Headworx

Recently I have been contemplating about a new phone. It is about time, as I have been using my faithful Samsung I600 for 20 months now. Two months ago I was given an iPhone, but somehow it failed to conquer my heart. Yes, it is a gorgeous toy. It has brilliant applications... I could play for hours with Bloomberg, rotating the screen up and down. Or watch music videos... But when it comes down to some serious business, the iPhone seems to remain a gadget... So after long hesitation, I decided to give Blackberry a try. The Bold seemed like a perfect choice. Sync - perfect, it is able to fully synchronize with Google via the Google Sync . And it is able to synchronize with iTunes music library, I decided to by my master music meta data. I was about to buy one, but then I met a friend who had been using one for a long time. What scared me was his routine task of removing the battery twice a day... to keep the berry fresh and up to the task. No data connection? Remove the battery... Unab...

So what is the next big thing after the Internet? That question still remains my top one since I formulated it in June 2008 at the Intel Capital CEO conference. It was just a week after the impressive presentation by Chris Cooper at 2008 Telecosm Conference . Still being a little jet lagged, I was immediately awaken by the vision of nano confinement fusion. Today, while the nano - scale fusion nuclear batteries are not ready, and will not be ready for some years to come, we may soon be getting an intermediate solution - the mini - scale fission reactors. They are just moving into a mass production. According to The Cutting Edge : ... nuclear battery technology pioneered by government scientists at Los Alamos—the facility that developed the first atomic bomb—has been licensed to private companies for mass production and distribution... in its initial format, each micro-reactor will produce just 25 megawatts, but enough to provide electricity for 20,000 average American-sized homes or ...

Computers on the Internet have IP addresses. Like 208.77.188.166. We are used to locate them based on names or Web addresses. Like www.example.com. DNS ( Domain Name System ) is what translates Web address into an IP address. Seems pretty easy and straightforward. But DNS is absolutely central to the integrity of the Internet and there seems to be a serious weakness that may cause us a lot of headache. Fake DNS servers. Under normal conditions you get access to the DNS servers when you log in to youe ISP (Internet Service Provider). It is in the very interest of the ISPs not to mess with DNS system and provide the proper references to DNS servers to their clients. But there is nothing that would stop me from setting up a free WiFi network providing fake DNS references. Then any computer joining such network would go to fake DNS servers to resolve any name a user types in the address bar of the Web browser. And as a result users would be redirected to fake servers. After typing in www.M...

Last week I found myself in a situation prompting me to figure out the new setup for my virtual office. My previous setup was mainly based on the Microsoft Exchange 2007. My laptop running Outlook 2007 with local cache of all mail / contact / calendar items residing on a server. Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone on top of it, synchronizing everything over the air via the ActiveSync protocol. This worked flawlessly. I had all emails and contacts and calendars in sync all the time. My phone, my laptop plus a working copy on the Exchange server. The challenge now has been to do the same, sans Exchange. So I started thinking about my new setup. These days we tend to sore everything in The Cloud (the Internet). I use GMail and Google Documents for my private stuff a lot, so my first steps were to try setting up everything around Google services. I soon found out this was not that simple. Starting with contacts, my first goal was to move my database of contacts from Microsoft Outlook to Go...

Crapware is probably a better word for what I used to call bloatware . The software that you can live without. The same software that comes preloaded on your machine when purchased. Eating your CPU, RAM, battery. Eating your nerves when your machine hangs or stalls or takes too long to boot. The problem is now widely noticed and as necessity is the mother of an invention, anew class of software utilities emerges. Decrapifiers. Computer viruses spawned a wave of anti-virus software products, even entire companies, some of them listed on stock exchanges. Big industry. Then came firewalls. Software fighting against other software trying to get on to your computer and wreck havoc on the desktop. Now we have decrapifiers. Utilities promising to clean your windows machine to the state comparable with Macs. One of them is the PC Decrapifier . It is a good start. No perfect by all means, but good and helpful for starters. And looking at the dynamics of the amount of crapware coming with new PC...

A few weeks ago I posted an entry touting the entry - level SLR camera, namely the Nikon D40. I am a very happy D40 owner, it serves as my secondary camera and a great learning tool for the family members. We use Picasa as a "cloud" storage for photos and one thing I would really love to have (and have been writing about for a while) is eliminating the PC as a man-in-the-middle between a camera and an Internet photo storage / sharing site. Last week I have finally found some time to configure and test the new release of the before mentioned Eye-Fi SD card . Eye-Fi is a special storage card. On the outside it looks and behaves just like any other SD card. 2GB capacity may not sound big these days, but it is plenty enough for casual usage. D40 reports it can store some 500 snaps on it, which is more than enough. But the Eye-Fi is not an ordinary storage card. It has a dedicated computer and a communication device inside. Namely an 802.11 b/g WiFi transceiver and antenna. And ...

Last week I cried out loud my 802.11n hassles . People may wonder why move to faster wireless network at home, but the answer seems to be pretty clear: multimedia. More and more homes are equipped with some kind of a multimedia home server. In my case this is the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ . It serves three main purposes: Stores my digital pictures (the ones myself and other members of the family snap with our cameras) Stores digital videos (mostly satellite TV recordings I collect, like the Formula-1 races) Stores digital music (MP3 rips of CDs I buy and eMusic downloads) All the three types of content go through my laptop. Pictures are copied from memory cards to the laptop, cataloged with Picasa and sent to the NAS. Videos are downloaded from the hard drive of the Dreambox satellite tuner, and then converted from .TS (MPEG-2 satellite transport stream format) to .MPG (MPEG-2 native format) and sent to the NAS. Music goes almost the same way. Each time the laptop does some proces...