Headworx

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...