Headworx

I've had a chance to test Starlink (the "mini" variant) over the last week during the trip to Cabo Verde - a remote archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This was originally planned as a remote work week (no, AI does not make us less busy). And for that, Internet connectivity is fundamental. Before the trip we checked various internet forums for the quality of WiFi (and cellular) services there, and the opinions were very mixed. The first location we stayed at (close to Porto Novo) actually had upgraded to their own Starlink, and in our hut there was even the Starlink Mini Router Node installed. In the other location (the Paul valley) there was LTE coverage (not very fast), and the house had WiFi at around 4Mb down / 0.5Mb up - fine for basic browsing but not for video conferencing. I ordered the Starlink Mini dish via the Starlink.com site before the trip. It comes with a 30-day return policy. Probably I will keep it though, as generally it worked and it may j...

Finally. Digital cryptography has been applied to a civil satellite positioning system. Satellite positioning is one of the technologies that deeply influence our daily lives. Thousands of services rely on the fact that a mobile phone can instantly figure out where on Earth it is. Mobile maps are the first obvious example.  But there are other less obvious. Time stamping voltage and current samples in power distribution grids to synchronize them. Arbitrage of high frequency trading on stock exchanges. Maintaining microsecond time slots in 5G networks. Weather forecasting. Seismic monitoring. Tracking and recovery of items that broadcast Bluetooth signals. Photo tagging. Drones. City rentals of electric scooters and bikes. And many more... Then of course we have aircraft navigation, ship navigation, and many high value services. Disruption of satellite signals has been an easy target. There are several methods to do this. Brute-force jamming is the most straightforward. But there ar...

The shoemaker's children go barefoot. And so they do in the AI era. I plan to spend a week on Cabo Verde, most of the days working remotely from there. Quick survey of internet forums and cellular coverage maps hint at poor internet access there, so it seemed like a good excuse to try Starlink. Especially as the prices have fallen and the Starlink Mini Kit sells now for under $200. And then you can suspend the subscription at any time (so they say). There is also the 30-day free return period in case I don't like it. So I tried to more or less precisely time ordering the kit, so it arrives about a week before my trip.  The Starlink website was saying that I needed 1 to 2 weeks for the kit to be delivered. So I pulled the trigger on September 15. Then they sent me an email with the "updated" delivery estimate, which was between September 28 and October 6. So rather 2-3 weeks, not 1-2. Which would be a bummer as we leave for Cabo Verde on October 3. But there was nothin...

I used to use the iPad a lot in the past. But over the last year I've found myself using it less often. I think there have been three reasons for this decline and I have been able to get rid of at least two of them. Reason number one (and this one is still there) is the small "phone" form-factor apps have been getting increasingly better. Getting things done with just a phone is not only possible today but often it is the most effective way. App UX designers target the largest audience and these are phone users. I even find it quite convenient to watch (offline) YouTube videos on the phone ( the battery drain bug is still there - so be careful! ). Not movies but blog-type videos, where the audio track is really where the content is. Reason number two was the battery in my iPad was discharging quickly. It is a 3rd party battery. Apple does not replace the battery, replacing the whole device instead. I did not want to go through the iPad erase/restore process ( it is tediou...

The Karlsson Nixie clock (by Peter van der Jagt 1997) is very stylish. One of the first of the kind and definitely setting the trend. Unfortunately it does not hold the time after a power outage. For quite some time I was thinking of adding a time synchronization module. Initially the idea was to use the long wave radio receiving the DCF77 signal. DCF77 is increasingly more problematic as the 77kHz frequency is impacted by the totality of high frequency digital power supplies that generate lots of radio noise. The alternative is of course fully digital, relying on an Internet time source, based on the NTP protocol. Surprisingly (or not) the NTP-based module has proven to be super easy to build these days (...with the help of AI). Actually I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: have the bloody clock display the right time and also test Claude's capabilities as a junior embedded software / electronics coworker. Both goals have been achieved. I found it entertaining, educating, ...

