Headworx

I have very mixed feelings about the importance of good user experience (UX) in technology products. Very often ironizing on UX gurus' posts who think UX is super fundamental. Scott Jenson for example have cried rivers over control panels in microwave ovens. True, some of them are quite baroque, and myself - when it comes to microwave ovens - I do prefer just two mechanical dials: power and time. Same for air fryers: temperature and time. But really it does not take a super high IQ to use a microwave oven. A bit higher one is probably necessary to set up an alarm clock in a hotel: 99% of time they show wrong time and then it is unclear which time is the current time and which is the alarm time and if the alarm is on or off. Long gone are the times of travel clocks with the alarm hand and the pop-up "armed" button : nobody needed instructions to operate them. Nowadays even the iOS 26 alarm clock is misleading - if you have an alarm entry that is off and you click it and th...

Apple AirTags are really a great idea. They build on the popularity of iPhones. Periodically broadcasting tiny Bluetooth Low Energy beacons they last for a year or more on a coin cell. And any iPhone acts as a message relaying / geotagging repeater station. Physically being tiny buttons, they can be attached to almost anything - car keys, luggage, any item than can potentially be lost. What is even more exciting (but still not as ubiquitous as it could be), a Find My beacon is a very simple piece of software running on any Bluetooth chip. It can run together with other functions. One great example is the Insta360 GO 3S action camera. The one I actually lost on my way down from Mt Aorai . It was raining on the way down and the clay path quickly became quite slippery. I slid down on my butt a good couple of times (it has some quite steep sections). Upon reaching the shelter at 1400m I realized the zipper in my backpack's pocket was open and the contents (including the GO3S) was miss...

There is a very insightful podcast episode - the interview of Andrej Karpathy by Dwarkesh Patel . At 00:53:39 they mention for about 1 second the 2021 paper by Erik Hoel:  The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization . It is all just a hypothesis, but I must say I've fallen in love with this hypothesis. Not much proof exists yet, but Hoel is really on to something. Dreams are all undiscovered yet. Impossible to get into. Brain activity scans of course can do nothing, as it is like trying to figure out the logic of the software by scanning activity of the microprocessor transistors. Impossible. But surprisingly the recent advancements in AI may get us to better understand how brain works as we try to rebuild an intelligent system in silicon deep neural networks (DNNs). Erik puts forward the overfitted brain hypothesis (OBH): Notably, one of the most ubiquitous challenges DNNs face is a trade-off between generalization and memorization, wherein as they learn to ...

Very simple trick today, which you may actually find useful. I learned it a good while ago and admittedly have been using quite often. The default means of sharing things on a phone is taking a screenshot and reposting it. This is ugly as carries a lot of overhead and makes it (more) difficult to extract the actual information such as copy a portion of text. But is easy (press two buttons) and preserves the view / formatting. Selecting text on the other hand is still the most ugly part of touch screen UX. Wonder if we will have it ever solved. Anyway, back to the main thread. Sometimes someone asks you to send a well formatted document resulting from a web page (such as ecommerce order) or an email confirmation. Yes you can screenshot. But if the source document is longer than the screen, things become tricky. There are a number of screenshot applications (especially on Android) supporting long screenshots (a single screenshot consisting of multiple pages), but we are talking about pla...

Life has presented me with a unique opportunity to visit some remote islands on Southern Pacific. As I’m based in Europe, Southern Pacific is probably as far as I could go. New Zealand is probably the farthest, but not the most difficult to get to - usually within the range of two long haul flights. Having just finished US East Coast business activities - the very successful NYcontrolled show followed by the DALI America Summit  and a workshop with an important partner in NJ, I faced the dilemma of what to do over the next week ahead of yet another show - this time in Hong Kong . Of course I could simply get back to Poland and fly to China next weekend. Or hang around in the USA. Or… Or take a week long holidays on a multi-hop trip over the Pacific Ocean.  With the internet at hand planning such a trip these days is peanuts. The itaSofware Matrix is your friend. Ultimately I opted to stay a couple of days in Tahiti (French Polynesia) and the second half of the week in Fiji. ...

