in every aspect with the quality and the attention to details. Simply speaking Unleashed is a Bluetooth interface for digital cameras. The Bluetooth interface done right. I ordered the N1 (Nikon) version and it works flawlessly. But even before putting it to work, I was stunned when unboxing - how small (and mechanically well thought it was). Then the initial setup was a complete breeze - it paired with my phone, executed a firmware update in a matter of seconds and was ready. But OK, what is it doing? It has a companion phone app which does full remote control of the camera PLUS can download photos (over Bluetooth, so full resolution takes a few moments, but a low / medium variant is perfect for instant sharing). A...

As promised a quick update after 2 weeks with the iPhone 15. It seems there are many hardware / software features Apple does not talk about. Or people just don't care. The first is - already mentioned - the great keyboard. This is purely an iOS 17 improvement, as after the upgrade the iPad keyboard started behaving the same. Super accurate predictive text and corrections and no need to switch languages anymore. Just type. Like on a BlackBerry :) I make less way typos and errors. Another are camera improvements. I've yet to try them, but supposedly there is some magic when taking long exposure astro photos. When the phone is steady (e.g., on a tripod) and the subject is dark, the night mode shutter can go up to 30 seconds. At 30 seconds you would already see small star trails but they are supposedly being removed . A kind of behind-the-scenes image post-processing AI magic like the keyboard? Maybe... I need to try it. The magsafe system of accessories is yet another great little...

I know I may sound like a broken record, but this situation continues to amaze me. How the airline booking systems are broken. After 30 years of the internet and - I believe - more than 20 years of online presence during the period of the most rapid technology development. And the crown example here is not an obscure third world carrier - it is the flagship, one of the top carriers in the world. Lufthansa. And it is not just me. I'm not doing any evil here. A friend of mine who is much more knowledgeable in web technologies was having very similar experience. And when he opened a debug pane in his browser all he saw was a litany of "500" - server errors. A 500 error typically means something has been seriously wron on the server side. Either a crashed session, a disconnected database, or exhaustion of server resources (typically an out of memory error). So these are not just simple bugs which can be quickly fixed. They are severe architectural problems at the heart of the...

It has happened - I have an iPhone now :D. USB-C was the deciding factor (or - the lack of USB-C previously had been deterring me from buying an iPhone). So thanks the EU! And of course everybody agrees Apple sticking to the lightning port on iPhones for so long was just stupid. My initial thoughts are generally good, some very good, and some surprisingly bad (although the bad ones a just minor, but unexpected...). Probably the worst part was the initial setup. I wanted to move my data over (both from the Android phone and the iOS iPad) and I read about the data transfer bug in factory fresh iPhones, so did as requested and right after unboxing plugged the iPhone to iTunes. That is like time travel. iTunes was never great but now it is exactly the same like it was 20 years ago, so considering the overall progress this is terrible. But the phone was updated and I started setting it up. It recognized the iPad (the "device" nearby) and froze for more than an hour. During that ti...

Source: CNX Software I remember people's faces back in 2011 when responding to "what is your company doing?" question my answer was - software for light bulbs. That was almost two years before Philips Hue came out. Now fast forward 12 years, we have reached the level of elevating that software concept to the global standard level, through Bluetooth NLC. Bluetooth NLC is the standard's body response addressing the needs of universal cross-vendor interoperability in the smart lighting space. Of course they are not exactly "light bulbs", as less and less people make and use them, but rather commercial / industrial grade lighting fixtures and luminaires. With the proliferation of LEDs the bulb form factor has gone away nor there is a need to have them replacable. So the E26/E27/E14 screw standards are gone, but the lights now are intelligent and want to be connected. At a glance the lightbulb functions seem very simple - turn on and turn off. Then there is dimmi...

