Headworx

Despite some stupid and controversial moves, (like the recent one by Facebook to change the Terms of Use stripping users of the rights to their content), Internet - powered social networking keeps on gaining in popularity. We suddenly find we live in communities. Communities that even cross each other and are totally location - independent. Yes, there still is a barrier of timezone, or - more important - culture, but it would be nearly impossible to find a person these days, who does not have friends abroad. The other day I had an idea of a device / service (I even wanted to patent it). A box sitting between the Net and a TV (like Apple TV) with an interface to a webcam. The idea behind was to achieve social watching experience, but with an ordinary TV and voice / interactive video overlay, instead of PC and "just" texting. I even envisioned an Apple TV box where you could just plug in any USB webcam, and some software to overlay a strip of your buddies' faces on top of...

So we all have wireless wide area connectivity, right? Well... most of the time this is true. At least when we do not leave the home country. Going abroad is (still) a different story. "G" in GSM stands for "Global". The idea behind was to have a phone that works in every country. And more or less this vision has been fulfilled, when it comes to voice calls. SMS messages are not too far behind, but I do remember just a few years ago going to the US would result in very unreliable SMS service. I was always supposed to send an SMS home when landed. Unfortunately they were not always delivered on time. I mean - today it is probably not an issue, since service providers have polished their roaming agreements and network interconnects, so they really work. But in 2005 I happened to send a couple of SMS messages and they were delivered some three weeks later. Of course SMS is a store - and - forward messaging, so likely messages are stroed somewhere in transit and once in...

I have been using the BlackBerry Bold for two months now. It has been a battle uphill the learning curve. The basic laws of nature are different in the BlackBerry world. Of course I expected something unexpected entering this land. I expected BlackBerry handsets being fully controlled both by RIM and by the wireless service provider. But what I did not expect was how a service provider can without a reason cut the functionality by half. Or even more. But let me tell the story from the beginning. BlackBerries have their own very special way of handling data connections. In case of the Bold 9000 there are four scenarios: The phone is connected via cellular data channel (GPRS or EDGE or 3/3.5G) to the service provider's generic APN. With this connection you can run some (but relatively few) applications (like the GMail rich client) and one incarnation of Web browser that goes directly to the Internet and renders pages entirely on the device. The phone is connected to your local Wi-Fi ...

My brand new Lenovo X200s died. The first symptoms of the deadly illness were spotted a month ago. It was 3 weeks old at that time. Horizontal strips across the screen and reset. I sent it for warranty repair, it came back after 15 days not being touched. "Tested" was the service description, I tried to argue with the lady handing it back to me, but finally gave up... And It worked fine for two weeks without a glitch. I was even thinking I had treated the lady at the Lenovo service center too bad, and may be the computer was really "tested" and the previous breakdowns had been just my imagination. But then it crashed for good. My feeling is these days electronics fail much more often than mechanics, so do not immediately trust these ads saying "no moving parts" etc... Do not be surprised when your SSD drive fails while your spindle drives keep on running... Anyway... I was facing another two weeks without the laptop. I tried to rejuvenate my old OQO 01 bu...

Catching up with post - CES comments, my attention has been captured recently by the press release from AMD, referring to the peta-flop supercomputer project powered by 1000 (one thousand) ATI Radeon GPUs and running... surprise surprise... the OTOY software. OTOY has been mentioned here a few times . I was the lucky one to attend two sessions by Jules Urbach (2007 and 2008) and they were just blowing the audience away... When Jules was presenting his real time rendering software, there was complete silence in the room with an occasional sound of people picking their jaws from the floor... Jules has been promising us the render cloud for some time. Algorithms constructing the virtual reality that is undistinguishabe from real reality running on massive server farms and client computers running just a tiny layer of client software to display the rendered VR. There is a short interview with Jules on the AMD site ( http://www.amd.com/us/fusion/Pages/otoy.aspx ). In the background you may ...

Netbooks are just great. Simple, inexpensive, portable computers with a primary function to access the Internet. It would not be a far stretch to bring the 80/20 Pareto rule here, saying they deliver in terms of personal computing 80% of what we expect from a personal computer. Or may be even for 80% PC users they deliver all the need? Netbooks are great, but really both the hardware and the software is not ready for netbooks yet. I mean client side hardware and software. We are getting close. Intel with the Atom chip is aiming at perfect netbook design. Perfect meaning enough processing power to render Web pages quickly and very little battery drain to keep the machine running for hours (if not days) on a single charge. But what we really still lack is a client operating system designed from scratch to be a Web - client operating system. At 2009 CES this month Qualcomm demonstrated Google's Android OS on the Snapdragon platform. Android had initially been targeted at mobile phon...

Last week Slacker announced the Slacker Mobile application for Blackberry smartphones. I downloaded it almost immediately to find out it is one of the must have applications for the device. Slacker is a music service, similar in nature to the Pandora , mentioned here a number of times . Both stream personalized music and both have been available for the iPhone for some time. But the difference Slacker gives is station caching. So you can create your personalized radio stations and pre - cache some or all of them (in my case the Slacker Mobile says it can cache 53 stations on the 16GB micro SD card, half occupied by songs I transferred there from iTunes). 53 stations is a lot. The idea of caching is fantastic for mobile personalized digital radios. Cellular data connectivity is still too slow (in many places where 3G coverage does not exist), too expensive (when roaming) or non existent in places you would like to listen to music (like a plane). Of course both Pandora and Slacker know y...