Headworx

Managing energy consumption in battery-powered electronic gadgets is one of the most difficult engineering tasks. And no one has dine it 100% right. Low power consumption is only achieved through managing the device activity. A device may really be designed to and perform consuming manageable amount of energy, until once in a while it runs away and dies. A 2018 MacBook Pro runs for 8 hours under macOS and only 90 minutes under Windows. The reason? The accelerated graphic card (the ATI Radeon GPU) is tightly managed by macOS (by switching it off and using the integrated low-performance / low-power Intel GPU). Wen booting Windows, the Apple BIOS disables the Intel GPU so Windows has nothing to switch back to and consequently draws batteries at full speed. My Garmin Delta watch has a habit of draining its battery to death in the night when it repeatedly attempts to connect to the iPhone to sync data. I have a habit of leaving the watch on a kitchen table and taking the phone with me to t...

I should have known this time. This happened to me in the past multiple times. I bought an SSD drive which was 256GB on the outside and only 40GB inside. I bought suspiciously inexpensive 1TB microSD card which was way less than that in practice. I bought branded fragrances which were fake. And this time I bought AirPods Pro 2 for a too-good price. They were fake. Fake, but really hard to distinguish from originals. I just could not believe what I saw.  The AirPods looked and felt like the originals. Perhaps the audio quality was not that great, but that is always a bit subjective. Anyway I wanted them for my Mom. She has some minor hearing loss. I read all the recommendations about the Pro 2s stepping in the role of a hearing aid (with a firmware upgrade). Of course I wanted to try this feature, so all I was looking for right after pairing with my iPhone was the firmware update. The AirPods paired like the originals. Displayed all the native features, including the serial number,...

Musk's acquisition of Twitter started the first wave of exodus (or simply the Xodus) but it was not definitive. People were trying Mastodon or Facebook's Threads , but none of that reached the critical mass. It may be different this time, as the US presidential elections has polarized the audience to the levels previously unseen. I personally tried all those options but also sticked with Twitter. But over the last couple of months it has become clear the platform has clearly become algorithmically  biased and flooded with bots. Nothing in common with the officially claimed "free speech". Even to a casual reader like myself it has become mostly a sewage, in which even funny orange cat videos could not make it to the surface. The recent shift of users from x.com to Bluesky might have been sparked by Taylor Swift fans , but then it has accelerated like an avalanche. The Guardian was next . And now it seems like everybody is moving. Including some old friends of mine w...

Santa has visited me early this year. Something a bit unexpected but I love the gadget a lot: the iFixit portable soldering station . Battery (or power bank) powered soldering iron has been in my toolkit for some time. I had been using the TS80P . Which had been good for small field jobs but not really capable to fully replace a professional desktop station. The iFixit station is the best of the both worlds. Designed to sit nicely on a desk, with a specially designed station / controller / power bank (100W output, 2 output ports). And equally handy to take outside / to a car / or wherever there is a need to do some soldering and dragging a power cable would not be easy. They don't say it, but clearly the base has been designed with some additional tools available in future - as it has two independent USB-C power ports. The quality is top-notch: great ergonomic design and top grade materials like the super elastic cable. I'd say I'd recommend this as a Christmas present, but...

Technology capabilities have for years been outpacing real life adoption. The gap seems to be widening as on the technology front we are talking now about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) while simple everyday things just don't work. Last week the airline lost my luggage and the recovery started nicely as I got a personalized message indicating they had already found it and it was n its way. The message prompted me to a simple web form to enter my temporary address they should deliver the bag to. This was all on Oct 28. i was staying at the hotel for 2 nights, so I put Oct 30 in the form. Early morning on the next day (Oct 29) I got a notification asking about the baggage delivery, as I was supposedly "about to leave the temporary address". Surprised, I went back to the form which was indeed showing Oct 29. I was sure I entered Oct 30... But OK, I did this again. Picked Oct 30 from a nicely crafted date picker. The form was still showing Oct 29 The regular tricks suc...

