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...

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...