Headworx

Tesla had a dismal quarter and looking forward things look equally bad. Essentially the competition has caught up (or even overtaken) the aging S/3/X/Y product portfolio. On top of that the market is not rushing to buy electric vehicles (EVs) in millions. It almost looks like whoever wanted an EV, they already have it. The rest are just fine with so much more practical internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. To rescue the company capitalization Elon threw a bunch of new ideas during the quarterly conference calls. But none of them are really convincing. To be honest they all sound like fairy tales. But the stock went up significantly. As The Register says - you have learned nothing . So on the Full Self Driving (FSD) front we now have the robotaxi (relabelled as Cybercab). And it is coming on August 8th. It will be all smoke and mirrors. Sure the car will be displayed but it will be no different from the Optimus robot played by Elon's girlfriend dressed up as the robot. The shift fr...

It is not common that I comment or recommend power or garden tools. But this time I think it is worth highlighting how Ryobi has done it right. They've created a large and fast growing family of cordless electric tools. Something the previously leading brands like Bosch or DeWalt or Makita had not done. Now many are following but Ryobi seems comfortable maintaining the lead. In any electric product batteries are the major cost component. They also require dedicated chargers and have limited life span. So it was such a waste when every tool was coming with its own dedicated battery and charger. Perhaps that was the business model: sell more incompatible batteries, but that was destined to fail at some point. That point was when a successful brand took an opposite strategy: admit you probably need one or two batteries for the whole range of tools - from drills to trimmers to vacuum cleaners. And one universal charger. Ryobi now has over 300 compatible "ONE+" power tools an...

Minimizing the bulk and weight of electronic gadgets on the go is an everlasting challenge. As time goes by, things get more compact and there are standards like USB which definitely help. Today, in 2024, everything is so much more streamlined compared to what it was back in 2008 - see my blog back then:  https://headworx.slupik.com/2009/06/so-what-is-in-my-holiday-gadget-bag.html . Also things are different depending if you carry a laptop with you or not.  But if it is just a phone and some accessories like headphones (I love the open-ear bone conducting ones ), a smart watch (Garmin in my case) , an emergency satellite messenger (Garmin too) , you can get a set of  charging accessories down to a very small package. Here is my recent one - at 182 grams including compatibility with just about all wall sockets globally and an emergency power bank. Universal dual port USB-C + USB-A 20W charger . While not the most powerful, it is just fine to charge small devices, and at j...

In my Off Grid post about New Zealand tramping I mentioned being quite happy (if not really surprised) with the performance of the iPhone battery. If not touched it was draining less than 5% a day, and up to 20% under normal off grid use - mostly taking photos, using offline topographic maps with GPS and writing up a small journal entry at the end of the day. These statistics clearly show the phone does nothing in the background. Which is of course possible when the airplane mode is active and it does not even attempt to find a network. But the airplane mode cannot be used during normal busy days, can it? Surprisingly yes, it can. Like in an airplane you can still have WiFi active and connected. And iPhone (depending on your SIM card / cellular provider) can support "WiFi calling" which technically is tunneling the cellular connection over WiFi. While it may sound weird to many, it actually is a super useful feature. And actually one of the reasons i decided to switch to iOS...

In the "everything's possible" era we live in, there are indeed very few surprises, particularly when it comes to technology. With abundant AI, self driving cars, gigabit internet available everywhere, we are about to colonize Mars while James Webb keeps sending us postcards of black holes and galaxies formed at the very beginning of time. The lost Malaysian MH370 aircraft - it was 10 years ago - is probably one of those things which have been impossible. The worlds largest twin engine aircraft just disappeared and we have not been able to find it. Now the jaw-dropping surprise is it actually left a trace, which had not been analyzed until last year. The trace is WSPR or Weak Signal Propagation Reporter . WSPR is a protocol designed to probe global propagation paths with low power transmissions, designed by Joe Taylor, an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate in Physics. WSPR would probably stay ultra niche, but in May 2021, Richard Godfrey, an aerospace engine...

Back in February I had a blast experience hiking (tramping they call it) in fairly remote parts of the New Zealand's southern island - the West Coast and Fiordland. Packing about 10-day's worth of food on my back let me enjoy the freedom of being entirely on my own for a long time.  There have been several experiences related to what technologies / technology products do or don't work on such a trip. And interestingly - the off grid context turns the classic pyramid of needs upside down. Paper topographic maps and old school candles trump the technology achievements of the modern era. But still there are some developments worth noting. This was my first hiking trip without a dedicated camera - I only took an iPhone and was super happy with that decision. West coast hikes go through quite challenging terrain - a lot of bush bashing, very steep ascends / descends, jumping on boulders along riverbeds. Carrying as little as possible with you significantly decreases the effort a...

Offline has always been a tricky. But many apps claim to support offline mode and some are even created with the sole purpose to offer offline experience. But the truth is with offline... your mileage may vary... YouTube (premium) usually works except sometimes to start a downloaded clip it wants to check something online. Same with Spotify. Has the download feature but sometimes refuses to play downloaded content. Then there is Pocket. Created with the goal to deliver offline reading. I have been using Pocket (paid) for many years and it is super picky. Some "pocketed" web pages it renders properly but majority it does not. On the surface pocketing web pages for offline reading does not seem like a rocket science. Yes the page must be rendered first, but hey, rendering a page is one of the most executed task on any computing platform. Regardless of how much server code is involved and regardless of how much client-side scripts there are, in the end there is a human-readable ...