Bitcoin, and particularly the blockchain technology was supposed to change the world. That was 15 years ago. And the world went crazy indeed. Particularly in the startup / VC world blockchain was the only thing that counted. Fast forward to 2024 and we barely have a trace of that. I mean Bitcoin still exists, mostly as a (very niche) speculative instrument. And also serves very well the dark communities. I complained on that back in 2021 . About half of Bitcoin transactions serve illegal activity. And even if legal - the speculative and mining for money part - it does not do any good either. Investment groups have been reigniting decommissioned power plants. Generating air pollution. And noise - to the extent that people decide to sue Bitcoin "mines" operators . Generally speaking - it is useless. Enter now the 2024 and the Artificial Intelligence craze. Myriads of promises and tons of "cool" demos. Again the startup and VCs have gone crazy about it. But the net ga...

    On October 7, 2024, Apple published a research paper that discusses the limitations of mathematical Reasoning in large language models (LLMs). This is yet another proof that LLMs are about language and have very little in common with understanding the underlying meaning. This is by the way quite similar to how human brains work, as we have (at least) two separate neural networks (and probably more) - one responsible for parsing and constructing language statements, and a completely separate one where the actual "thinking" happens. I posted a blog on that back in May. Long story short, the Apple researchers point out that despite the overall heralded progress in LLMs, they are still bound by limits of pattern matching, when they "convert statements to operations without truly understanding their meaning". This "suggests deeper issues in reasoning processes" that can't be helped with fine-tuning or other refinements. In other words there is still t...

I posted about my backup Windows setup several months ago when my primary laptop died during a business trip. It came back to life later but then died again and the verdict was - replace the motherboard. This time it died after I returned home, so the overall conditions were more manageable.  It took end-to-end full two weeks to have the computer replaced and reconfigured again (more on that below). After leaving the broken MacBook at an (authorized) Apple repair shop, I blew the dust from the Panda and hooked it up to the giant curved Philips USB-C monitor.  It worked right away and the most beautiful part of the setup was the single cable connecting the monitor with the machine. USB-C, when properly implemented with all its features (high speed data, video lanes and power delivery), does wonders. What was a bit surprising, the Panda-based setup was not that much different from my high-end (albeit ageing) 2018 i9 MacBook Pro. In typical office work it was a tad slower and I ...

My Mother's iPhone has gradually become non functional. It was iPhone 6. The hardware was pretty OK. But one after another the apps were refusing to work. In a pretty bad fashion. The apps typically started complaining about the version being too old and forcing to update. But when redirected to the AppStore, there was a message saying the newest one was not compatible with the iOS version (which could not be upgraded) and offering an older version. Which then complained it was too old. A very confusing dead loop. The reason of course was the old iOS with the newer releases not supporting the "old" hardware. So the question was not so much if we needed a new iPhone, but really which one should we choose. I initially thought the choices would be limited to the main line iPhones: 14 or 15 or 16. And only when I started checking which was the oldest that would support iOS 18, I found about the "SE" line. And to my surprise I realized the 2020 iPhone SE perfectly su...

We had a number of updates coming from Boom (the maker of the Overture - the passenger supersonic jet) last week. Supposedly the news were to excite the public, but the skeptic in me got a feeling like Overture is a solution looking for a problem.  Of course I’d love to fly on Overture. At least once, to experience something new. But somehow I don’t think that cutting the end-to-end intercontinental journey time from the average of 15 hours to 10-12 hours makes a difference. An intercontinental flight (time in the air) is at most 50% of the total time, which includes commuting, checking in, boarding, taxing, deplaning, passing through border control, collecting luggage and commuting again. So flying on Overture will be more of a status symbol than real “savings”. Especially as they indicate $5000 range ticket prices, which is twice of what you pay today for a round trip lie-flat upper class experience. It also remains to be seen how they will handle luggage, as some here may still ...

A number of announcements related to satellite communications have popped up recently. United Airlines is implementing Starlink for free in-flight internet. This will replace the Viasat system which is in use today. Interestingly J.P. Morgan downgraded Viasat following the news. The key difference between the two systems is latency - Viasat is geostationary (~800ms) while Starlink is low-earth orbit (LEO), which translates to roughly 40ms. We don't know how many Starlink antennas / terminals will be installed on an aircraft, so potentially Starlink may achieve better throughput (per single antenna both systems are similar). Overall I'm not a big fan of in-flight Internet nor the entertainment systems in general. I prefer to watch the clouds through the window :) Also my go-to entertainment for flights is YouTube premium, which allows me to download videos for offline viewing. I almost never have time for watching videos, so I collect them in the "Watch Later" playlis...