I discussed the issue of latency many times here on this blog. Typically understood as the delay of a reaction on human input . This has been the issue (and one of the key performance metrics) in computer gaming. There is a human interface device (HID) controller such as a joystick, it processes the physical inputs, transmits them to the computer or a gaming console that does it's own processing and renders the output scene which is then pushed as a stream of digital signals to a display. The display (monitor) also has its own lag - a parameter that differentiates gaming displays from (cheaper) office displays. (The reduction of) the lag is also what is driving mobile devices such as phones and tablets to support higher screen refresh rates. Also what from the very beginning was the iPhone differentiator was the smoothness of the reaction, something that Android was struggling with for several years. Google even had its special focus "Project Butter" - the effort in Andro...

I have joined the air fryer crowd. Made my finger wet with one of the cheapest options available, several months ago. And have not used the oven nor the microwave ever since. I love the concept and the simplicity that also makes these appliances so inexpensive: a heating element and a fan - that's it. The food is delicious and super simple to make. But of course I would not be myself if I didn't look for something special on the crowded air fryer market. So here it is: the Ninja Crispi . Clearly with Crispi, Ninja have addressed all needs and pain points of air fryers. There really are no big pain points with the traditional designs, but Ninja still made it significantly better. And definitely the better part comes from detailed observations and usage insights captured - the work of a product manager. Instead of adding more buttons and more electronic displays, to advertise more features, they actually reduced the functionality: 4 temperatures an a timer. But instead they addre...

CLEAR ( https://www.clearme.com/ ) is a commercial service promising accelerated way through airport security. Its existence is questionable, as airport security is done by a government agency, so why would a commercial entity charge extra money for getting people in front of the government queue? Well, after all we have the best democracy money can buy. But of course CLEAR is not the only one, as "status" travelers also have their Fast Track systems. CLEAR is like a subscription-based "faster than fast track" track. A while back it was available only to US Passport holders, so despite United airlines giving me CLEAR membership for free, I could not make use of it. It let me create an account but then I got stuck in the process. And I forgot about it. Until recently I saw a $129 charge on my credit card for yearly membership. United clearly withdrew their offer of "zero cost CLEAR membership", and I had my account (despite not being able to use it), so the...

Out of curiosity I compared the highlights and features of iPhone 17 with the Pro 15 (the one I use). They are (almost) identical. The only difference is the telephoto lens - offering 4x magnification (vs 3x in the 15 Pro) and 48 megapixels (vs 12 in the Pro 15). The higher resolution allows for a quite effective crop, which results in the 8x option advertised by Apple. I primarily bought the iPhone for the photography features . And they are great. The long exposure low light is something not achievable by real cameras. I mean, considering the pocketable nature of the phone and the fact it can shoot steady 3s exposures handheld, 10s with a simple support (say, resting your hand on a tree while holding the phone), and 30s when really steady (a simple lightweight tripod is fine for that). There is a great sensor fusion at work plus it stacks multiple exposures into one, with the result being fairly low noise ultra low light photo. The unfortunate thing is, that despite all the advances...

Dedicated management of email subscriptions looks like a great enhancement to GMail. Email these days has become increasingly less used medium for human to human communications. Humans primarily use instant messaging apps today. WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger. Or simply "text" each other. Email has become a formal notifications channel for variety of services: "here is your invoice", "your flight reservation information is...", and so on. Most of those services take advantage of knowing your email address and automatically enroll you to "updates" that are typically a plain marking spam. Making email more cluttered and less valuable / less usable. Google has been trying to keep email alive by helping fight the spam and clutter. "Manage subscriptions" is really helpful. It is available on the mobile interface through the "hamburger" (the three horizontal bars) button in the top left corner. It is also available on the PC/w...

The biggest return on AI/LLM tools seems to be spam generation and so called conversion. Bumping people's inboxes with machine-generated content costs nothing and provides small positive returns - someone clicks the link or responds to the marketing message. Zero cost and positive (no matter how small) revenue means one  thing: repeat at scale. So we are flooded with spam.  Automated filters have been losing the battle. That, combined with the simple lack of discipline to clean the inbox on regular basis, often leads to the complete loss of communication capabilities. I am an Inbox-Zero type. Never allowing my inbox to be longer than one page and often keeping the number of unprocessed messages below 5 and zero unread. But that pattern is quite rare today, at least judging by what I often see looking over people's shoulders. One idea that might actually improve the situation is an <Ignore> button. Today we have <Delete> or <Move to Trash> but they really don...