The super accelerating world of technology today means some high end upgrades are available to everyone.  Take HiFi music before CDs - the super expensive Dolby tape decks. Now way exceeded by the cheapest MP3 players. One such upgrade for me were the original Bose noise canceling headphones. Wearing them in an airplane was more than being upgraded from economy to business or first. Flying in silent environment and being able to listen to high fidelity music was the unforgettable experience back in 2000. I was using the original (wired, 1st gen) Bose headset for many years before upgrading to the wireless variant (around 2012 I think, so already over 10 years ago). This product has been flawless for me. Almost infinite battery life, perfect audio performance (including noise canceling of course) and seamless Bluetooth connectivity to any device. The only sign of ageing has been the micro-USB charging port. But not a big deal, as they easily lasted a return transcontinental trip on ...

It seems Apple has plateaued. iPhone 15 is identical to iPhone 14. Just has a different (mandated by the EU) charging connector. Everything else is the same. I mean of course there are changes / improvements, but probably none of them are noticeable for the users. Not to discredit Apple's work: the insane price aside, this is probably the finest phone ever made. Thanks to the USB-C connector, after 15 years it will likely be my first iPhone. And maybe the last one? I am replacing the 6-years old Blackberry , which has aged beyond hope. Still works, but is slow by today's standards and - my biggest complaint now - is not waterproof. But it seems all that could have been invented in a phone, has been invented. Of course you can start adding foldable screens and other fancy concepts, but it is disputable they make the device better (which is very subjective). The #1 feature i want from a phone is that it is robust, always working. Foldables are not as robust as simple one-piece-br...

GoPro has just released the 12 version of their flagship Herp Black camera. It brings many improvements despite being based on (almost) the same hardware as the predecessor - the GoPro 11. And it marks the trend by being the first camera capable of connecting to a Bluetooth audio device. For playback but most importantly - for recording. Almost everyone today uses wireless Bluetooth audio for calls, teleconferencing, music, audiobooks. Action cameras (and just about any cameras) suffer from poor microphones. There is the whole crazy market of wireless microphones dedicated to work with video cameras.  While the obvious would be to just use Bluetooth to record audio. But the digital camera industry had failed to see the obvious . So hopefully, as the GoPro 12 fills this gap, the other manufacturers will follow. See the review by William Brawley , in particular the demo video of using Apple AirPods as the Bluetooth audio source . Obvious, isn't it?

In 1970s, when Poland was ruled by the communist's party, there was a popular saying: Everyone lies but it doesn't matter because no one believes anyone Fast forward 50 years and the situation has not materially changed. It is not even related to communists. Everybody lies. But we need to believe some people some time. Although it is hard in all the communication noise surrounding us. I pointed to this problem in relation to Artificial Intelligence back in January 2023 . I think at that time I had access to GPT-3. Now it is the all-heralded GPT-4 and still the amount of false information it spits out worries me. I wonder though, what is the level of trust people have in what the LLMs are spitting out. As everything they produce is super eloquent and even makes sense at a glance. The example illustrated here is the question about the Channel Sounding feature of the upcoming Bluetooth Core specification. In short - what the GPT says - is all wrong. But it is wrapped in such a fl...

I mentioned briefly the issues fir Western Digital / SanDisk portable SSD drives losing all recorded data briefly in the July 2023 post . Fast forward a month now and we have lawsuits against the company saying Western Digital "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers". It is impossible for consumers (or even professionals) to test / fully evaluate products for their true capability of delivering on the claims. But drives are meant to store data. This is fundamental. Of course they have their MTBF ratings and ultimately will fail over time due to mechanical or electronic wear, but this is not the case here. The SanDisk drives can lose all data at once even if carefully treated and rarely used. Typically most of us expect the companies value their brands the most, as a brand value is most tedious to build and may take a brief moment to collapse. Western Digital somehow does not understand that. Or they don't care, which is also a plausible theory, as they have already bee...

