Headworx

Back in April I indicated how  quality (and performance) have been the most invisible features of a product  while people have been taking for granted. Ease of use is probably the second most invisible feature. Although some do seem to appreciate that. But only if they have previous experience in the field, something they can compare against. Otherwise it things are simple and just work, they do not get much attention. If things are simple and just work, the users just do not appreciate the underlying problem being solved is actually difficult. Like flying. Commercial air travel is probably one of the most complex accomplishment: ultra mature and ultra complex technology (materials, propulsion, predictive maintenance, navigation, safety) combined with ultra wide scale operations (pilots, traffic control, airports, security, connections, booking) on a global scale. Millions of humans do this every day and very few really appreciate the complexity. Actually most of them com...

Considering a number of business strategies it seems the best businesses are the ones addressing customers' convenience. People are soo willing to pay for that. Some assorted examples from the history are automatic transmissions, fast food chains, processed food (in general), drive-through, services coupled with smartphone apps (food delivery, personal transportation), one-click shopping with recommendations, car navigation, TV channel fishing and so on. Humans are lazy and they think they are smart when taking a bait (and getting on a hook) to make their lives easier. We can no longer cook, shift gears, read maps. We feel smart and self-satisfied while becoming less curious, less critical and less informed. Pushing ourselves into mental slavery ruled by elite masters (supported by an army of lawyers), who ruthlessly exploit our diminishing willingness and capacity to think. And it has not been like that just recently. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in Sapiens : hunter-gatherers s...

Bi-directional power interfaces are finally maturing and getting standardized. On a personal device level this has been possible thanks to USB-C ports supporting USB-PD (Power Delivery) technology. I can use my phone to charge my earbuds. Newer phones can do this even without cables, offering reverse wireless charging. The thing with energy is that there are times when it is fully abundant (a phone at home) and there are times when it is very scarce (a long hike-through trip). And it is very similar on the grid level. Thanks to wind and photovoltaic power there are times when we almost don't need any traditional power plants. But then there are periods (say chilly but windless winter evening) when we are hungry for any kilowatt produced by polluting coal plants. The grid-level solution is around the corner thanks to the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technologies.  In Germany Nissan has teamed up with Fraunhofer and Bosh for the pilot i-rEzEPT project . A Nissan Leaf serves as a larga capac...

It seems funny to admit I have been fascinated by cables and connectors . But it is much deeper than that. Back in the old days personal computers were plagued by the cable mess. Each box had a dozen or so different cables hanging out with as many as five separate ones (power, VGA, USB, audio in, audio out)  necessary at the same time to connect a monitor. Other accessories, like mice, often required separate communication (RS-232) and power cables. Because each cable had its own purpose. The power cable to deliver power, the vga cable to deliver video (but no audio), the usb cable to deliver data and the audio cables to deliver audio in one direction (hence two were often needed). Things started to converge with inventions like HDMI (audion and video in one, but no power) and USB, especially when the latter started enabling more than 2.5W (5V at 0.5A) of power. It was 15 years ago when I first called USB the Universal Supply Bus . USB had (what has been HDMI's biggest drawback) a ...

Palm Pilot was my first touch screen device. 25 years ago, it was revolutionary. It turns out Palm still lives today, in a form of a tiny Android phone - the Palm Phone. This device is useless as a primary phone, as Palm went a bridge too far squeezing the battery such that it lasts half a day on light use. But with volume and weight of 25% of a typical 2021 phone, it is great for casual use. It runs proper Android and just about any app you may want. And Palm did really a good job customizing the UI to fit the small screen - the launcher is first class. It can be a backup on the road. Broken screens happen. and this thing is so tiny it is no brainer to carry it as a backup device when traveling. It is a great "fitness" phone, if you need one. Again the tiny nature helps with any activity and it is waterproof. There is even a specially designed custom armband which puts the on the forearm - easy to navigate things like music or calls. For me it is primarily an audiobooks-on-t...

Electric cars are surely the future, but most brands have been offering just faster horses. From Teslas to Volkswagens it has been a yawn... Better 0-60, more touch screens. No qualitative change. And that is precisely why I'm so excited by Stellantis'  Citroën AMI . What a great car! I own two vehicles. One is a special version of 2005 Subaru Forester STI . Probably the most fantastic car ever built by Subaru. My other one is the Boosted Rev - an electric scooter. Probably, again, the best electric scooter ever built. Unfortunately also the one that brought the company which created it to bankruptcy. The STI and the Rev have many things in common - they both are sleepers. Phenomenal performance and handling in ordinary looks. I use the Rev almost everyday from April till October. It is great on warm sunny days. Not that great when the weather is cold. And terrible when it rains. And this is when I switch to the STI. But driving a performance car on crowded city streets is an ...

On the positive side Apple AirTags are great. Tiny, long lasting, ultra-wideband enabled (to enable directional indicators when locating a lost one). And of course, the key advantage of this system is the crowdsourced network of billions of iPhones globally, which can help reporting a lost device. And on the surface the system is designed to protect privacy. But not all that glitters is gold. Let's scratch that surface a bit. While AirTags are designed to protect the owner, they do not protect against malicious owners. The simplest use case is that I buy an AirTag and drop it in a pocket of a person I want to track. Instantly I have that person pinpointed on a map, in real time. A stalker's dream. Technically if that person happens to have an iPhone, it will eventually start alerting about a "foreign" tracking device she carries, but that is only on an iOS device. Non-iOS users are in the cold. Secondly, AirTags internally do not implement a secure environment and th...