The IES Annual conference has always been the temple of light. Stunning designs, beautifully illuminated spaces, and the role of light in human wellbeing. In 2025 this has changed. The Gala and the Awards were still about illumination, but the technical sessions started to boldly drift away, to discuss - surprise, surprise - heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. All with connection to light of course. Or - to be precise - to occupancy sensors brought to buildings en masse thanks to lighting. HVAC is shaping up to be the first significant beyond-lighting application. Forget wayfinding beacons. Forget asset tracking. Forget space utilization heatmaps. It is still all about energy savings. The lighting folks realized the HVAC crowd was unable to pull it on their own. So have come to offer the helping hand: the Lighting-HVAC Integration. As I cried almost 10 years ago - for the connected products to get really connected, we need cross-domain industry experts. And this has been happ...

I've been using iTunes for 25 years. It is a terribly bad piece of software, but one of only a few options to manage a local library of music files with somewhat universal interoperability. In particular the playlists created on an iPod transfer to other Apple (and Windows) computers as well as are recognized by independent local media management and streaming systems like the Sqeezebox Logitech Lyrion . Over the years iTunes has undergone some minor changes (the latest one is nearly as bad as the original), and some of them have somehow (in my case) resulted in the music database becoming corrupted. Long story short, the only way out was to restore the backed-up mp3 files and let iTunes rescan the entire library. The playlists were unfortunately lost this way, as neither the mp3s nor the file folder structure have any information about the playlist metadata. iTunes itself have since moved the root library folder from iTunes Music to iTunes Media (and also some other changes), so...

The post on  Bluetooth NLC vs DALI+: Capacity and Performance has generated very valuable feedback. I promised to shed some more light on my network capacity calculations, so here they are. The key assumptions are: - The Thread network operates at 2.4GHz using IEEE 802.15.4 data links at 250kbps; - Transmitting nodes use Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) method to manage the shared communication channel; - Each unicast transmission is acknowledged - There are two hops (say: sensor → router and router → lighting controller) - The minimum data frame at PHY is 50 octets (+6: preamble + SFD), so ~1.8ms - The ACK frame (including the SIFS time) is ~0.5ms - The average CSMA/CA overhead is ~1.4ms That gives us 3.7ms per hop total. So with two hops we have the channel occupancy of 7.5ms. At full 100% channel occupancy that would give us capacity of 135 end-to-end messages per second (one way). But... 100% would simply kill the network. Thread is very fr...

Whenever I come across a discussion that involves wireless communications over the Thread protocol (such as this one ), there is almost 100% chance people don't understand the underlying physics and traffic patterns. This is the result of Thread marketing since 2014, highlighting the IPv6 protocol as its key strength. And typically it goes like that: "Thread is based on IPv6 and there are more IPv6 addresses that grains of sand in the Universe". And people read this "because Thread is based on IPv6, it is a highly scalable wireless protocol". Treating the potential number of static addresses equally to the dynamic situation when these devices actually send data. If we consider the networked lighting control domain, the most prevalent pattern today is to have a motion sensor in every luminaire. The motion sensor usually has multiple functions: it is a motion sensor of course. But it also is a light level sensor enabling daylight harvesting (or dimming lights down...

Once considered the greatest thing since sliced bread, notifications have spun of of control. Meant to be the (most) important stuff, have been sliding into complete irrelevance. And have become totally distracting and annoying. The operating systems (including the flagship Android and iOS), even with their recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) features have failed to cope with the notifications' torrents. Out of box, every app wants to send notifications about everything - this is of course the fight for potential revenue through engagement and conversion. Yes this can be managed. But only theoretically, as users really drown in the ocean of options they do not understand. On top of the notifications' options there is the hierarchy - you have favorite contacts (meant to always go through), you have time - or activity - based profiles (iOS calls them focuses). Barely anyone understands the combinations. Then there are the super annoying users of (increasingly more popular) instan...