My knee has been getting better and I was told that bicycle would be a much better recovery exercise than trail running. That is kind of obvious - less stress and better joint stabilization. September has also proven to be a great time for a bit of off-road / gravel biking. Not too hot and very nice scenery, especially in mornings or at sunset.  Sunset rides also mean returning after dark. Which means the bike needed a good light. That was planned from the very beginning, especially with some longer off-the-grid trips I had in mind.  When I was a kid, most bikes had attached dynamos, friction- powered by a rotating tire. That system was problematic - the friction was significant and did not work when the tire was wet. Also the additional tire wear was not negligible.  But now we have dynamo hubs. I chose the German SON , as it bears some convincing German engineering - like moisture protection. The hub also removes all issues of the old design: works always (even when wet...

We have clearly got carried away with AI. I'm hearing singularity, AGI, fully automated economy... Yet the truth is the basic IT services and apps just suck. They are often pretty and that seems to be sufficient for most complacent users, yet the quality of their output is really, really bad. A year ago I was complaining about the Flighty app . Pretty but totally inaccurate. Google Calendar is not that much better - it fails on some most critical tasks. Like managing date / time on trans - Pacific flights. These flights are tricky because they cross the date line: going west you lose a day, going east you gain a day. My typical east-bound itineraries are via Los Angeles or San Francisco, where I have other connecting flights. These flights are always part of the same booking and they usually include a 1-3 hours layover. Looking at the departing times of the connecting flights, they often depart on the same day as the long haul Asia -> America flight, but nominally at an earlier ...

I lost my passport when changing planes in San Francisco. Arrived from Seoul, Korea, on the way to Denver, Colorado. Deplaning was fast and immigration even faster. The bag was already on the carousel. I headed to the United bag re-check area, then visited a bathroom and cleared the US security screening with ample time to reach my connecting flight.  Re-checking my belongings after the security I realized the passport was missing. And immediately I remembered I had it in my hand when exiting the customs and put it on a shelf in the bathroom at the bag re-check area. I would have realized earlier as security checkpoint requires passports, but I had Clear+ , so breezed through the checks without any documents. I made an attempt to get back to where I left it, but it just did not work. San Francisco airport undergoes heavy modernization and terminal patterns are not what they used to be. Suffice to say the United flight from Seoul arrived at gates B, which is T2 (the Delta terminal)....

Last week I had an overnight layover at the San Francisco airport. Landed in the afternoon and then took the hotel shuttle bus to the nearby hotel. It turned out the bus could not enter the hotel parking area: the automatic barriers were lowered and a number of cars before us was already lined up. We ended up disembarking the bus on the street and walking up to the hotel. The front door did not open. "We have a power outage" - a staff member explained - please use the side door. I did. Then the check-in was by means of writing my name and CC number on a piece of paper and walking up the stairs to the 3rd floor. I still could open my room with the keycard (battery-operated?) but inside it was dead silent - no usual ventilation hum. There was no WiFi either.  They fixed the power in the evening, but many systems still did not work. Elevators required a service company next day to get started. WiFi was on but the captive portal did not work until next morning. This whole situati...

Last week, with 184 visa-free countries, Polish passport has moved up to #5 rank globally. Interestingly there are 3 other post-communist European eastern block countries at #5. Actually positions 3-8 are all occupied by European countries. #1 is Singapore an #2 Japan and Korea. This is just one illustration of the transformation the former Soviet-block countries have gone through. But also Europe as such, despite much criticism about bureaucracy, poor state-driven economy, lack of entrepreneurial spirit and general over-regulation, to quote Fareed Zakaria, Europe has done something very extraordinary, even as it has declined in terms of raw power. Europe has shown that past a certain level of economic wealth, what matters is not just sheer economic wealth. What matters is quality of life, what matters is certain level of equality, and things like that Europeans have. For most of history, general quality of life was closely correlated with wealth. The richer you were, the better. A...

