Headworx

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...

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...

Email has clearly become cheaper and cheaper to push advertising messages. This has become apparent during the recent days - the US Thanksgiving followed by the Black Friday which now seems to last for two weeks. I had several brands I liked, that I still was subscribed to, but this time most of them went just too far. Some of them were sending me multiple (three or more) promotional emails per day. So I have radicalized myself cutting off somewhere between 80% and 90% of email subscriptions. One reason is (maybe I'm aging) - I really don't need more stuff. I definitely need more peace and less time spent on keeping my inbox tidy. Gmail has recently introduced a helpful feature - [Manage subscriptions]. Shows you the complete list and for 90% of subscriptions it offers a on-click [Unsubscribe]. So if anyone is stull using email, I highly recommend going through the list and cutting down stuff.

The energy crisis was the leading theme throughout the 2025 COSM conference. And people were really crying rivers about it. With the two most severe loses articulated: We will not be able to scale the AI infrastructure sufficiently enough China will overtake us Both are - I would say - purely "American" worries. First of all, nobody knows if AI progress is really limited by energy. Dwarkesh Patel has recently discussed this with Ilya Sutskever - and the headline is "We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research". Returns from scaling out the AI infrastructure have been diminishing. Ilya argues we need to do other things than just building more capacity. And I could not agree more. The existing LLMs have already swallowed all that was ever written. And probably more. And they still remain language models, increasingly more sophisticated statistical engines, not having a clue what they are talking about. I'm not saying that LLMs are totally usel...

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...

Once considered the greatest thing since sliced bread, notifications have spun of of control. Meant to be the (most) important stuff, have been sliding into complete irrelevance. And have become totally distracting and annoying. The operating systems (including the flagship Android and iOS), even with their recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) features have failed to cope with the notifications' torrents. Out of box, every app wants to send notifications about everything - this is of course the fight for potential revenue through engagement and conversion. Yes this can be managed. But only theoretically, as users really drown in the ocean of options they do not understand. On top of the notifications' options there is the hierarchy - you have favorite contacts (meant to always go through), you have time - or activity - based profiles (iOS calls them focuses). Barely anyone understands the combinations. Then there are the super annoying users of (increasingly more popular) instan...

You have the passport and a phone with the internet on it. What is next? Translate. Unless you speak Mandarin, a language translator app in the next on the list. Language has been a barrier, but translator apps break through that barrier. Use the one you like. I use Google translate. It is prudent to download the languages for offline use. Once done you can either type or dictate (or have someone else dictate) or use camera for instant translation of signage or restaurant menus. The apps are not perfect (yet), but they do a really good job. On one of the past trips, for example, we were able to negotiate a set of medicines in a pharmacy. The pharmacist was asking many questions in Chinese, us answering in English, and ultimately the medicine worked very well. Payments. As I mentioned, China has its own preferred payment systems. Credit cards would not work in most cases. Maybe in higher end hotels. But the default means of payment is by presenting or scanning a QR code. The app I use m...

I never thought I would become an expert on China and I'm still far from being one. But our business relationships with Chinese partners have been growing strongly and that is reflected in much more frequent China trips. So here is the mini series of blogs with some tips which you may find helpful. China is not straightforward for Western visitors. It is just different and small things matter when preparing for a trip. Or just knowing what to expect. May marks my second trip to China in 2025 an I plan to be here back in June. What is different is I'm the first time on my own, which I find both exciting and liberating. Being able to do things on my own has always been important, be it soldering a PCB or writing a piece of assembly code or trekking in the mountains of Georgia or Kirgizstan. Organized trips and telling people to do things for you or carry your bags is simply not my style. So you are going to China - where to start? Passport. Obviously the number one step is making...

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...

