Headworx

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...