July was not travel-heavy. A week in Trondheim, Norway (a great place to be in Summer) and then the rest of the month at home / Krakow. Ah if you don't count a weekend trip to Spa, Belgium for the F1 GP race. But it was busy preparing for the intense 2nd half of the year. It starts just now, with the Korea Build in Seoul this week followed by the IES26 in Denver, CO, so another RTW trip. And three presentations to deliver over the next two weeks - the keynote in Seoul, the Bluetooth NLC roadmap in Denver and a joint webinar with US DoE / PNNL / IES on lighting systems integrations. Three different venues and events, three different topics, so plenty of preparatory work on my end. Add to that the Embedded World America (that is in September) and my days were busy compiling PowerPoint slides. I like doing that, but always the tedious part were illustrations. Text-only slides are boring. Visuals help. But when doing them on my own the results were not that great. And working with a gr...

Sustainability discussions have become mainstream now. And the theme is very broad, touching essentially every aspect of our lives. Cars have however always occupied the center stage, especially now as electric vehicles (EVs) take over traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) based - mostly in China and Europe. Feeling a bit guilty here - as an owner of a 20+ years old Subaru Forester, I did some math (seeking some absolution). I don't drive much with this car though, maybe a bit over 5000km per year, so the initial feeling was that my contribution to the global carbon footprint would not be super high. For comparison I took the additional footprint of flying intercontinental in business class vs economy (more floor space, heavier seat etc., and all those bottles of champagne on board) and the global reduction impact of the lighting control software my company makes. So here is my math: The car: 5000km is about 600 liters of fuel. Burning 1 liter produces roughly 2.3kg of CO2. ...

I feel I am more fortunate than an average person to find issues and bugs in IT systems. Basically whatever I touch, there are problems. Some fairly benign like the United Airlines app losing all my flights (the flights could be accessed through a desktop browser via booking codes stored in email confirmations). And some looking more serious. On the lost flights the comment I got from one of my colleagues was "what do you expect - it is AI vibe coding". Fair enough. Release cycles spinning faster (that is what everybody wants: faster, faster, faster, right?). AI tools enabling this spin acceleration, but then the automated CI / test systems not coping with the changes. Code review also done by AI. And the result is the code spinning (pun intended) out of control of protein / carbon - based engineers. Apps get released, more features faster, KPIs improved. Users find bugs, but have no one to report them to, other than AI-based automated support systems. The bugs get eventually...

As a follow up to the last week's story about car dashboards - an addendum from my rental experience. It was a 2-day trip to Germany. My company has a rental agreement with SIXT, with some preferential rebates and integrated invoicing, so I went there without thinking too much. I liked SIXT in the past for their quite seamless "skip the line" online check-in (scan the driver's license and an ID, get a code to open a lockbox with the car keys). And it went OK like that this time too. But there were several things that were not OK.  During the booking process I got a number of really silly-looking options. Like "get Bluetooth for 5 EUR/day". And then "get Apple CarPlay" for additional 5 EUR/day. CarPlay requires Bluetooth so technically selecting it should select the Bluetooth option too... "Get parking sensors for 5 EUR/day".... the list was long. SIXT are you serious? There is no way to enable / disable these options remotely (or maybe th...

Cars peaked around 2005. This is the model year of my Subaru Forester STI (SG9). The best and coolest car ever made. 350 hp,  1500 kg (3300 lbs), frameless side windows, ultimate performance (including offroad), driver-focused interior, sub-5s 0-100km/h acceleration, unbelievable handling. The dashboard is driver-focused too with clean instruments panel featuring central tachometer and all distractors moved away. The other controls are just three well know knobs for ventilation (fan direction, fan speed, temperature). Then I have a 2-din aftermarket radio unit with capacitive touch and wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay . It also has tons of other functions including a CD/DVD player but I don't use them. Android Auto / Apple CarPlay is all that is needed these days. OK maybe an FM receiver for some old schoolers. As I travel a lot, I drive many rental cars too. The problem they all indicate is the car industry got drunk with semi/automated driver assistance subsystems and comp...