I have done quite a lot of travel in the last two weeks. Actually it was a full RTW circle: Poland - Hong Kong - California - Indiana - Washington - Poland. Was using the iPhone a lot for all sorts of things. The battery life has proven to be sufficient. Which is a big relief. I purchased a small universal power bank (the Anker 622 , which is both magnetic and cable and can charge other devices over USB-C too). And I have not used it, which actually is a good thing :). What has really proven to be the strength of the iOS platform is its market leading position which forces vendors to prioritize applications and services to support the Apple devices. You simply cannot afford not to. To get around Hing Kong you need an Octopus card. The issue with the Octopus is you need cash (yes, cash!) to purchase it (unless you have an account in one of the local banks). Now there is a virtual Octopus for Tourists (an iOS app which integrates with the Apple Wallet). The app actually allows you to to...

It has happened - I have an iPhone now :D. USB-C was the deciding factor (or - the lack of USB-C previously had been deterring me from buying an iPhone). So thanks the EU! And of course everybody agrees Apple sticking to the lightning port on iPhones for so long was just stupid. My initial thoughts are generally good, some very good, and some surprisingly bad (although the bad ones a just minor, but unexpected...). Probably the worst part was the initial setup. I wanted to move my data over (both from the Android phone and the iOS iPad) and I read about the data transfer bug in factory fresh iPhones, so did as requested and right after unboxing plugged the iPhone to iTunes. That is like time travel. iTunes was never great but now it is exactly the same like it was 20 years ago, so considering the overall progress this is terrible. But the phone was updated and I started setting it up. It recognized the iPad (the "device" nearby) and froze for more than an hour. During that ti...

My Blackberry is ageing. It still works many days on a single charge but barely copes with the new software. Apps are slow and some even fail to run. But the biggest issue is the camera which has gathered a lot of duct on the internal lens surfaces, so photos come out washed out and often not sharply focused. I've been waiting to "pull the trigger" and buy the new Samsung Galaxy S23 but after a careful examination of pros and cones I passed on it. To be honest passed on Android as such. In a surprising move I have become an iOS guy. Not yet, as Apple must first release a USB-C iPhone. But that is definitely in the works, so it is all very probable I will be buying the iPhone 15 when it comes out. I did a list of features I wanted from a new phone and surprisingly there have been several points where Android lost to iOS. And even more surprisingly many of them have been around handling photos. This is surprising as Google Photos is definitely the leading personal photos a...

Stadia, the revolutionary online gaming system launched by Google in 2019 is the last victim of the product axing policy. It joins the Google Graveyard, the resting place for wonderful applications like Google Reader, Google Inbox, Google Travel, Google Music and many more. What is even worse, when Stadia hits the graveyard next year, it will create an environmental problem by bricking thousands of game controllers people bought to use with the service. Some time ago I was nagged by a Google representative to switch our cloud operations from AWS to Google. My answer was simple - "never". No matter how good the offer was, there was always the risk they would kill the product forcing us to invest in porting it to another cloud platform. I simply do not trust Google when it comes to their product strategy. One day a product exists and the next day it may be axed, like it happened with many. This is why we use the Atlassian suite for tracking software issues and documentation d...

In the previous era software updates were significant events. Not only they did not happen automatically, but even to check if there was one, you had to do some special things. Look up a web page, download the installer package, uninstall the previous version, remembering to save settings somewhere, then run the new install and restore the settings. Then appstores came around, popping up notification bubbles which were inviting to download and install updates. Now the updates are gone. Not that they are not anymore, but we mostly just don't see them. Both Apple and Google have hidden the updates and they execute kind of behind the scenes. And it works for most people, But then there are some devices which can be considered a part of the "infrastructure" and updating them fully automatically probably is not the best idea. I have the Firewalla boxes on my home networks and despite being very happy with them I have never pulled the trigger to switch the networks to be Firew...

Enjoying the second year of relative slowdown across the board, I do not have too much "gear"noise to offer. But having said that, there are several items I really enjoyed throughout 2021. And one of them undeniably was the Palm Phone . Make no mistake, I did not use it as my primary phone, which BTW the Blackberry has continued to be (one of my top picks for 2017 ). But the Palm was with me on many occasions. Especially on the trail runs, where I enjoy listening to variety of audio content. About half of the runs (which I continue doing daily at a very consistent level), I had only the Garmin watch with me, loaded with the podcasts I subscribe to. But there are other content sources which do not transfer that easily to the watch. Among them are Audible audiobooks, which can be copied over to the watch, but that requires transcoding them to the MP3 format. The transcoding itself is not that difficult, but they end up being big long files and the Garmin does not have a proper...

