Headworx

I dropped my Blackberry on the floor and it died. Bad luck - it happens. As it was just days before leaving for a complex business trip (KRK-ZRH-SFO-LAX-SFO-YVR-LHR-FRA-KRK-AMS-FRA-BKK-SYD-LAX-ZRH-KRK), I decided to buy a new one while sending the broken for a repair. Despite running fairly recent Android (7.1.1) it took me almost a day to restore the new phone to the state where I left the old one. It failed to install some widgets due to some race conditions around authentication. It failed to restore the account links between the apps (both Pocket and Feedly "forgot" I used the Google account to log in. Feedly forgot the linked Pocket too. Banking apps required re-running the process of authorizing the fingerprint sensor. All Bluetooth pairings were lost. And the Google Music offline collection reported finishing the sync process after around 85GB (previously it was 93GB). So somewhere I lost about 8GB of music, but not really sure where and what. In short: device mi...

Two nice additions since the original post on USB converters. The Type-C male to A-female will likely be more and more in use, as host ports migrate from A to C. There will be tons of accessories with male A plugs and this one makes them all compatible. The second one is the Type-C female to B-micro male: yes it converts a Type-C cable into and old micro-B variant. Anyway with this set a single C-C cable is capable of connecting anything to anything. Micro-B-female to mini-B male. There are still devices using mini-B female sockets... Male-A to female C. Makes an old laptop compatible with new Type-C devices. Male-C to female A. Does the opposite: new laptops (or phones) and an old accessory. Micro-B to lightning. Makes i-devices compatible with USB. Micro-B to Apple 30-pin. Makes old i-devices compatible with USB.  Apple pencil. This is the weirdest one, but yes it is useful when you want to use a cable to charge the pencil. Female Type-C to micro-B. Use a Type-C cable t...

Every now and then when I'm on stage pitching Bluetooth mesh, I hear people commenting this is yet another standard. And that we have too many standards already. Which is true, but only to some extent. Multiple ways of doing things is a completely natural evolution step. In every category. Take airliners: it took the industry almost 100 years to figure out and get to the point when the standard design of a jetliner is a 2-engine turbofan: it is hard to get down to a single engine (redundancy, thrust symmetry) and anything more than two brings efficiency down. B747s and A380s are the designs of the past. Widebody models will be narrowed down to A350s, B777s, B787s and narrow body to A320 and B737 families. The signs of convergence are seen everywhere. One of the most recent developments has been Qi - the wireless charging. A longtime favorite of many, positioned to win when Apple finally decided to use it rather than develop its own standard . And just recently Powermat droppe...

Application by application, category by category, wireless is taking over wired connections. Anyone remember WiFi around year 2000? It was hardly working... Today? It is really rare to find a hot sport that has connectivity issues. And almost nobody uses wired LAN in an office. Same with mobile phones. Remember land line phones? Remember choppy mobile calls quality? It is all rock steady and crystal clear today. Especially when high quality, wideband  audio codecs kick in on both ends of the connection. High speed Internet was one of the remaining applications ruled by wired. It still is where the "wire" was changed from copper to glass (fiber). But not everyone is lucky to get fiber to the home. Those stuck with copper DSL could only sit and wait. I was among them. Until I decided to try wireless, the mobile wireless offered by mobile carriers. It is simple - go to a shopping mall, visit T-Mobile or Vodafone or whoever is your mobile carrier and ask them for a WiFi rou...

There are signs of maturing technologies for wireless power delivery. And I don't mean proximity power delivery like Qi, which is present in many Android phones and the latest iPhones. We're talking of wireless power delivery at a distance. 2018 should bring the first products to the market, and I'd expect some announcements as early as at the 2018 CES. What has so far come to my attention: Pi says it has already delivered. It uses resonant receivers. Energous has just received an FCC certification for their power-at-a distance wireless charging systems Power by Proxi (I saw their working demo in 2016) was acquired by Apple . Again, this is based on resonance. One thing that keeps me still a bit skeptical is influence of these power transfer technologies on human health. And here I'm speaking from my own experience. About 30 years ago (mid 1980's) I built my first stereo wireless headset (yes this had been 15 years earlier than the first version of Blueto...

2017 has definitely been a year of maturing technologies. From a road warrior perspective this means the gear is less bulky and more dependable. And the gadget bag getting lighter. Here is my personal hall of fame, which also reflects what I carry in my bag on every business trip. Blackberry KeyOne . This is the phone that ended the era of power banks. Depending on usage I charge it every 2 or 3 days and it has never run out of juice. 10.5 inch iPad. Serves as reading, research and entertainment device. I tried the 12.9 inch version which proved to be too bulky to fit in a seat pocket or on an economy class table. But I still use the same self-made kickstand. It also serves as a 2nd monitor for my windows laptop. 512GB memory is the key, as I can carry with me all my music, photos, books, research documents as well as several movies. Offline experience matters when you average 15k miles in the air every month. Logitech MX Anywhere 2S mouse. Ultra responsive and precise on any ...

One of the promises of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that it allows things to speak. Or even more precisely enables products and services that listen to things. Product maintenance is a great example of a such service. Imagine a lighting system on an airport. There's probably 50 thousand lights installed and statistically around 10 of them may be failing every day. Now having a service that precisely pinpoints the 10 that have just failed (or a single one as it fails) is clearly a value. But this is passive, reactive, poll-type device monitoring. Ping it periodically and once it stops responding, assume it needs to be checked, as it has probably failed. But actually if things can speak, we can shift from passive and reactive to proactive monitoring. A thing may be able to indicate that it will fail. If it is a lamp, it may report it has worked for a given number of hours at full power, so the performance has significantly degraded. If it is a power supply, it may report it ...