Evolution and its time scale are fascinating. It is however hard to imagine the universe and put it the into perspective. We are too busy with everyday duties. But once in a while when I have enough time to just stop, do nothing, and let my thoughts wonder and imagine... some things fall into place. I've been reading The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. It's been slow as I don't have it in an electronic form (nor as an audio book) and I don't bring it on my frequent trips. But maybe slow is good in this case as the book is very thought provoking. And it helps put things into perspective. The key take away so far has been the 10 billion years period. This is what it seems to take for the universe to create life. From simple atoms to birth of stars to death of stars and supernovae (they are necessary in the process as some heavy elements can only be created through supernova explosions). Then through seeding newly born planets with ...

I've had a number of very interesting (private) discussions following the last week's post on The Wall Of Money . One important take away has been to also mention the shadow banking system as the key contributor to the wall of money. If traditional central bank money printing is the visible high tide, the shadow banking system is the massive underwater current that amplifies that tide. It plays an enormous, often hidden role in inflating and sustaining asset valuations. A fund can take $100 million in Treasury bonds, pledge them in and borrow $95 million in cash, and immediately use that cash to buy equities. The lender who took those Treasury bonds as collateral can turn around and use those same bonds to back a different loan for someone else. Rehypothecation - rinse and repeat. This generates an immense amount of purchasing power that flows directly into financial markets. But it is a liquidity mirage. [Traditional Central Bank] → Creates Visible Money Supply [Shadow Banking...

I'm in the middle of a yet another round-the-world trip. Started two weeks ago in Europe for the Milan Bluetooth Member Summit , followed by the ultra dense in meeting Guangzhou International Lighting Exhibition in China. Next week I'll have a number of customer meetings in the USA. Luckily there is a short weekend pause in between, which I decided to spend in the "TikTok city" of Chongqing. It is a 6-hour high speed rail ride from the coast (the CR400 "Fuxing" at 350 km/h ), which I spent almost entirely glued to the window, with my brain working in the background to aggregate and generalize the inrush of information of the past 14 days. One of the puzzles I was trying to solve was the explosive SpaceX IPO, which, on the surface, has never made any sense to me. Everything I know about SpaceX, plus what I read in the S-1 filling, is a pure fiction (with the exception to the Falcon rockets that represent the solid part of the business). That is on the surface...

No, I cannot tell the details. Development of Bluetooth ®  specifications is governed by the confidentiality rules. So the only way to learn more is to be a Bluetooth SIG member and join the Working Groups. As I write this, the June Members' Summit in Milan, Italy is getting to the end. The week has been really packed. And as I have been excited about the progress on many fronts since I joined the SIG in 2012 (and then started to lead the Mesh Working Group in 2015), the excitement this week has reached all time highs. These things are complex and may seem to move slowly for casual observers "when will Bluetooth finally do X,Y,Z?", I've been super happy with the progress. To be honest, the progress is the one thing, but entirely more important is the spectrum of opportunities and the roadmap ahead. For the last couple of years, in parallel to development of Mesh / NLC - specific features (like the HVAC Integration Profile) , we have been doing a lot of ground work on ...

This one is generally nothing new. I think I get quite a lot of things done. Am I always motivated? No. Discipline is the other factor and there are - I think - three aspects of it that help: Imagining the results. This itself kicks in the right chemistry (literally) - dopamine - the needed neurotransmitter. Dopamine is sometimes confused with endorphins and incorrectly considered the satisfaction molecule. People thought dopamine shot up because you got something good (like winning a game). But dopamine actually spikes before you get the prize. It is the fuel for motivation: it drives the internal incentive processing. It creates the craving, the focus, and the energy required to go get the thing. Making lists. Richard Branson's favorite: " I have always lived my life by making lists ". I too make lists all the time. To help my aging memory and remember important things in the exploding galaxy of interests and distractions. I don't use paper lists but several electro...