As I was lamenting last week on the terrible service end-of-life policies rendering fully functional products useless, I was going through some important upgrades, breathing new life in some other devices. When Android TV showed up in TV sets about 5 years ago I thought this was the best thing since the sliced bread. Finally the promise of a single remote and a TV set as an application platform capable of receiving terrestrial, satellite and Internet content, with a local storage for recording and pausing. I bought a 4k Android TV made by Philips and this was a huge disappointment. First it was very laggy. An ageing phone was snappier than this device. Then it was buggy, requiring a reset every now and then. But I was literally stuck with this 55 inch of a glorious 4k LCD screen bundled with a completely crappy computer inside. I could never decide on trashing it for the environmental reasons (and also because the LCD part of it has been quite good). So just last week I decided to tur...

Google sent me this "Christmas gift" message three days ago. Yes I had heard the rumors. And it is both sad and surprising. I have been using the OnHub WiFi for several years and it has been great and flawless. After experimenting with several WiFi access points, this one has been the first one to fully cover the house. And I never ever needed to reboot it. It has been invisible. The best technology is invisible - it just works. But due to the support / end-of-life policy I will have to go through the hassle of selecting / installing / troubleshooting a new device while trashing the perfectly functioning one. This is the insanity of the Internet era. I can - to some extent - understand the upgrade cycle of devices which do gain significant functionality. Smartphones are among them but even they hardly need replacements every year or two. But WiFi? At some point it is just good enough and replacing an access point just does not make sense. Vendors really do need to start think...

Statistically, Americans do not travel . And this is why there is no rage about the geographical restrictions on electronic content services. The United States are bearing the critical market voting mass here and countries like the United Kingdom alone do not matter .  In the old days, after buying a CD record, I could put it in a portable player, circle the globe and the music would continue playing uninterrupted. But these were the old days. Now we have changed the conduit - from physical discs to wireless streaming and suddenly we learn the hard way about the legal restrictions. For a consumer, how is an ABBA song on a physical record different from the same song on a music streaming account? Yet there seems to be hell of a difference to the royalty collector (or the middlemen), such that they restrict where you can or cannot listen. Which probably is not a problem for those who do not change a zip code throughout their entire life. But once you start moving, you quickly hit a w...

Passwords are probably the most unsolved user experience issue since the beginning of the Internet era. The biggest fail. There is one thing that keeps them alive, which is (the recovery) email. Email is - in the end - the last resort when we mess with passwords, by simply forgetting them. The problem with passwords is that by trying to make them more secure, by enforcing policies of "difficult" passwords or policies to change them frequently, we force users to keep them stored in plain text either on easily accessible electronic notes or on post-its. And any web service which is accessed less frequently, we probably start with the "forgot password" option which emails us a recovery link. Then there are password managers which themselves are a mess. I have always had issues trusting them fully. Probably one useful thing they offer are statistics. E.G., Google Chrome tells me I have about 300 passwords to various web sites. 300 is obviously not manageable in any way ...

The irony is that people who care about (backing up) their data tend to lose it... Most just don't care and this approach is good enough. After all Google Photos, iCloud and similar services will take care of device backups automatically. And so will any of the messaging or social sharing sites. I do know some people who rely entirely on WhatsApp as their backup for photos and other stuff. That just works, as long as you do not have any special needs (such as storing certain file types or making sure the photos are not down-sampled). Then there is a group of those who care a bit more. They purchase premium tiers of the cloud services, enabling them to store full resolution photos and other files by either manual uploads or automatic mirroring. And then there is the very paranoid group who do not trust the cloud services. They take the most effort of setting up and maintaining local backup devices - most typically in form of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. All in faith of be...