One big gap which exists in one of the most popular consumer device categories is the missing link between standalone cameras and smartphones. I wrote on this a number of times before . Of course the fundamental gap is the lack of a full-stack communications standard. One that would allow any phone to connect to any camera without a special dedicated app for that particular camera. It sounds super obvious and in the past there even was a digital camera working group at Bluetooth SIG. But that group never produced anything (any specification) reaching the adoption phase. Clearly members of that group did not have enough motivation to create the standard They clearly thought they would achieve better results doing it in a proprietary way. But even in a proprietary way - they failed. The cameras' smartphone apps are infuriating - writes Richard Butler at DPReview. Yes they are. This statement probably does not apply to the latest - meant by design to be connected - photo and video ca...

Software has been eating the world. On one end this is really powerful. The dream of a hardware product being continuously improved with "just" software updates. This has clearly worked for computers and smartphones. Of course to some extent, as there always comes a point when a new update is not enabled on "old" hardware. But generally everyone expects whatever they buy today will be a better prodict tomorrow. And in a year or two. The other side of the coin are products which simply should work as-is, and nobody is expecting any updates to come. Yet these products are very often too software-driven. And when this embedded software has bugs, the products may suddenly fail. There are many stories like that. Some examples: SanDisk Extreme SSDs abruptly failing (and the follow-up story ) Sonos Arc soundbar " pop of death " Mazda FM radio bricked Of course they are just examples what can happen (and does happen). The SanDisk issue is particularly nasty, as i...

Facing the loss of archived data - the last week's post - I needed a quick decision on the alternative solution. The straightforward way would be to upgrade the old Networked Attached Storage (NAS) server. It clearly has been failing and despite a bunch of bulged capacitors in the power supply unit (PSU), replacing the PSU did not solve the problem. Of four disks one was declared dead almost immediately after start and a second one was being flagged as dead shortly after. I could stuff the old chassis with new disks, but two disks dying at the same time smells like the problem is elsewhere. On top of that the software on the NAS has been no longer maintained (another civilization disease) and there have been issues using it with newer versions ow Windows (I think it was Windows 10 which officially declared the old SMB protocol fundamentally unsafe). But another angle of the NAS story is also important. Historically the NAS server was the home multimedia server with stored music an...

I somehow have sentiment to old digital content. I mean the one which I created, as this is something the Internet will not take care of automatically. Being lost in managing all the detailed files and directories with source code, experiments, configurations, photos, notes etc, I resorted to having sufficiently large backup storage to just "backup it all". Especially as even with digital photos contributing to most of the bulk, the economically accessible storage capacity outpaces my creation velocity. In short: today it is affordable to backup everything. The storage capacity increase unfortunately is not matched by the reliability increase. In other words: hard drives (and be it mechanical or solid state) still keep alarmingly failing. This failure rate is what makes the redundant systems alive - have a RAID disk array and it will manage your failing drives proactively notifying you about imminent failures and letting you replace the (inexpensive) drives on the fly. The q...

It turns out no matter how great you design a standard, there will be people finding ways around it. Flooding the market with crappy useless products which violate the rules while claiming (or implying) to be conformant. USB-C, which is a loose term for the connector and the numerous standards behind it (USB3.x multi-gigabit per second data transfers, alternate connector modes, and. last but not least, Power Delivery (USB-PD) enabling up to 240W of power (5A at 48V) over a USB cable, is teh prime example here. It is ingeniously designed, being ultra simple for the basic, backwards compatible features, while at the same time enabling a great variety of advanced features. One of the basic backwards-compatible features of USB-C is the 5V charging function. Something that has been available for previous USB generations since early 2000's . To make it work while at the same time enabling the other new use cases, USB-C makes one assumption: a power source (a charger) does NOT output any ...

We live in an instant world. Clik - post - click like. Click - buy - delivered today. Click, click click. This has certainly had a big social impact, especially on the young generations who just don't understand the concept of waiting. And very often not just passive, but active waiting - or - should we call it - developing. Our teams at Silvair have been analyzing market adoption of delivered product features. And the conclusion has been that most of the features have been failures. The real reason - they measured the adoption too close to release dates. Simply not giving the market a chance. While in the current state of product maturity, there are no things urgently and immediately needed. The world keeps going on, there is inertia in discovery and learning. As an example I must admit, despite passkeys being one of the most important internet development of 2023, I am yet to update my accounts to use them. Inertia. And laziness. And passwords just work. Kimon and Richard keep r...

