Headworx

TSLA has been one of the most "emotional" stocks in 2022. Rising for no reason to absolutely irrational  levels and then dropping like a stone. What is interesting is what were the drivers for that behavior. The fall is probably much easier to explain: it is back to reality. Recession is on the horizon and as a car maker Tesla does not have any inherent advantage. The autonomous driving software does not work (not a surprise, as this is one of the most challenging problems to solve) and the rest - batteries, electric drive trains, software subsystems are equivalent to many other EVs. To be honest (without diving deep into the details), it is a car like may other cars. Some like it, some don't, but in the end there is nothing special about it. In other words, the competition has caught up and now it is a matter of individual taste, and even more importantly, even a decision to own a car at all. The rise was driven entirely by hype and led to the 2022 peak of irrational exu...

The legacy - originally Japanese - photo camera business has been increasingly challenged by smart phones. This is obvious now to almost everyone and it is hard not to admit the SLR, and even the mirrorless cameras, have become a niche of a niche of a niche. Of course this was inevitable, as many (most?) people are just fine with the photo quality offered by today's phones. And the problem is the overall user experience - from taking a photo to having it corrected and archived or shared with others. Nothing has changed there for the last 20 years. Clumsy cables, memory card readers, unintuitive software. I remember it took me many hours of tutorial videos to understand the concept and the basic features of Adobe Lightroom. On the other hand anyone can start using Apple Photos or Google Photos without any learning nor training. My curiosity has pushed me recently into making time lapse video clips. It is a pain using a DLSR. You need to manually calculate all exposure parameters tha...

I have found myself in a pretty unusual situation - between a hammer an a hard place. It started with a super ordinary transaction at Best Buy, purchasing an Apple gift card. The gift card did not work, saying "the code is invalid". I reached out to Apple support and after going through the usual checks "have you typed in the code correctly?" a human support person pick the issue up and quickly explained to me that "this gift card was cancelled at the place of purchase". And that the only option was to contact the Best Buy store. I tried Best Buy's online chat but the agent was of not much help either. He was apologetic, but the conclusion was to ride back to the store and "the customer service will help you". So I did. Actually the store manager happened to be the customer service person, so without being forwarded like a hot potato, he quickly produced the "POS transaction fingerprint" (a log file spanning 6 pages when printed) an...

As briefly mentioned in the Nov 6 post , it was time to replace the dying battery in my iPad. Apple does not do that. I mean, they do, but instead of replacing the battery they sell you a new iPad (the same model and configuration) and you give them the old one. This is clearly because of the super low "repairability" score mostly due to the "Gobs of adhesive hold most everything in place, making all repairs more difficult.". A local non-Apple-authorized service shop offered the battery replacement so I was eager to accept this offer. It took them a week after which they returned me the device with a new battery but broken WiFi (and Bluetooth). There was clearly something wrong with the 2.4GHz antenna, as WiFi reception was bad and Bluetooth was choppy. I returned them the device, they kept if for another week and returned in the same state - broken WiFi. Clearly they did not have skills nor testing tools / procedures to to fix what they broke. And I was afraid the...

The advertisement of the new Volkswagen T-ROC highlights variety of technological features as differentiators and advantages. Among them are touch controls on the steering wheel . This definitely LOOKS cool. At the same time Ars Technica reports that " After complaints, Volkswagen will ditch capacitive steering wheel controls ". Touch controls work for screens. Period. I have not seen any other implementation of touch which trumps old school mechanical. Be it mice with touch scroll-wheel emulation or the Bose glasses with touch-based volume or the car steering wheel. Or even the original iPods. Capacitive touch works in laboratory conditions. But it breaks so easily in real life. Drops of water and gloves are the most typical issues rendering capacitive touch inoperative. Of course this is the only technology today which works for touch screens, so there is no alternative. And we basically know we should take gloves off before operating a phone and that it does not work when...

The key problem with the Internet is trust. Or lack of it. There is tons of information. It is just almost impossible to tell for sure what is real and what is fake.  Interestingly it is much easier for machines to verify what to trust, because of the established authentication protocols based on widely adopted cryptographic standards. For humans it is just a jungle of click-baits. Ultimately what we verify is what we see. And what we see is rendered by applications, displayed on screens. And very often what we see looks legit while it is not. The whole problem of scam and phishing.  And it takes years to build the trust. Then, as Elon Musk demonstrated during his week at Twitter, it is just a moment to ruin the reputation. [For those who were not following: Twitter had had a "blue mark" program for high profile celebrities and institutions. Musk started selling this mark for $8 to anyone, without verification. So there was an eruption of imposter accounts, all granted the Tw...

Passkeys have been heralded the final nail into the password coffin. And I do agree this is a great step/milestone and I'm really looking forward to have this enabled across all devices and all applications. But as lots of us will benefit from this rare development which increases both security and ease of use (typically these things are opposite), there is the growing "layer 8" security attack surface. Which is the attack on people who are unfamiliar with how things really work. Probably most of the vulnerabilities will lie around the ownership and protection of personal devices (which are now holding all the keys). Just to illustrate the issue. The battery in my several years old iPad has been dying and I decided to have it replaced. The standard Apple procedure is "give us your old iPad and we will give you back a refurbished one". I did not like this procedure as it required erasing the old device and reinstalling everything on the new (refurbished) one. Ev...