There is one other interesting aspect of computers (and phones) trying to figure out the current location.  Last week I discussed what happens when an iPhone does not have the location information. This happens most likely when the phone is not connected to any network (an airplane mode) and has not managed to get a GPS fix. Then in some scenarios like tagging photos it seems to be using the last known location , which can be way off, e.g., when you're flying. The other situation occurs when the phone is connected to a mobile network which is not local. Or maybe to be more precise - to a mobile Access Point Name (APN), which routes data packets in a private tunnel which is then connected to the public internet in a completely different place. This typically happens when you use your carrier's default APN while roaming abroad. Things can be off by 1 hour (as it happened to me in China when the phone was thinking it was in Japan) or more. Interestingly applications and subsystems...

The beauty of photos taken with a phone is they are automatically geo-tagged. I love geo-tagging, as with every photo I can pull up the map location, search and organize photos by locations etc. Adding locations to DSLR photos was difficult. It typically required an awkward piece of equipment (a dedicated GPS receiver) attached. It was slow and drained batteries quickly. Then came the idea of the phone keeping a timestamped GPS log and synchronizing locations based on the camera clock (which I was often forgetting to adjust). Now with phones it is all built-in. But the issue with location stamping is the location data is not always available. It takes from a couple of seconds to couple of minutes to get a GPS "location fix". Which is the time the GPS receiver needs to collect the data from multiple satellites. Sometimes this is not possible at all. One example is flying a Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" which has electronic window shades which block the radio waves entirely...

I really like how over time I lug less gear with me . Be it on a business trip or a multi-day hike-through. Take less, do more say Gossamer Gear , one of my favorite ultralight brands. Could not agree more. Especially when the terrain is demanding and rough. But then there is the question of taking photos, and, in particular what I love, taking night photos. For that you need a good camera and a tripod. The camera part has been - to some extent - solved by the latest smartphone advancements - see what iPhones offer in the photography department . The results are not DSLR-class yet, but they are getting close. And some trips - like the New Zealand West Coast - really require the lightest gear possible. For the weight of a DSLR you can take 2 days of food (food is the challenge on remote hikes lasting 10 days). So an iPhone. Bt then you still need a tripod. In the past the FLM CP-10 carbon was my option, but that (while super steady and light) was very low, requiring to crawl and not a...

Insta360 GO 3S has been a great evolution of the original Insta360 GO 2 camera. I was a big fan of the GO 2, as it was as close as possible to almost-invisible button-sized camera. The GO 2 had some drawbacks though. Image quality was good but not great and there were limited menu navigation options, as the "base station" had only a super tiny text display. But it still proved very useful. Even during the white water kayaking trip we took just two weeks ago. The "kayaking" included some related fun like jumping off a suspension bridge to a stream. But even without the cliff jumping, white water kayaking is a kind of activity when anything can happen. So carrying a phone is not the best idea. I know iPhones are waterproof now, but there are more dangers in white waters, in particular stones. Plus you must be prepared to lose all your gear. I would also not dare to jump off a cliff with an iPhone in my hand (I did that with the Insta GO). One other problem with a smar...

I blogged about eSIMs last year. Among all the features which make my phone great, this is the one of the most used. Mobile data abroad has always been an issue due to outrageous pricing plans. So travelers seek alternatives. Of course free WiFi here and there helps but it continues to be shaky and slow. And only available in more inhabited places. But move further into the wilderness and there is no WiFi. While mobile (mostly LTE and 5G) continues to be available. And speeds are decent (LTE) to great (5G). The problem with 5G is that you can easily transmit data at a rate of many dollars per second and also quickly exhaust the "global" allowance from your home carrier. My recent experience shows you should plan for 1GB per day for moderate use (uploading photos, checking maps etc) to multiple of that if you want to upload trip videos. The solution of course was to swap SIM cards to a local prepaid plan, but that required physical shopping. Now with eSIMs the local data rate...

