Headworx

Device interoperability is absolutely expected by users. But they are not getting it. Why is it so hard to deliver? Because we've never done it. How does an electric plug look like? It depends on which country you live in.... It has a very simple function and there is no interoperability. Converters and adapters are needed. But computers connected to the Internet are interoperable. So why things can't be? Why don't things use WiFi, which is an interoperable protocol? These questions are based on false assumptions. Computers are not interoperable. WiFi is not interoperable. Humans using them are. My laptop cannot talk to your laptop. But I as a human can use an application (like Skype) to connect over WiFi and the Internet to your laptop that runs Skype and has you on the other side. Remove the humans and nothing works. We've never built a single interoperable system! Even the airline reservation systems are not interoperable. So often it happens a ticket iss...

Two weeks ago I made an experiment installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Air. Initially it went smoothly but ended up in a total fiasco. I mean - it worked, but the overall experience was very poor. The battery life dropped down to 2 hours (from around 6 with OS X). After digging around and installing some extra power saving tools and drivers I got it up to 4 hours. But it was unreliable. A couple of times the machine did not turn off after closing the lid. The effect - unexpectedly dead battery. The touch pad was also somehow impaired. Not sure what the problem exactly was, but simply the touchpad operation was not that smooth as on the original Apple software. And I am comparing apples to apples (pun intended), because on both systems the only application I run is Google Chrome. So yes, the Chrome experience on the OS X MacBook is much better then the Chrome experience on the same machine running Linux. I am back to OS X with relief. Which spells again: the devil is in the details. Thou...

What Android TVs and the new iPads have in common? They don't know how to organize the users around them. The world was pretty simple with personal devices. My phone. My tablet. My laptop. My account. My phone shares the photos with my laptop, because both devices operate in a context of the same account. But the problem arises with devices that - by design - are shared. A TV set is a crown example. What user account should the Android TV sign with? And there is no obvious answer to that question. I ended up setting up a new account that I call the "Family Account". Both the TV and the Android TV players are signed to the Family account. This setup is not that bad. Each family member can share selected content with the Family account. Like photos. And then the TV set can go and run the DayDream screen saver displaying randomly the photos it has access to. At least in theory. The real life shows the idea is still not fully supported. Android TV screensaver can grab...

My adventure with digital photography started in 2002 when I realized the quality of images taken with my Minolta Dimage F100 beat an analog film. Since then I have been paying a lot of attention to ordering my catalogs, backing them up and preparing them for sharing as well as being able to display on variety of devices. As a matter of fact this comes down to my Definition-of-Done. Done is not when I press the shutter button. Done is when the photo is cataloged, geo-tagged, post-processed, stored in an ordered album, ranked and shared on line. Today, 13 years later, this process remains extremely painful and difficult. There seems to be only one photo post-processing app that stands out. The Adobe Lightroom. It is difficult to learn but after you master even the basics, everything else pales in comparison. There is also a huge ecosystem of Lightroom plugins that are not available otherwise. Some of them, like the Google Nik Dfine 2 are worth every cent ad then some. Unfortuna...

My recent encounters with Android TV materialized inside the Philips PUS7150 tv set have reinforced the point: software is a hard problem. Especially for hardware vendors. Via the Android TV operating system Google brings an enormous value to consumer electronic manufacturers. It almost solves their problem. Consumers today expect a TV would behave like a computer, only on a bigger screen. Rubber remote? No thank you... Limited number of apps running on the big screen? Why oh why? Context continuity? Why isn't it available? TV makers can either spend millions billions on developing their own OS or license one that is ready. They still want to make their product special and try hard adding something. For example Philips is adding their own MyRemote companion App. Which simply said is hopeless. Looks like put together by a bunch of kids during an afternoon hackaton session. Google's Android TV Remote Control app is not perfect either, but is usable. And BTW, Google still h...

Chasing features and updates is our everyday life. I have an Android tablet in my car and everyday when I commute to work, it keeps updating some apps or parts of the system. It connects via a free 3G data (Aero2) which works well but has throughput limited to 64Kbps. Sometimes I wonder if 64K for 1-2 hours a day is enough to keep the system up to date... While the frequent updates are accepted for personal devices (laptops, tablets, phones), they are a completely different challenge for IoT systems. For two reasons: The IoT networks are narrowband by nature. Some, like SigFox, run extremely limited data rates. Low data rates are perfectly fine to transport sensor data or simple control commands, but are way too slow to perform application updates on the nodes. Even 802.15.4 - based networks, running at 250kbps can easily saturate for long periods when doing over-the-air updates. Many IoT devices are supposed to run uninterrupted. Firmware upgrade almost always requires a reboot. ...

It looks looks like TV sets have won back the purity. Set-top boxes will be gone soon. They were, after all, a temporary solution. Set-tops were application platforms, with connectivity to multiple feed interfaces: satellite, cable, terrestrial. They had storage and above all were hosting service providers' applications. Televisions were just simple displays. But now televisions are more and more powerful computers, with multiple connectivity options and power to run a number of applications. STBs are not needed any longer. This is becoming clearly visible with the recent arrival of the Android TV operating system, embraced by lead TV manufacturers like Sony and Philips. When my Linux - based satellite tuner was dying and my TV just stopped working I visited a local electronics store where - to my surprise - I've found a number of new generation TV sets. They are all already 4K / UltraHD panels with "smart" functions, but what has hit me the most were two develo...