Headworx

Increasingly I've been leaving my life on conference calls. Office, hotel room, airport lounge, almost any place is good to launch WebEx or GoToMeeting and attend a call. Over time I've leaned how to use a set of tools, gear, and best practices. For example the Jabra Speak 510 has proven to be an undisputed champion of voice clarity. Dead simple installation, awesome voice, both in a very lightweight package. Unfortunately the conferencing software lags behind. WebEx on iPad is far, far from what the desktop version offers. Starting with simple gaps like not being able to browse meetings. And one would think smartphones and tablets are designed to be the multimedia communication devices. Cisco somehow does not seem to understand the importance of mobile and has never successfully implemented the Mobile First strategy. There is a huge gap in user experience when using consumer oriented applications like Whatsupp, compared to professional communicators / conferencing tools...

The question about range of Bluetooth Low Energy radios is coming back like a boomerang. While it becomes less of an issue when mesh topology is used to network Bluetooth nodes, a single-hop range is important in many applications. When using Bluetooth 4, the practical range, demonstrated by us two years ago , was up to 250m in a smartphone - to - a peripheral setup and up to 500m in a peripheral - to - peripheral setup. The difference has been in the sensitivity, power output and antennas used. For range - optimized peripherals we've been using a front-end PA (Power Amplifier) combined with an LNA (Low Noise Amplifier). The Bluetooth radio we've been using had -95dBm sensitivity and 0dBm output power. The LNA was adding another 3dBm on the sensitivity side and a full +10dBm on the output side. So the peripheral - to - peripheral range has been 108dB (0dBm + 10dBm - (-(95+3)dBm)). Bypassing all theoretical calculations, in many repetitive tests this was giving us reliable...

As much as the Web is great, it has one downside: it is not always available. This may sound weird to California residents, but yes, there are other worlds out there, and offline is and will be there and simply cannot be ignored. Personally I find the best "content consumption" opportunities when being offline. A long-haul flight is one such example. And while airlines do their best to keep us connected when airborne, the in-flight wifi is both expensive and not very reliable. Pocket addresses this very opportunity and while being late to the party, I enjoy it a lot. The integration of Pocket into Feedly is awesome and extremely efficient in sorting news feeds. I absolutely love Pocket's article view: the content nicely formatted and stripped of the advertising bloat. The only moment when Pocket fails is when Feedly comes across a PDF file. Pocket can't handle PDFs in offline mode and struggles with them even when online. Looking for an alternative solution ...

A steering wheel has been one of the most widely adopted UX standard. Everybody knows what it is for and how to use it. But as cars are getting stuffed with increasingly more functions, a steering wheel is not enough. Many of the new functions migrate either to the central console (usually with a large display) or to various sticks and handles around the steering wheel. Recently I booked a standard Ford through one of the car rental companies and they proudly "upgraded" me to a Mercedes. I usually don't fancy such upgrades, but wanted to be nice to the guy behind the counter, so did not object. The CLS is a nice car, but it seems to have too much of everything and especially the initial experience has been very confusing (not to say frustrating). After starting the engine (good old ignition key) I could not find the gear shift stick. It took me a while to realize Mercedes creatively moved it to what usually is a wiper lever on the right side of a wheel. Wipers, on t...

The "proper" Internet routing protocols are based on a concept of a "next hop" address. When a packet arrives at a router, it takes the destination address and based on the routing table determines the address of "the next hop" the packet should be sent to. And forwards it to this next hop router. This works reasonably well when the routes are not changing frequently. And when the next hop is available most of the time. What seems weird, some wireless architects try to apply this concept to low power wireless networks, where the routes do change frequently (wireless nodes have freedom to roam around) and availability of the next hop is not given. Wireless networks change topology not only due to the nodes physically moving, but also due to the noise floor of the channels fluctuating continuously. A node within 60dB (path loss) range is usually available (but this is just a couple of meters), but a node 90dB away may be falling down to be 110dB away jus...

I keep investigating the power drain experienced on my Blackberry Priv phone. And actually I'm getting some consistent results. The screenshots are taken at the end of days that were very similar from the phone usage perspective. And the one on the right has 50% more juice left. The first option that helps running longer is disabling 4G/ LTE in the Cellular networks menu. Clearly when switch to HSPA+/UMTS/GSM helps while still giving very decent mobile data performance. The second option, with results illustrated by the attached screenshots, is one I have almost entirely forgotten about. It is the Physical Web in Google Chrome. It is off by default so most people are not affected. I turned it on months ago and then simply forgot about its existence. It does very little but means a lot to the beacon industry, as it is meant to resolve signals from Bluetooth beacons into useful content links. It runs in a background continuously scanning for Bluetooth advertising packets. I am ...

Last week I posted on the airline industry racing for newly designed aircraft built of new composite materials to shave hundreds of tonnes of weight that do not have to be kept airborne. This is pure physics that dictates technology choices when designing a well performing airliner. Steel and aluminum are the two most popular materials used in ground and sea transportation today: cars, trucks, railroads, trains, ships. But you simply cannot use steel and even using aluminum becomes less of an option today when building an airliner. The same is true when trying to take technologies used in wired communication networks and apply them to wireless networks. This just does not work, because the physics of electromagnetic radiation in radio frequencies are fundamentally different from the physics of a copper wire or of a strand of glass. Fundamentally it starts with wireless being much more lossy, due to interference. Smartscrapers surround us. The density of wireless IoT radios toda...