Headworx

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...