This post is way overdue. But it is only now that the new Bluetooth® audio technology - the LE Audio is finding its way into products. It has been 10 years in the making. Internally LE Audio is super complex as it aims to propel wireless audio for the next 20 years (or more). My personal picks (in no particular order) of the features enabled by LE Audio are:  It uses the underlying Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) transport. Which not only means longer lasting earbuds, but most importantly Bluetooth-enabled hearing aid devices. It also means better behavior at higher packet loss - (longer range and dense/interfered environments). It introduces the new LC3 audio CODEC, which offers better perceived audio quality at half the data rate (compared to the old Bluetooth SBC) AND an order of magnitude better latency (down to 20-30ms range). Think about the impact of that on teleconferencing (and gaming of course). It natively supports multiple audio streams, so joint / shared experiences are now...

The (very) traditional capitalism was strongly relying on savings as a foundation for the investment capital. The investment capital in turn was essential to keep the economy wheels spinning, as most of the industries were capital-intensive. From mining to manufacturing to distribution. The reliance of savings also was justifying the large spread in wealth, as it was the savings of the wealthy providing the investment capital. This model started breaking up roughly after the WWII and does not hold anymore. The majority of the capital needed today is the human capital. The fact there are many wealthy families in a country does not translate into the country's growth potential, if the middle class does not get broad access to proper education. And proper these days is not just high school. Honestly to be really prepared to contribute (and compete) a college or (better) a university is necessary.  The problem with human capital (which the worlds' economies have become so dependent...

I think I'll refrain from posting today, This is the 1000 post, so a great excuse to celebrate. Thanks to all my followers for your loyalty over the 20 years.  While the daily discipline helps me being consistent, all that I've been doing comes out of passion and brings a lot of joy. Therefore it is easy :) I guess I never get bored. Or at least not in the near future. This personal road combined with the "business" challenges has been so exciting. The long term nature of some things has always attracted me. And sometimes I feel like the luckiest person on Earth. So probably if I was to give a piece of advice to people, it would be: tame your expectations and be patient. At the same time do not judge things on their face value but dig to the bottom to find the truth and build confidence. The fundamentals will always prevail and win in the long run. This confidence will also let you sleep well. See you next week at post 1001 :)

Call me late, but I now have wireless CarPlay in my 2005 Subaru. It is as convenient and seamless as car-phone integration can be. It started way back in 2016 when (after driving for 9 years a civilian version of the Forester II / SG) I fell in love with the Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) STI-version of it. And during multiple upgrades I installed the Pioneer AVIC head unit equipped with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay technologies. The radio has ton of features (including its own GPS/mapping subsystems and SD-card based music library) but really the bright spot is the large capacitive touch display. And the phone interfaces of course. While the cable versions of Android Auto and CarPlay have of course been great (a single cable to connect/integrate the phone and charge it), they are not that super convenient during short city / commuting trips. I made a small upgrade by installing the magnetic cable , but it still required removing the phone from a pocket. Until I finally decided to p...

I have completed my self-assigned homework after the broken laptop experience on my last trip to Asia. Actually this exercise led to several interesting findings. First - the LattePanda Delta works great. I have it inside a passive cooling case (no fans!). The case gets quite hot during operation but it seems within the limits as the computer itself runs just fine (and totally silent!). It also gives quite decent mechanical protection (although for travel I would recommend at least a small pouch to prevent small object from falling inside). Also I had to do some creative work related to wireless antennas (the Panda leaves this problem completely unsolved - the antennas dangle around on tiny cables). I ended up buying a pair of pcb-strip antennas with IPEX/MHF-4 connectors and gluing them to the sides of the Panda Arduino connectors. It is not ideal but works. Other than that the Panda feels quite fast and responsive, even Microsoft Office 365 applications run quite well. Second - th...

Per Wikipedia : The use of fine print is a common advertising technique in certain market niches, particularly those of high-margin specialty products or services uncompetitive with those in the mainstream market. The practice, for example, can be used to mislead the consume r about an item's price or value, or the nutritional content of a food product. Identifying and recognizing the fine print has been the key strength of so called "experience" we gain over the years. Everyone was burned or disappointed multiple times in the past and over time we learn to approach with skepticism the things which are advertised. Assorted examples (some of them were surprising to me even though I consider myself experienced...): Boarding a flight: "Sir, you have been upgraded". "But sir, no food". The "cost optimized" upgrades tried by Lufthasna. Seems like they have backed off from that already (and also restarted serving coffee in the economy) after their ...

