Headworx

Last Friday I received the Twine . High expectations and a bit of disappointment. It works. But somehow I cannot find enough value in SMSes or emails triggered by the Twine sensor to compensate the cost of $200. After all, today for $200 you can have hell of a gadget. A modern Internet tablet or even a Chromebook , fully equipped with high resolution display, 320GB drive and wired / wireless LAN connectivity. Also, while Twine is one of the first battery - powered Internet - connected, autonomous "thing", it does not introduce any real novelty. Similar platforms, like the ioBridge.com , have been available for years. Twine offers three sensors: water, magnetic and wire contact. ioBridge has many more, and it offers actors too. Not to mention the Iota kits for $50. The Twine has inspired me to touch on the very important issue of security in the world of the Internet Of Things. It is an example of many implementations I see today. Things talk to a web service. Sure they us...

There are moments when I think the Internet connection I have is just fine. And then there are the reality check moments, when I feel like I had an equivalent of a 56kbps dialup service. This happens when I deal with the new developments in consumer video recording and photography. A year ago I got myself the Samsung Galaxy Note I, a phone capable of recording HD video. Nice! And I took my first short video, just a few minutes long. Only to realize the video FILE is more than 1GB in size. So I have it. I have the video. There is no way to share it (without compressing and losing the quality). There is no way to carry more files like this one with me either. I backup them on my LAN NAS server, as this is the only place capable of dealing with 1GB files. It has 8TB of storage space and 1Gbps LAN interface. A month ago I fell in love with the Sigma DP1 Merrill consumer compact camera. The Merrill is unusual. It is based on the latest Foveon X3 sensor (I wrote more on that 6 years a...

Sometimes I can't stop wondering how far mobile network operators are behind times. Yes I know I've written a number of times on that subject but I think it is worth crying. After all someone may hear the call. So a couple of observations from the last two days, living with my MNO. I talk a lot via phone while driving. Driving around a jammed city is boring, especially in Winter. So I talk. And from time to time my calls are dropped. I can understand this. I roam from one cell to another and the second one is full, unable to accommodate my call, so the call is dropped. But then the network never dials back to reconnect the call for me. I have to do this manually. The network knows the disconnect reason. It knows it was not me hanging up. It should relieve me of the manual redial. But it does not. Even worse. When the call is dropped, both parties dial back to reconnect. And the call setups very often collide. So the network actually knows the parties are trying to reconnect...

Every now and then I drive a car on a longer trip. Many hours with roads, traffic and car navigation systems. Faithful readers already know I have an Android tablet built in my dashboard and the currently preferred navigation application is Automapa . Automapa, by the way, has recently released maps covering entire Europe (not just Poland), so their addressable market has grown significantly. I like Automapa for a number of reasons, probably the most important two are the most accurate maps (hello, Apple!) and the best performing traffic service (I really feel smart when it reroutes me in advance around jammed roads). But being as good as it is, it lacks a lot in two areas: integration with a car and integration with the Cloud. Sadly, Automapa is not alone with these shortcomings. Honestly, I do not know of another navigation product (including the factory mounted systems like BMW), that do decent car / cloud integration. The navigation applications behave like they would never ...

The iWatch 2.0 was a sure thing on my list of predictions for 2012. But it has not happened. Do you know why? I know, at least one part of the story. As I explained a week ago and two weeks ago , there is one technology that is absolutely central to the emergence of smart watches. It is the Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE. BLE is probably the wireless technology with the most potential in the consumer electronics space. It will be huge and everywhere. In future. Because it is not ready for the mass market yet. And you will hear a lot about BLE in 2013. But it will not be until the Q4 of 2013 until we will ride the BLE wave. The reason is, it is not supported by the Android OS yet. BLE links peripherals (various sensors and gadgets) to a central device (a mobile phone or a computer in most cases). On the peripheral side it is just the BLE (a single mode Bluetooth Low Energy radio) chip. On the central side it is usually the Bluetooth 4.0 (a dual mode Classic / LE radio) chip, so th...

The Sony Smart Watch fits into the recently started Bluetooth theme. As a matter of fact I predicted the year 2012 would be the year of the Smart Watch . And as I still stand by my thesis that smart watches will rule the world, my prediction has failed. The timing was all wrong. Apple has not released a smart watch. Google has not released an integrated Android smart watch API. The Kickstarter Pebble Watch project I backed personally is delayed again. No smart watch for me this Christmas. Or may be? Here comes Sony to wipe the tears. Actually the Sony watch is a surprise. Or a couple of surprises. The first surprise is it works out of the box with ANY Android phone. Yes you read this right. It is not tied to Sony platform. It works with my Samsung Note and there is no reason why it would not work with just about any other Android device. All it requires is the Sony application installed. The second surprise is it uses the Bluetooth classic, not the Low Energy. Why - I will pos...

The recent weeks I have been investigating the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. Honestly I can say there has probably been no other wireless technology designed so well and complete as BLE is. On the other hand BLE is the most confusing and most miscommunicated standard I can remember. The reason for this post is to clear the fog a little. So first, what is the purpose of BLE and why we need yet another standard for wireless communications? Bluetooth has always been about interconnectivity in PAN or Personal Area Network. Interconnectivity means various devices from different vendors can connect and talk to each other. Most typical use case is the wireless headset connecting to a phone. Or wireless mouse connecting to a computer (sans dongle). PAN means the target scenarios are about devices in the close proximity. Like all the gadgets you wear or carry. Your personal cloud, usually with a radius of  one meter (can go up to around ten meters). Bluetooth (the classic Bluet...