Headworx

After a really long and thorough preparation, the Namibia / Botswana / Zimbabwe trip went way over the initial expectations. Over three weeks we covered almost 4000 miles, more than 80% of that was gravel and off road. There are close to 2000 photos, which I'm trying to reduce down to about 300 before publishing. I could go for hours telling what worked (many things) and what didn't (almost nothing...), but here is the list of the indisputable winners: The Hankook DynaPro MT tyres. They carried our HiLux Dakar through the entire distance with no single puncture (although we had two spares). This is a phenomenal track record and those of you who do some off road trips know how important it is to have absolutely dependable tires. The Tracks4Africa maps, both paper ones and the electronic edition loaded on the Garmin GPS platform. It is just unbelievable how precise and dependable they are. Nobody should even think of self driving there without these maps. The Delorme inRea...

I have just had a couple of novice interactions with GoPro. It is one of the worst UX I have ever had. Tiny LCD, a set of ambiguous buttons, the battery losing power, especially when WiFi is enabled. It is hard to understand and explain a product like that is having such a market success. But being successful does not mean you couldn't be even more successful or at least generate less frustration for users. Of course using a phone a a remote keyboard and display via a wireless connection is obvious. They even try this over WiFi, but wifi brings at least three problems here: It draws a lot of power and impacts the already very poor battery life It has to be turned on and off and it is not obvious how to do it The discovery process and securing the channel is not that straightforward either It all could be solved easily by implementing a Bluetooth Smart radio on GoPro. It could be always on, not affecting the battery. It could be automatically detected and create a secure c...

Security of software - based systems is very high. It may sound weird because we keep on hearing about malware and hacks and holes. But a typical software - based system is far more secure today than typical hardware, be it a door lock or a padlock or even car's ignition system. Opening a locked door to a house or an apartment poses no problem to a professional thief. But there is one fundamental difference which makes software based systems such attractive targets. A software attack is scalable. When you find a way to break it, you may bring a huge number of systems down. It is yet another scenario where bits scale and atoms do not. Breaking into thousand houses requires a significant effort from the attacker, even if opening a single door is easy. In software, when you find a way to break in, usually breaking into million systems requires the same effort as breaking into a single one. This is what makes software - based systems so vulnerable. Not because the defenses are we...

In his January 2015 blog , Scott Jenson writes: we just assume there won’t be many smart devices in our homes because it is so damn hard to put them there in the first place! With the two previous standards in place, it would be child’s play to add items to a home and it would quickly change this from a game of things to a game of swarms With my "live in the future and build what's missing" motto, I arrived at several hundred connected devices at home some time ago. And interesting problems emerge when you have 500 devices around. E.g. with the "industry standard" failure rate, I have several nodes on my network dead every day. For many reasons: depleted batteries, sensors being eaten by dogs, taken away by kids, flooded by rain after being pierced by birds (they especially like the swimming pool floating thermometer), etc. I also once had several radio controlled relays I built into some legacy products (coffee makers etc) and their power supplies died m...

Smarthome platforms (both the real ones and the fundraising mockups) keep springing like mushrooms and still (!) most of them are focused on using a phone or a similar touchscreen device to control the "smart" environment. Sorry, fancy remote control is not smart at all. It is just this: remote control. Smart is something more. Something much more. Much more difficult. Scott Jenson argues home automation is an EasyHard problem and I do agree. Even the simplest rules, like operating a water valve , are not that straightforward. Rules handling lights in a bedroom are much more complicated and require more sensors and also much more sophisticated engine processing them. I've been playing with this very issue for three years now in my home and the result is almost acceptable now. But before we get to the rules engines, we need to arrange the inputs signals for them. This means sensors, many of them. Motion, presence, gesture, temperature, humidity, air quality, ambie...

Something's been wrong with my credit card balance. I keep track of all my transactions and so does my Bank. But my balance was not matching the balance presented by the Bank. I took the effort to dig down to the details. Counting the beans carefully, I realized the Bank's system was making errors when adding up numbers. I nailed the problem down to a single screenshot and forwarded it to the Bank, together with all my account details. They emailed me back asking to contact their call center and promised to solve MY problem. My problem is I am overcharged 10 cents. Which I don't care about. Nobody would. But. Dear Mr. Bank. If somebody presents you a proof your system makes errors while adding numbers, well, then YOU have a problem. And don't try to help me. Help yourself! Run to nail the problem down and solve it.

I've been having many emotional ups and downs related to smart watches. I was pitching them just to realize they do not really bring any real value while adding the bulk of yet another charger to my travel gear. For the last 6 months or so I have been wearing the Moto360 which is by far the nicest smart watch ever (Apple included). But it has two serious drawbacks: has to be recharged everyday and the charging cradle is bulky. Yes the cradle is nice as a desk stand but I am spending more than half of my life now on a plane and carrying the bulky charging cradle has not been what I really want. I have also been carrying a Bluetooth headset in my carry on backpack. Namely the Plantronics Legend. Very nice headset in a clever recharging box. But when I saw the Huawei Talkband B2 I gladly traded in the Moto360 and the Plantronics for this simple Smart Watch. The Talkband is ingenious. It is a simple stylish smart watch with a touch screen. It also doubles as a Bluetooth headset...