Headworx

My recent effort to cut down noise that manifests as a continuous avalanche of notifications on a phone has been quite successful. The phone is mostly silent, the watch does not vibrate and the earbuds do not interrupt audiobooks to play announcements. I only get a handful of "beeps" per day and they only come from a couple of selected contacts and apps I really do care about. Apps generally abuse the notifications mechanisms in a big way. Rendering the notifications' mechanism practically useless. So I went through all of them, disabling notifications and also making sure they use location services only when an app is active / in the foreground. What was not immediately obvious to me, was that the functionality of an app to stay connected over Bluetooth to an accessory (such as a watch) depends on the "location" permission to be "always". It does not explicitly say "Bluetooth", but iOS ties Bluetooth access with "location". My par...

Find My is one of very useful features of the Apple ecosystem. The way it works is devices broadcast Bluetooth beacons that can be picked up by other devices that forward these beacons to the Apple cloud, after attaching location tags to the beacons. Thus, assuming there are random iOS devices close to your items, you can track the items globally. A similar system is available in the Android ecosystem - the Find Hub. Just recently Google has upgraded the feature, allowing phones that are powered off, to be found. iPhones have had this since iPhone 11 (the U1 chip). The idea is simple - continue broadcasting Bluetooth beacons even in the off mode. Bluetooth broadcast use almost no power, so this broadcasting could be almost indefinite. Maybe not literally indefinite, but at least couple of months. The Insta360 Go3s camera I lost when descending from Mt Aorai in October 2025 , has come to life just recently (it has been 5 months now). It disappears for a couple of days and then reappears...

USB Type-C (usually referred to as USB-C) chargers support a fairly sophisticated protocol for selecting charging voltage and current. What is important, when nothing is connected to a USB-C port, no power is provided. The device that wants to be charged must tell the charger what it wants. Otherwise no charging takes place. This is designed so for may reasons, but the simplest explanation is: a connected device may not want to be charged at all: imagine using a USB-C cable to connect one charger to another charger. If there was any voltage present by default, the result could be catastrophic. The simplest way to tell the charger to offer the default 5V (as in USB-A legacy chargers) is to use the so-called Dead Battery mode. This is described in Section 4.8.5 of the Type-C specification. The device that wants to be charged (known as the Sink) must apply 5.1kΩ resistors to both CC1 and CC2 lines (pins). The term Dead Battery (from the Type-C specification perspective) describes a device...

I have a truly love-and-hate relationship with my Garmin watch. I love it for the looks. And for keeping record of my daily trail runs. And for holding backup topographic maps of (almost) the entire planet. And for being the flight computer on long distance flights. Actually the last part is also a contributor to the hate part. As it keeps the location track in flight through combined satellite readings, it also updates its time to the GPS time. And a time zone with it - meaning it always shows accurate time for the current location. Which is useless when you are just a passenger. You wake up in the night, look at the watch - it shows time, but at a glance you just don't have an idea in which time zone you are in. Yes, there is always 1pm somewhere on Earth. But generally when flying, the best way is to have either the departure time zone or the arrival time zone, not something in between. A phone use to be then a much more convenient time source - just showing the departure time z...