Headworx

Security in IoT is paramount. And the most difficult at the same time. Difficult because of the nature of the tiny devices that have very small storage and very low processing power. But any new product or protocol must be designed with at least the fundamental security features as standard: The design must be published, so it can be analyzed and scrutinized publicly. You should not even try to touch a proprietary solution. It must be upgradable. Bugs happen and can be fixed. But what is a fix worth if it cannot be deployed? It must be physically resistant to attempts of extracting security material (keys). External flash memory is a no-go. No keys should ever be hardcoded. Because they will fall eventually. Humans should not be responsible for creating the keys. Because they usually will be weak. Keys should be generated by truly random generators. Nonces have to be truly unique. Not just random. A system should be able to roll the keys periodically to prevent brute force at...

All signs point to the mobile industry moving towards headphone apocalypse by dropping the 3.5 mm standard jack. I know it potentially means more money, but first and foremost it means confused and frustrated consumers. Envision this: the next phone you are about to buy will not have a standard analog headphone socket. You can now trash your high quality Bose, Monster, Beats or whatever you've been using recently. Or you can use a Type-C- to - 3.5mm dongle (yeah, yet another dongle). The problem not just the dongle itself, but the fact it will occupy the only port the phone has, so you won't be able to charge it while having headphones plugged in. The same applies to Apple devices, the only difference is they will have the Lightning port. On iPhones and iPads that is, because on MacBooks there is the Type-C USB (but Apple fans can afford having two sets of headsets, can't they?). Unless Apple drops Lightning and adopts Type-C across the product line (which it should)....

USB Type-C is probably the most promising wired technology developed recently. Small, reversible connector, huge bandwidth (up to 10Gbps), huge power (up to 100 watts via USB-PD or Power Delivery standard) and even high definition video via built-in Display Port (upt o 8K@60Hz). But today it still shows all signs of immaturity. Not diving into the high data transfer rates and video over Type-C, the biggest hurdle are chargers and cables. Even official Google Nexus Chargers Could Be Dangerous . Not long ago I bought the Intel Core m3 - based Compute Stick with the idea to drive presentation projectors in conference rooms. It comes with Windows 10 preinstalled and has plenty of power to run it. It also comes with a very clever concept utilizing Type-C: it is powered via a Type-C cable, while the power supply acts as a USB hub exposing two SuperSpeed (blue) sockets. The problem with this very smart concept is the cable that weighs twice as much as the computer and is 3x bulkier...

Physical things wear our and break. This is the nature of our world. Systems made of physical things are supposed to keep running uninterrupted. To do that they have to be designed in such a way that the components can be replaced effortlessly. Maintenance is not incidental. It is a process. As things are getting smarter, one of the fundamental design goals should be self-maintenance. Of course database software is not able to replace a failed hard drive. A lighting system will not screw in a new light bulb when an old one fails. But failures - in most cases - are not instantaneous. Usually a deteriorating state of a component can be detected before it stops working completely. Alerting humans and giving them enough time to react. This was one of the very pleasant experiences I had a few weeks ago. If you can call a hard drive failure a pleasant experience. But hey, hard drives do fail. But when a NAS system I run in my basement detected this condition, with enough lead time to b...

The most annoying aspect of the Apple Pencil is there is no way to carry it. Apple never took care of this problem and neither did various sleeve / cases makers. Even the premium ones, like Pad&Quill . They however realized their mistake. In an attempt to fix it, designers at Pad&Quill rushed to create an addon pencil holder , but missed again: I don't particularly like the proposed way of attaching it to the Oxford case. Fortunately the holder is flexible to attach anyway you like. And I think I've found a better place for it. At least it works for me much better. It extrudes nicely when forming a kickstand and it feels almost like taking a pen from an inkwell. And then it folds back when the case is closed.

When I was starting my adventure with low power wireless mesh networks back in 2010, radio range was the key problem. Companies developing wireless standards were looking into ways to extend the range by allowing light bulbs route messages between each other. This had been the foundation of Z-Wave and ZigBee and later Thread. Hopping a single message from A to B via C and D seemed to be the Holy Grail when the number of "smart" devices in a network was in the range of single units. Or tens of units.  In 2014 Gartner said the average number of smart / connected devices at home in 2020 would be 500 . And I believe they are close. With proliferation of widely adopted standards, such as Bluetooth, there will be nothing stopping us of putting sensors everywhere, especially for applications like occupancy sensing and asset tracking. A typical home requires not more that three "hops" for a low power radio packet to travel from one end to another. Which gives us rough...

Another summer vacation. Another set of photos. Another hours spent keeping them all organized. It is gradually getting better but still is tedious. The whole process reminds me a data warehouse. Aggregating data from variety of sources, cleansing, merging, until an acceptable result is achieved. It all starts from the fact almost any digital device today can contribute to a photo collection. A camera will take pictures. And provide time-stamp information for each, which by the way is always inaccurate. Either because the camera clock has drifted or it reset itself completely as the camera has not been charged since the previous vacation, or simply the time zone has not been set correctly. I used to have a habit of keeping the camera clocks on GMT, but this no longer helps merging together photos from several sets, as some photos (increasingly more) are taken with smartphones, and smartphones stamp them with local time, not Zulu. Phone camera apps also try to geocode the photos...