Headworx

Two years ago the global pandemic followed by a war in Europe must have sounded like total fiction. Yet both has happened. And while we do not have control over mutations of viruses, wars are started by us, humans. And in most cases there is ego and business behind each war. Which is terrible because people are dying just because a group of mad men starts a series of actions leading to thousands of innocent deaths. Just to satisfy the ego. And/or get richer.  Just months ago it was unthinkable a war would erupt in Europe. We were living in a nirvana, busy with inventing apps and services which make it more convenient to have a lunch delivered or make it more entertaining to chat with each other bu using new emoticons. We must remember one thing: mad leaders do not act alone. They are always surrounded by a group looking to benefit from the mad man's actions. This was exactly the case before the WWII. The top industrialists who benefited from WWI (despite Germany losing it) were loo...

The Polish anti-EU government has recently enraged the opposition electorate with the advertising campaign suggesting the EU climate policy is responsible for 60% of the skyrocketing energy costs. While of course such statement is false and misleading and spending public money of the member state to blackmail European Union is criminal, there is, unfortunately, more to this. The anti-polluting climate policy is expensive. And the expenses are directly, or indirectly, paid by the consumers. It is all because, as of today, the clean energy is simply much more expensive. This does not apply to countries like Norway (which has abundant water plants) nor France, which wisely has gone nuclear for many years. But everywhere else burning fossil fuels. or coal in particular, is the cheapest. And the dirtiest. Which is why "modern" countries, like the EU, pride themselves with leading the green energy movement. But at the same time China has been exempt from most climate - preserving c...

In the previous era software updates were significant events. Not only they did not happen automatically, but even to check if there was one, you had to do some special things. Look up a web page, download the installer package, uninstall the previous version, remembering to save settings somewhere, then run the new install and restore the settings. Then appstores came around, popping up notification bubbles which were inviting to download and install updates. Now the updates are gone. Not that they are not anymore, but we mostly just don't see them. Both Apple and Google have hidden the updates and they execute kind of behind the scenes. And it works for most people, But then there are some devices which can be considered a part of the "infrastructure" and updating them fully automatically probably is not the best idea. I have the Firewalla boxes on my home networks and despite being very happy with them I have never pulled the trigger to switch the networks to be Firew...

I could write a book on history of my interactions with Garmin support. And there would be multiple chapters in it. Generally speaking they are good people, dealing with software which has bugs and is poorly documented (for support purposes). The two major incidents I had, both ended up with Garmin physically replacing my devices with new ones. And I have reasons to believe that both are just software issues, which could be fixed by fixing the bugs and providing an update. Actually for the first issue ( cannot simultaneously play audio and record an activity ) I have a proof it is a software bug, which I nailed down after I got the replacement unit. Basically the bug is resource (memory) starvation when additional maps are uploaded to the watch. It seems each additional map consumes some RAM (file system? index?), and in the end there is insufficient memory to run some functions simultaneously. The catch is the factory reset does not remove the uploaded maps, so even after a factory re...

On the astrophotography front I am happy to report about my recent wedge upgrade. A wedge is an important part of a tracking camera mount, a kind of mount which compensates for the rotation of Earth and allows long(er) exposures.  Precision of a tracking head directly impacts the quality of long exposure photos of the (night) sky. Equally important is the stability of a tripod as well as sturdiness of a wedge, which must be calibrated for each session. Some of you may remember I have been using the Fornax Lightrack II tracking head which offers a great balance between precision and portability. Initially I had tried several 3rd party wedges with the Lightrack, but all of them were shaky and flimsy, so in the end I decided on getting the original wedge from Fornax. It did the job, being very sturdy, but with that came the weight and the size. Also the Fornax wedge was difficult to align precisely, as the mechanism lacked a method for (very) fine adjustments.  Quite recently Wi...

I have an electric water boiler which is probably responsible for majority of my electricity bill. A hot bath or a hot shower are the luxuries I enjoy every day. And heating water consumes a lot of energy. This is because water has high specific heat capacity. To heat 100 liters of water from 15 to 60 degrees Celsius requires about 5kWh. An average car consumes 0.20 kWh per kilometer. So this energy would allow a car to drive for 25 kilometers.  The high heat capacity of water also means it is a quite effective energy storage. Or - in other words - it can stay hot (in a properly insulated tank) for quite a long time. This also means the 100 liters I need for a bath in the morning could be heated at any time during the day. In particular during the period when we have oversupply of energy (when the Sun shines and wind blows and people are not taking baths and the industrial machines are switched off). It is a dead simple idea. An I thought it was only where I lived that this idea wa...

Enjoying the second year of relative slowdown across the board, I do not have too much "gear"noise to offer. But having said that, there are several items I really enjoyed throughout 2021. And one of them undeniably was the Palm Phone . Make no mistake, I did not use it as my primary phone, which BTW the Blackberry has continued to be (one of my top picks for 2017 ). But the Palm was with me on many occasions. Especially on the trail runs, where I enjoy listening to variety of audio content. About half of the runs (which I continue doing daily at a very consistent level), I had only the Garmin watch with me, loaded with the podcasts I subscribe to. But there are other content sources which do not transfer that easily to the watch. Among them are Audible audiobooks, which can be copied over to the watch, but that requires transcoding them to the MP3 format. The transcoding itself is not that difficult, but they end up being big long files and the Garmin does not have a proper...