Headworx

So is Amazon running scared by Barnes & Noble? I have to admit my expectations were set high last Monday when Amazon announced Kindle was available worldwide. The start was excellent. Ordered the same day on Monday, shipped from the USA on Tuesday, delivered by DHL just two days later passing a customs clearance. This is the current record time for any item ordered from the USA to Poland. In te meantime, on Wednesday, they kindly credited me back with $20, due to "Consolidation of family of 6" Kindles." (whatever this means besides aligning with the price of B&N's Nook ). Unpacking the device was reminding me unpacking the first iPod for the first time. The feeling of a device of a completely new class... It was turned off and there was an image on the screen. I thought it was a piece of paper to peel off... But actually this was a displayed image... WOW! "It needs to be charged" - I thought and looked in the box for a power supply. First was the ca...

A few days ago a friend of mine lost her Yahoo mailbox. She was fooled by a phishing page to give her password and soon the phisher got control of her mailbox, forcing her out by changing the password to his own. A standard recovery should be to reset the password and change it to a new one, forcing the phisher out. As it is practiced in such scenarios, an automated process tries to figure out if a person claiming the rights to the account is authentic, by asking predefined questions set up when the compromised account was created. And very often people just do not know the answers to their very own questions, making the recovery impossible, as they cannot prove their identity. For some reason Web sites have been ignoring a perfect second factor authentication device - a personal mobile phone. Years ago phones have been tied to places. Today phones are as personal as toothbrushes. Everybody has their own. Phone numbers are even more personal. With mobile number portability being a sta...

Last week I've reached an important milestone in a lifetime long project of setting up a (multi) home network by setting up an IPSEC tunnel between two distant locations. Actually the real distance is not really THAT far - about a half an hour drive, but in Internet terms they could be separated by an ocean. I do not have too many practical applications for this setup yet, the entire project is mixed fun and education. There are many hosts on both networks, most of them are tiny dedicated computers, doing their everyday jobs. Among them are NAS servers (replicating contents between the two locations, using rsync protocol). Or weather sensors, talking over IP to the central data collecting unit, that also does charting and other calculations. There are cameras set up, so staying in the city during winter I can have a look at my summer country cottage. There are digital satellite receivers sharing crypto cards, so we can watch TV in either location, without physically taking the equ...

I heard about the OCZ NIA a number of times. But my perception was they were still in the marketing phase (before production started). To my surprise the product has been actually available in OCZ retail chain for some time now. Mine arrived last Wednesday. A metal box with a size of a pack of cigarettes, USB cable on one end and a rubber head band with a small proprietary connector on the other. All packed in a big box (probably to justify the price - I payed ~$150 - quite steep for a HID controller) with high quality finishing touch. The only disappointment was a small paper insert advising to download the most recent drivers before plugging the thing in. The drivers are working - and this is the good part - even on my Windows 7 laptop. I think I should tell what NIA is... NIA stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, and is a HID (Human Interface Device) controller that lets you control your PC (and I do mean PC - sorry, no Mac's at the moment) with impulses your brain sends to vario...

A warning note tonight. Flash memory wears out. And fails. We are prepared to pay premium price for the latest and greatest SSD drives that lift performance of our systems to then next level. While the performance side is true indeed, we have to face one serious risk: flash (solid state) memory is generally not safe. At some point in time my SSD drive will refuse to write data. But this will probably be caught by the operating system (at least this is what I hope...). Or worse - it will silently lose stored data and will refuse to read it. This is a relatively high risk. Why do I write about this? Because I have just had a really bad week, with four devices that failed due to flash wear problem. The first was the Toshiba Network Camera. It simply refused to store new configuration changes and went dead after I tried to upgrade its firmware. The second was the accompanying NSLU-2 based little FTP server. It rebooted one day and reported there were no USB drives connected to it (well......

So after a week with x64 Windows 7, I have to confirm the Earth is suddenly a better place to live :) As I said a week ago - after getting here from Vista, there is no going back. Everything is so much better... The only thing that has suffered is the battery life. Remember I was getting an average of 8 hours on my x200s with low power setting. And it could have been stretched up to more than 10 hours... Now my power meter shows around 7 hours when I start working on a fully charged battery. That is about 15% less... My theory here is the screen backlight. Screen can take as much as 50% of the total energy consumed by a laptop computer. In my opinion the long battery life of the Lenovo x200s is achieved partly due to the Intel L9400 "Santa Rosa" processor optimizations, and partly due to LED backlight technology (previous display technologies were using fluorescent lamps). The display in the x200s can be very bright, so usually I run one of the lowest backlight settings. And ...

Ufff... I have just (almost) finished migrating my system (the Lenovo x200s) from Windows Vista (32-bit) to Windows 7 (64-bit). And I feel the result is worth the effort. It took me a lot of time - I started two days ago. The upgrade process itself was triggered by my hard drive running out of space after taking more than two thousand pictures during the summer holidays. As some of you may remember, I have been using the 200GB Hitachi FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive for the last 18 months... It has been performing flawlessly... But now it is simply not spacious enough... And I am not going to give away the convenience of having all my personal data and files with me at all times. This is also the reason why I have opted for the FDE drive. The FDE concept is simple - the drive has a security chip in it and always encrypts data. You control the encryption by setting a drive password in BIOS. With no password, the drive happily releases the key used to decrypt data when passing it to t...