Lex Fridman has had recently a very interesting conversation with Marc Andreessen. Marc is the  co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. They covered a galaxy of topics, as is typically the case of every Lex Fridman podcast. which is unusually long format (3-4 hours each episode). There is an interesting discussion at around 2 hours 44 minutes mark - on startups . Great founders don't take any advice. Then on top of intelligence/passion traits there is the courage element which is the choice. The question of pain tolerance - "how many times are you willing to get punched in the face before you quit?". Marc goes on saying the biggest thing people don't understand about what it's like to be a startup founder is it gets very romanticized. And even if they fail it still gets romanticized about what a great adventure it was. But the reality of it it is most of what happens is people telling you "...

May apps, in particular multimedia apps have so called "offline mode". Often available in the premium subscription plans. Like YouTube, Spotify but also navigation apps, including Google Maps and my favorite - FATMAP . I use these offline options very often - either during off-grid trail hikes or for watching movies / listening to books and podcasts during flights. Unfortunately these offline modes are very often broken. They need online Internet to start doing something. A couple of weeks ago I tried playing a movie I purchased and downloaded for offline viewing and it would not work. As the plane was taxing towards takeoff, I managed to turn back my phone, turn the mobile WiFi hotspot on and let the tablet communicate with the Internet to kick off the playback of the downloaded movie. Similar thing happened to me recently with Spotify - it refused to play a downloaded podcast episode due to the lack of Internet access. The green wheel kept spinning forever. And this happens...

Europe - in general - does a good job in taming the entrepreneurial gallop to satisfy consumers' desires. I remember the times when every mobile phone had a replaceable battery. It was practical to the extent that the battery could be removed as a last problem solving resort. But then came the iPhone and in the race for ever thinner and cooler looking devices the battery eventually got sealed inside a case which cannot be opened (even by most service shops, including the official Apple). To have the battery replaced the entire device must be sent to the factory. Apple actually has mastered the replacement program and basically you can have a device swapped for another one with a new battery. And yes, the new device you get is a different device. Which means all the hassles of migrating data . Wouldn't it be great if we could just swap the old battery with a new one? So the EU has come now with a set of new regulations mandating replaceable batteries in all kinds of electronic ...

I wrote on noise pollution before: https://headworx.slupik.com/2021/07/noise-pollution.html . The situation has not gone materially better since then. In particular, as travel has resumed after COVID, I've noticed North America is generally more noisy compared to Europe. Remember touching down a couple of weeks ago in Washington DC and despite very mild outside temperature (it was mis-May), the bus to the rental car center had rumbling air conditioning running at full power. Truck and bus engines in America also seem to be noisier. Wonder if the EU is just voluntarily more sensitive to the noise problem or are there any stricter regulations behind? And do we really prefer super-stabilized cold temperatures over a  quiet environment? Not to mention all these AC units are responsible for very significant energy consumption nationwide . Another annoying source of noise are the little combustion engines in lawn mowers and similar gardening equipment. Surprisingly they are also res...

It seems the security aspects of wireless networking finally start becoming important to the market. I have had multiple discussions with multiple customers about that recently.  And honestly - it has been very bad almost everywhere. Everywhere except the official Bluetooth mesh, where the security architecture is at another level. There is a good overview published by Bluetooth SIG back in 2017, and for those who are willing to dive deeper, there are the specifications - both adopted and the upcoming drafts. But without diving into the details, there is one fundamental question any customer concerned about the security of a wireless system should ask: show me the blueprint, show me how you have architected that and how it works. Vendors can claim anything, but the claims practically cannot be verified. So if they claim their security is good, they should not have any issue providing openly the architecture of their system. Any excuse to do that should be a warning, or even a red...