I really liked the Lex Fridman's recent interview with David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) - the 37signals / Ruby on Rails guy. Many topics, but the small teams theme has really resonated with me. I was a solo programmer for about 20 years, starting with Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1983 and going through several jobs including the company I cocreated in 1992, which grew up to around 300 people ten years later. This solo experience has spoiled me. I was the product manager, the ux designer, the architect and the coder. And that was extremely efficient. Of course the solo approach has limits to the scalability, as there are only 2 hands and 24 hours in a day, no matter how much money you throw in. So at some point I had to give up and cede the tasks to the team. And that was so immensely frustrating. Despite the team being many developers (I still tried to keep the architect role), things started going super slow. I was spending countless hours teaching, explaining, then explaining again ...

Utilities move slowly. But ultimately they do. Half a year ago I installed the Home Assistant multi-channel energy meter which has  clearly shown the energy usage patterns. I had known before my addiction to hot bath every day cost me dearly. And it was really the lowest hanging fruit. Water boiler is the most efficient and available energy storage . After seeing the usage patterns, I was planning to switch to variable energy pricing plan. But filling the related paperwork was tedious enough to procrastinate. Until the utility offered the helping hand: switch to energy pricing with just a single "yes" click on their web site. No paperwork, no nothing.  A couple of days later the confirmation of the switch arrived. Plus I have online access to the formal energy meter readings. No Home Assistant integration yet, but the patterns and values match with what I have, which is reassuring. I need to get used to this a bit (although the main patterns have already been preprogrammed)....

This one is quite interesting and I am yet to collect the hard evidence on what really happens. Long story short: Home Assistant can, behind the scenes, drain battery in a smart watch. It all leads back many months ago when I started seeing my Garmin fēnix  watch dead every morning. I mean ALMOST every morning. Normally it can run for 1-2 weeks on a charge and suddenly every morning it was dead, despite being fully charged on the day before. I tried different things - software/firmware update of course, changing some parameters (but it had been working fine before) - no lasting improvement. Until this June (after having extensive travel period - US West Coast, twice to China and then Europe), when I realized that it did not lose the battery when I was away from home. I started thinking on what was so special at home that the watch, left for the night on my bedside table, was losing the charge completely. There was one idea that came to mind: Home Assistant. And to be precise: ...

It has been almost 6 full months since (after long procrastination) I finally completed the home energy monitoring project . In short: Home Assistant + Circuit Setup energy meter based on ESPHome. Long story short: all has been working flawlessly. There have been multiple routine firmware updates (they are released ~monthly). To be honest I have not paid (almost) any attention to them. Luckily nothing got broken, but equally Home Assistant could be releasing one update per year. This is a side observation, but generally people are fed up with software updates. Even if they go flawlessly, there is always the risk of something getting broken. I've been hearing the same from our customers: you release too frequently (we used to every 6 months, but now there is the pressure to release at most once a year). Ove the 6 months I have learned quite a lot about my usage patterns. Daily hot bath is an energy hog, but I can easily run the boiler when the energy is least expensive (=middle of ...

High speed trains in China are phenomenal. I could sit by the window for hours watching the passing landscape. They do not run on ground. They either soar high on concrete bridges and piers or pierce through tunnels. It is thousands of kilometers of piers and tunnels. And the landscape mostly flips from agricultural fields to endless seas of industrial buildings - factories. It is totally unlike anywhere else. When the train enters an industrial zone, there are thousands and thousands factories. It probably takes such a train ride to understand the hypothetical effort of moving manufacturing to the West. The factories form a unique and super efficient industrial supply chain. It is not about the iPhone. While a flagship symbol of Western dominance, we could do without iPhones. But probably we could not do without lights, linen, pots, just about every daily used item is made in China. And then there are basic components to make them: wires, bolts, glue, paint. And then the raw materials...

