Headworx

It has been three months now since I posted a note on the Sheeva Plug Computer . I have been quite busy with the Sheeva all the time. Currently running three of them. Two in a full production environment and one as a development system. The three Sheevas make for my small data center. The first one, as originally intended, runs MeteoHub. MeteoHub is a software, that collects and processes data from weather stations. In my case initially it was just one station - the Davis Vantage. MeteoHub was doing a perfect job with the Davis weather station. The configuration was very simple and everything was running smoothly from the very start. My appetite was growing. Davis has just one internal temperature sensor and I thought it would be nice to have temperature measured in many places around the house - the attic, the cellar, the garage and so on... I found a source of cheap (~$8) wireless temperature / humidity sensors manufactured by Oregon Scientific and bought 10 of them. Then I used a un...

Every now and then I think how the future of wireless data will look like. Recent weeks somehow have brought a significant clarification, at least I can see things clearly now... :) Let's start from the definition of the problem we have. It is simple. Wireless data transmission is too slow. Yes I mean the home and office WiFi networks. Even with the latest 802.11n standard just ratified a few weeks ago, a simple four twisted pair copper CAT5 cable is almost an order of magnitude faster (1 Gigabit per second versus 100-something Megabits) and a couple of times cheaper (a home gigabit switch is $30 today...). But more importantly I mean mobile cellular data. Yes we have 3G and even 3.5G HSDPA networks in place. Delivering on average 1 Megabit per second to mobile terminals. 1 Megabit used to be a high number a while ago. Especially in mobile scenario. But it no longer is considered high today and won't be in the future either. You may say new standards like HSPA+ and especially L...

Today I have moved to my new home entertainment setup. The gear remains the same. There is the good old Panasonic PT-AE2000 full HD projector and the good old Sony PlayStation 3 . But the setup is very different. Moving the projector far to the back of the room, I've managed to get a picture with 140" (>350 cm) diagonal - at 16x9, the image is 120" (~300cm) wide. At the same time I 've moved the sofa forward, so my eyes are only about 80" (200 cm) away from the screen. To picture these proportions it is like keeping a nose 6" (15cm) away from a 14" widescreen laptop. There are some unexpected effects of such extreme setup. Firstly, at FullHD (1920x1080) I see no pixels nor grain. The image is very smooth (I suppose the Panasonic display engine makes some clever tricks here...). Secondly, I feel I no longer play a game. I am IN the game. This is especially true with simulators, like the Blazing Angels or H.A.W.X. from Ubisoft, where you fly a plane u...

Two weeks ago I gave Amazon's Kindle a number of thumbs down, the truth is I still stand by what I initially said... The Kindle has been completely unprepared for European market. Today, however, I would like to focus on one, in my opinion very important piece of the Kindle puzzle - the Whispernet. Whispernet is a virtual mobile data network. Amazon uses the Whispernet to silently, automagically deliver digital content (books and other stuff) to Kindles. Initially, in the first and second generation Kindles, the Whispernet has been based on Sprint's CDMA network. This was the main technical reason why Kindles were not offered outside USA, as CDMA in practice does not support international roaming. The third generation Kindles (the international ones) use GSM - based Whispernet, so they are able to roam abroad. Unfortunately we still have absolutely ridiculous GSM data roaming prices. Anywhere on the Planet subscribers get virtually unlimited data plans for $10-$20 a month. But ...

Integrating audio / video entertainment systems around a house is not a trivial task. It is still much easier today than some years ago, when the only way to go was to install a dedicated system from vendors like Bose or Bang-Olufsen. I have been playing with multi - room audio and video for a long time and basically there have always been three areas to solve: Media transport. Making sure a CD or a radio station can be played in any room, with individual volume adjustment. My first installation was just a number of power amplifiers with speaker cables around the house. Three years ago I moved to an all-IP solution, storing my entire music collection on a NAS server (the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ , running Logitech's SqueezeCenter streaming audio to a number of SqueezeBoxes ). For stored videos I use the same NAS server, streaming the content DLNA-compliant way down to Sony PS3 console. For live video there are Linux - powered Kathrein UFS-910 DVB-S satellite set-top boxes. Remote co...

So is Amazon running scared by Barnes & Noble? I have to admit my expectations were set high last Monday when Amazon announced Kindle was available worldwide. The start was excellent. Ordered the same day on Monday, shipped from the USA on Tuesday, delivered by DHL just two days later passing a customs clearance. This is the current record time for any item ordered from the USA to Poland. In te meantime, on Wednesday, they kindly credited me back with $20, due to "Consolidation of family of 6" Kindles." (whatever this means besides aligning with the price of B&N's Nook ). Unpacking the device was reminding me unpacking the first iPod for the first time. The feeling of a device of a completely new class... It was turned off and there was an image on the screen. I thought it was a piece of paper to peel off... But actually this was a displayed image... WOW! "It needs to be charged" - I thought and looked in the box for a power supply. First was the ca...

A few days ago a friend of mine lost her Yahoo mailbox. She was fooled by a phishing page to give her password and soon the phisher got control of her mailbox, forcing her out by changing the password to his own. A standard recovery should be to reset the password and change it to a new one, forcing the phisher out. As it is practiced in such scenarios, an automated process tries to figure out if a person claiming the rights to the account is authentic, by asking predefined questions set up when the compromised account was created. And very often people just do not know the answers to their very own questions, making the recovery impossible, as they cannot prove their identity. For some reason Web sites have been ignoring a perfect second factor authentication device - a personal mobile phone. Years ago phones have been tied to places. Today phones are as personal as toothbrushes. Everybody has their own. Phone numbers are even more personal. With mobile number portability being a sta...