I've been quite successful completing my backup travel PC (more on that in an upcoming post). One component I needed was a travel keyboard. Ideally that keyboard could be also paired with an iPad. And it should be both comfortable and light. Connecting via Bluetooth and living forever without charging. Of course that last requirement is quite difficult to address. I mean it is easy to imagine harvesting energy - back in the 1990s Compaq even had a laptop which was recharged through keystrokes (magnets moving inside small coils generating energy). But such keyboards are loud and heavy. My initial thoughts were to check Logitech. They used to have a wide selection of wireless products. And the core value proposition from Logitech always has been seamless connectivity and very good power management. Just to put things in perspective - here is the blog post discussing how bad a good keyboard experience can be when connectivity and power management are ignored. It also explain why I r...

The use of strong magnets in consumer devices has significantly improved user experience. Apple has been the leading vendor creating this trend - with the MagSafe brand being around for many years. But interestingly it seems the Chinese vendors created something even better than Apple MagSafe - the 540 degree swivel magnetic connector. The 9-pin (and this is important!) variant is the latest (4th) generation of the original concept, which only supported +5V power over a single pin. The 9-pin variant supports 6 wired lines in a USB-C cable, namely power, data transfer (at USB 2.0 speed) , and power delivery negotiation. The cables have e-markers, so enable up to 5A of charging current (which is 100W at 20V). I've been using these cables for couple of weeks now and they are just great. Work perfectly charging my 15-inch laptop at 100W, the iPhone/iPad and just about any accessory I have. Not only providing the safety aspect of a magnetic coupling, but the 2-dimensional rotation (360 ...

I guess this is Murphy’s law: things break exactly when they are needed. So did my laptop in the middle of a 2-week Europe-China-Korea trip. Days during such trips are fully packed and it is not really feasible to visit a repair shop (even if they could help). A phone serves as a good backup these days (staying connected) and I also carry an iPad with me which helps even more as a backup device.  But the iPad, despite the hype, is still far from being annually comfortable content creation device. Writing an article or designing a slide deck is so much more efficient on a regular computer with a keyboard, a mouse with a proper cursor, and a file system.  So I’ve been thinking about potential backup solution: a small headless PC with a Bluetooth keyboard which could use the iPad as the primary display. Moving / synchronizing data is less and less of an issue these days as most of it sits in a cloud anyway  It is mostly about having a „desktop” (as opposed to „mobile”) envir...

I was mowing my garden last weekend. Riding a 22-year old Husqvarna rider. Despite the not-so-bad looks, this is not a very advanced gear. I mean the construction looks more like a DIY, albeit by a quite skillful blacksmith. Random belts, pulleys, steel cables plus an 18HP engine and a hydrostatic gearbox. The thing breaks quite often but most of the time it does not require too sophisticated work to fix. This time the blades in the moving deck stopped rotating which was signaled by a smell of burning rubber and blue smoke indicating the drive belt was about to fry. Fortunately I managed to disengage the deck in time to save the belt. And after a quick examination I found I could rotate the blades backwards but not in their normal rotating direction. Which most likely meant a broken ball bearing. Once a ball bearing breaks, the debris inside it can block it completely. It took me a while to disassemble the thing and find the bearing type. And yes the initial diagnosis was spot on - see...

After just a few weeks of excitement the Apple Vision Pro has faded away. Too pricey, too heavy, too cumbersome to work with. At the same time a number of Asian OEMs have come with a much simpler (and I believe a much better) concept. USB-C glasses. They work like a wearable display (with some extras). And displays today can be hooked up with a USB-C cable. The same cable can carry power (either way) and data (for additional accessories). So it makes the glasses conceptually dead simple. Alex Badics dives deeper into internals of these glasses on his blog here:  https://voidcomputing.hu/blog/good-bad-ugly/ and here: https://voidcomputing.hu/blog/worse-better-prettier/ . Plug them into any display-enabled USB-C port. A laptop, an iPad, a phone (including iPhones since v15 of course). And have huge private screen for yourself. On a plane or on a couch. I believe most of the designs use the electronic viewfinder (EVF) displays from digital cameras (e.g., Rokid says the displays are m...

