Headworx

I have just returned from a trip to China. It's been a blast. And quite an experience too. I was to China several times before, but the trips were always fully organized by business partners and we always had a Chinese host with us. This time it was slightly different, as me and my friend, we did some parts of travel on our own. Nothing really unusual, but without any knowledge of Chinese, things can sometimes be difficult. Such as discussing something with a taxi driver. Or buying medicines at a pharmacy.  One very useful tip I took from some travelers' forum was to note down the Chinese addresses of hotels, to be able to show them to taxi drivers. This was really helpful and worked. But some other times we felt really hopeless when a person was trying to tell us something and the language barrier was just impossible to cross. And then we used language translation apps.  In my case it was Google Translate, with the relevant dictionaries loaded for offline use. Google is gener...

Some people are dinosaurs. Or at least behave like them. It is 2025 and promoting a wired lighting control system feels like you are from a deep past. Makes me wonder how you can still be alive at all? Bluetooth mesh has been around since 2017 - 8 years and counting. Millions of devices shipped, tens of thousands of commercial buildings deployed, happy customers and users, zero issues. And you still pitch cables? Arguing one cable system is better than another cable system because it uses less miles of cables drilled in the walls and laid in the plenum? That is definitely the feeling I had listening to otherwise great Lighting Controls podcast  episode 83 on DALI . And don't get me wrong - I LOVE DALI (it stands for Digital Addressable Lighting Interface). Actually I have been very actively participating in development of DALI, particularly working on the DALI-341 specification which links DALI and Bluetooth NLC based on the industry - approved architecture . For the uninitiated: D...

I've been "using" Apple Intelligence for a couple of weeks now, thanks to the iOS update on the iPhone 15 Pro. Actually "using" is an exaggeration. It simply started showing up AI-abbreviated notifications. Notifications that turned out to be completely useless. Phone notifications have clearly got out of control. Every app wants to send them. They beep and flash and bubble on everything, including phones, desktops and watches. And are super tedious to manage. I remember Android handling them a bit better than iOS, but still far from perfect. It seems to be a good idea to task an AI LLM model to "do something" about the notifications. Figure out the context, figure out the incoming stream of notifications and aggregate / postpone / mute - whatever is needed to make them usable. But clearly the bar is too high for the current state of the art AI systems. This simple cases demonstrates how far from reality the AI hype is. Afterall handling notifications...

Measured by the raw number of steps, my 2024 was definitely below expectations. The February decline was due to the New Zealand trip where the terrain (mostly West Coast) was making it difficult to cover more than 10 kilometers per day (as typically parts of that were hanging with hands on tree branches or crawling below fallen tree logs or crossing rivers). Not complaining, just explaining :) Then out of nowhere I had a knee injury that kept me sitting on a sofa for a couple of weeks. Things started looking good in Autumn, but then I foolishly twisted my left ankle and as it almost healed, I repeated something similar to the right foot. I'm almost ready to restart now, but the result (raw steps) is 1000km less than in 2023. When healthy you rarely think how lucky you are. Only when things go wrong the other perspective opens and you suddenly start appreciating being able to just walk :) Also shows how almost impossible it is to maintain an uninterrupted streak. Still, since start...