In this last part (so far) of the Getting Around in China mini-series I'd like to share tips on personal mapping and navigation software. Actually this is a one big tip. The Gauda / Amap mobile application. In different markets (app stores) it goes by different names, so search the app store for either Gauda or Amap. This is the go-to replacement for Google Maps or Apple Maps. While both Google and Apple work to some extent in China, their functionality is severely limited. They will not find you any public transport options and even basic driving / walking functions are limited. Also in several interesting areas Amap offers very interesting options not available in any app in the Western hemisphere. Driving in underground garages. I still need to explore the technical side of this, but the long story short is Amap can navigate in underground garage structures. Clearly no satellite reception there, so I suspect Bluetooth beacons may be at play. Nevertheless you will appreciate the ...

The terrifying crash of the Air India flight 171 in Ahmedabad has ignited a number of theories on the cause of the accident. The plane took off and went down immediately as it appeared to lose thrust in both engines. Today's aircraft are considered very safe. The key for the safety record is redundancy of all critical systems. Everything is doubled or tripled or quadrupled. From the probability theory perspective, multiplying the critical components vastly reduces the chance of a total failure, as the individual equipment unit failures are considered to be independent. That is mostly true for legacy / mechanical components. An engine blade failure in one engine does not cause the other engine to fail. Or a chance of two blades (one in each engine) failing at the same time is practically zero. But it turns out when software is involved, equipment failures can be fully synchronous. Which I believe is what happened in this accident. In the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the fuel pumps are el...

In this third episode of the China: Getting Around mini series I'm going to share tips about long(er) distance travel in China. So far we have already covered passports, eSIM data in part 1 and translation apps, mobile payments, WeChat and DiDi in part 2 . Airlines. There is not much special about how airlines work in China. Buy tickets online, show up for check-in etc. There are some differences related to items allowed in a carry-on bag. For example foldable walking poles are not allowed. So are not multi-tools designed as so called "TSA-safe" (from my experience, they are not in Mexico either). As they say "a tool is a tool and tools are not allowed". Period. Cigarette lighters are prohibited too, and there is an interesting solution - you drop the lighter before security in a box and that box then goes to the security exit door where disembarking passengers can grab lighters.  Trains. High speed trains are what China is really famous for. The network is inc...

You have the passport and a phone with the internet on it. What is next? Translate. Unless you speak Mandarin, a language translator app in the next on the list. Language has been a barrier, but translator apps break through that barrier. Use the one you like. I use Google translate. It is prudent to download the languages for offline use. Once done you can either type or dictate (or have someone else dictate) or use camera for instant translation of signage or restaurant menus. The apps are not perfect (yet), but they do a really good job. On one of the past trips, for example, we were able to negotiate a set of medicines in a pharmacy. The pharmacist was asking many questions in Chinese, us answering in English, and ultimately the medicine worked very well. Payments. As I mentioned, China has its own preferred payment systems. Credit cards would not work in most cases. Maybe in higher end hotels. But the default means of payment is by presenting or scanning a QR code. The app I use m...

I never thought I would become an expert on China and I'm still far from being one. But our business relationships with Chinese partners have been growing strongly and that is reflected in much more frequent China trips. So here is the mini series of blogs with some tips which you may find helpful. China is not straightforward for Western visitors. It is just different and small things matter when preparing for a trip. Or just knowing what to expect. May marks my second trip to China in 2025 an I plan to be here back in June. What is different is I'm the first time on my own, which I find both exciting and liberating. Being able to do things on my own has always been important, be it soldering a PCB or writing a piece of assembly code or trekking in the mountains of Georgia or Kirgizstan. Organized trips and telling people to do things for you or carry your bags is simply not my style. So you are going to China - where to start? Passport. Obviously the number one step is making...

SILVAIR published the Q1-2025 report on May 15th. Bound by the corporate governance rules I could not share our progress earlier, but now the cat is out of the bag. We had a stellar quarter. Q4-2024 was record and always in such cases the worry is if the trend would continue. It has continued. Even stronger. Despite the US trade wars introducing uncertainty in the markets. Fundamentally I think there are couple of jointly contributing factors to our overall progress: Brand recognition. Despite very low marketing budget, we continue to be increasingly more recognized. And this is both Bluetooth NLC as the only truly interoperable wireless lighting control standard, and Silvair as the leading product based on this standard. Both brands are associated with performance, quality, robustness and ease of use. A perfect combination of features. The product feature set is increasingly more complete, particularly addressing the needs of customers in the enterprise segment. Network scalability ha...