" Comprehension does appear to be separate from thinking " has been a revelation to me - as explained by Edward Gibson (a psycholinguistics professor at MIT and the head of the MIT Language Lab). Technically there is a separate neural network in a human brain which does language processing. And it has nothing to do with thinking. That makes a lot of sense and explains why the net output from all the AI progress has largely been negative .  AI Large Language Models (LLMs) work by finding statistical patterns in text. Most importantly - without connecting words to meaning. This becomes especially visible when LLMs often fabricate facts and figures, misunderstand questions, and exhibit biases found in its training data. But because LLMs have mastered language and thus sound very eloquent, we are tricked into thinking they are intelligent. This does not mean of course that transformer models - the underlying technology for LLMs is useless. Of course not. But the broadest progress...

35 years down the broad spread personal computing and messaging and clipboard cut/paste has been used increasingly more. The phone apps bubble with their notifications and we shuffle between them moving pieces of information manually from one app to another. It is increasingly difficult to keep track of all the messages on multiple accounts and systems - email, short messages, WhatsApp, Slack, Confluence, Jira, LinkedIn messages, Twitter DMs and so on. Very often the same information is sent using multiple channels. E.g., when boarding a flight I'm getting an SMS, and email and an in-app notification. To be honest an universal messaging client is my biggest hope for the AI. I don't want a self driving car. I want a simple (single!) phone app which would collect, aggregate, and manage the incoming streams of messages, drop spam, unsubscribe subscriptions I never subscribed to, categorize what is urgent and requires attention and what can be handled later and so on. Otherwise we ...

Everything is digital and therefore software-driven today. And that software is getting super complex, with tons of layers and dependencies. This complexity, statistically, leads to many failures which in the end are unavoidable. No matter how thorough the testing is, it is impossible to cover and catch every possible scenario. Even simple stuff like alarm clocks sometimes fail to go off. Something unthinkable in the old days of mechanical alarm clocks. And there are times when a working alarm clock is critical. Such that when you have an intercontinental flight to catch early in the morning. Just recently Apple has confirmed the iPhone alarms may not go off due to a software bug. That is why even being a digital gadget geek, I have a rule to set up an analog alarm clock just in that case - an early morning flight. To regular people this is something close to unthinkable - the most premium mobile phone, with millions of users and billions of R&D and QA budgets behind - can still ...

Economy (as indicated by the GDP) goes hand in hand with energy consumption. The better developed economies consume more and the less developed - well - consume less. And this ratio has been pretty stable over many years, with countries like the United States increasing the GDP and decreasing the energy use slightly. Now with cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, this is probably falling a lot. Both technologies - crypto and AI consume outrageous amounts of energy and contribute very little (if anything) to the GDP. It seems the most progress in AI is in generating noise and misinformation. The Register has reported recently that As The Register opined in 2022 and reported in January this year, search quality has declined because search engines index low-quality AI-generated content and present it in search results. This remains an ongoing area of concern. And this is (unfortunately) in line with my own expectations and experience . I wonder if we are...

Tesla had a dismal quarter and looking forward things look equally bad. Essentially the competition has caught up (or even overtaken) the aging S/3/X/Y product portfolio. On top of that the market is not rushing to buy electric vehicles (EVs) in millions. It almost looks like whoever wanted an EV, they already have it. The rest are just fine with so much more practical internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. To rescue the company capitalization Elon threw a bunch of new ideas during the quarterly conference calls. But none of them are really convincing. To be honest they all sound like fairy tales. But the stock went up significantly. As The Register says - you have learned nothing . So on the Full Self Driving (FSD) front we now have the robotaxi (relabelled as Cybercab). And it is coming on August 8th. It will be all smoke and mirrors. Sure the car will be displayed but it will be no different from the Optimus robot played by Elon's girlfriend dressed up as the robot. The shift fr...