Headworx

Just a couple of weeks ago I was joking telling the Logitech R&D engineers to go home , as the MX2 Anywhere is already the best mouse ever made. But it turns out there is one very big pain point that can be - albeit unexpectedly - solved by a creatively designed mouse. The pain point is that mice don't work with iOS devices, such as iPads. Apple does not support the Mouse Profile over Bluetooth. They have (economic) reasons to do so, because mouse support is for many the missing link between an iPad becoming a computer. And Apple thinks that would be bad for them... But the good news is that iOS devices have very good Bluetooth implementation and support other device types very well. So here is what Swiftpoint has done: it pretends to be something else, not a mouse (I have not had time to sniff the traffic, so this is just a guess). But the bottom line is - it is a mouse that works "even on iPad". There is a small (*) explaining that it works only in selecte...

Privacy is a swinging topic. On one hand we seem to not care at all with open social media every time and everywhere. But on the other hand we start to understand. And care. Privacy is also a very important topic from a system design perspective. It is very delicate and has to be taken care of since the very beginning. In wireless networks we talk a lot about security. Key exchanges, encryption, authentication. But how about privacy? It is not all that rosy everywhere...While the modern wireless systems seem to had learned how to do proper encryption (and that includes learning basic things like a nonce), many of them don't protect privacy properly. Or even at all. The culmination of misunderstanding of privacy was at the dawn of IPv6, when we were triumphant saying that every grain of sand could have an IPv6 address, not to mention humans of course and all their [connected] belongings. The addresses would be static - of course. That means every grain of sand could be traced....

There is something going on with flash memory. It is getting more affordable than ever. This SanDisk offer on Amazon makes the case for a micro-SD card slot in a phone. Apple charges $400 for an upgrade from 512GB iPad to 1TB iPad. That is $80 per 100GB. Expensive. But the SanDisk price at $60 for 400GB means 100GB is $15. Yes you can have 100GB of flash storage for the price of a breakfast in a street cafe. This puts whole lot of things in perspective. My entire photo collection (in RAW format since 2012) is 500GB and that includes dozens of night sky exposures for stacking. I guess  typical amateur photographers don't do that. My entire music collection is 100GB. It seems an SD card is an evolutionary product. But the capacity/price shift recently has been revolutionary.

V. Altounian/Science As noted last week, things have settled a bit. It clearly seems the next big thing is going to be Artificial Intelligence (AI). Or maybe it is already and we have just failed to notice? AI has learned to cheat its creators and that is the real proof of the 'I' in AI. But leaving AI aside, here are some more down to Earth expectations that may happen or I wish would happen. GaN is proliferating into digital power components. The nature of this material is much higher power density it can support. It has already been used in the LED industry by Soraa, founded by Shuji Nakamura, the Nobel laureate. Now we are expecting a new lineup of power bricks, led by the Anker Atom serie s. Shrinking power conversion components and making them more efficient has a huge impact. Everything does power conversion. So if we make this "everything" a bit more efficient, the impact is huge. And as is the case with GaN, convenience comes bundled: less ballast to c...

I checked my Top Gear Picks 2017 post and to my surprise there are (almost) no changes to that list for 2018. This may be the sign that things have stabilized on the tech front. Or that I am aging.... I'm still using the Blackberry KeyOne . That simply means no one has come with anything phone that I could consider an upgrade. Has the smartphone industry stalled? I think I know what phone would get me excited. It'd be an iPhone XS Max, with the Google Pixel 3 camera and a USB-C port. Or the Google Pixel 3 XL with 512GB storage. Each time I turn to the Pixel phones, the lack of decent storage options puts me off. Apple, on the other hand, although it does a very proper job with the cameras, is not taking the computational photography to the level Google just did. So in the meantime i will keep enjoying the Blackberry... I'm still using the iPad heavily. Actually at the time of writing it is the 11-inch Pro with 1TB storage. While it is a technological marvel, I'd...

Testing ha become a native part of any system development. Especially for software systems (what is not a software system today, after all?). And the common sense is that there is always not enough of testing and that most systems ship with bugs that surface while the system is in use, wrecking havoc or causing minor inconveniences. One, often forgotten part of testing is user manuals and procedures. Test systems are built by engineering teams. Manual tests are run by engineers. And the engineers usually "know" how the system under test is expected to perform. Missing the gap that may exist between a system and its manual. This happened to us last week, during a fairly routine procedure of testing the integration of our software into customer's product. The product was line powered (230V~) and simply exploded after power up. We found later there was a bug on the label, where terminals for N (Neutral) and L (Live) were shifted so both L and N led to the ground plane,...

Actually the title should be long lasting battery - powered devices. It is just my afterthought on the convenience brought by portable devices that last long. I praised Garmin watches for some time and I really do love the fēnix 5 plus family for their long battery life: 2 weeks easily. Withings has taken it even further, promising 25 days of the Steel HR Sport watch. Almost a month - this is remarkable. The Blackberry Android phone goes for 3 days (or 2 on heavy use), and 10% of juice left is nothing to worry, as this means several hours of operation until it really dies. This is what keeps me from "upgrading" to more flashy phones with more powerful processors and more vibran displays. And this is still the part why I love DSLR cameras - they can keep going for a week of intense shooting on a single battery. Unlike the current generation of mirrorless that barely handle a day... Long lasting batteries combined with the ubiquity of the USB-C connector capable of Power D...