Headworx

Hotel TVs are one of the artifacts of the past. No hotel probably even thinks of providing a room without a TV. Sure, you can have a room with a shared bathroom or without a window. But there is always a TS set. I wonder who watches them. These days most people watch their personalized content. Typically they are just fine with the endless scroll on social media but some do watch YouTube or other paid (subscription) Internet-based video services. And then they arrive at a hotel and do what? Watch the broadcast TV? I don't think so. At least I don't do it. Although it would be nice from time to time to watch something from a bigger distance and on a bigger screen (bigger than my 10" iPad). Some time ago I added a nice 90-degree USB-C - to - HDMI adapter to the cable bag  (other than that there have been no updates, and I'm very happy about the "cable" things have stabilized, mostly due to the USB-C all-capable standard). This adapter has two use cases. The pri...

Despite photography (electronic photography) continuing to be a category where most consumer product investments go, managing a photo library remains an unsolved problem. It works at a basic level thanks to mobile apps like Google Photos, but anything more advanced is full of process / conceptual gaps and a serious content management challenge. This is the reason why the compact / prosumer camera segment died. People simply got lost in the complexity of managing the photo sets, including how they access the photos on the road (when they do not have access to a computer), where / how they do edits and how they backup and share the photos. Things are super simple if you just have a phone. You take a photo, it gets geo-tagged and time-stamped automatically and gets uploaded to the cloud. Then you do some retouching edits and they are applied with an option to undo/redo on all "copies" (local / cloud) of the photo. Timestamping always uses a properly synchronized clock because th...

My trusty phone is aging. It's got a new battery and still works for days on a charge. But things start working slow. I believe this is is mostly due to the size of RAM (4GB) as most of "today's" phones have 8-12GB. RAM is being filled up with apps and when a new app is started, it takes time for the memory manager to clean up the RAM to make room for the launched app. And the other day I found what you can see on the attached screenshot - a configuration panel which controls which apps are loaded on startup. Clearly too many. I started turning them, off and then I realized most of them I did not actually used anymore. This led me to take a while (and yes it was a long while) to uninstall unused apps. I probably got rid of 80% of the apps. Of course I could remember why they ended up being installed but very often it was just a momentary use, contributing over the years to the app clutter. So there were apps I no longer used at all and there were apps I no longer used...

- "So you did not manage to release the product by the end of December as planned?" - "We didn't as almost half ot the month was eaten by the holiday season - Christmas and New Year" Oh how many times I heard that... Due to the surprise of Christmas and New Year happening barely a week from each other at the end of December we could not complete this or that. Yes, some people are really surprised Christmas in on Dec 25 and New Year starts on Jan 1. This is not a joke. This is a fact. Same with Summer holidays. There is always lament about the backlog after returning to the office after a week or two of vacation absence. Another surprise. People often talk about personal productivity tools. As you may know , I do not use almost any of that. Instead, I have developed a discipline of walking thorough the calendar, day by day and seein how much I would be able to accomplish in a day / week / month ahead. That helps me offer reliable commitments and avoid overpromisi...

Continuing the series on designing for longevity, a couple of thoughts on skimping on hardware.  Of course less capable chips are less expensive. They even do not need to be less costly to manufacture, but simply a smaller / slower chip is positioned to be a lower cost part in comparison to high end parts. But because most of the products today are defined by software and software upgrades, contrary to hardware upgrades, do not have negative impact on the environment, it is fundamentally important the hardware should have room to accommodate such updates for many years. Skimping on hardware is simply a false economy. Typically we are talking about sub-dollar or single-digit dollar amounts for a chip versus the costs of replacing the whole product built around that chip. One example is my (now 7 years old) Philips Android TV. It has a nice 55" 4k LED panel and a good set of speakers. Unfortunately the Android subsystem (which was already limited at the time of purchase) is complete...

Solid state electronic components seemed to me like a liberation from the problem of wear and tear. Any product containing mechanical parts has been subject to wear and the limited lifetime of those mechanical products has been something obvious and natural. Solid state has brought the new concept of "no moving parts" and to many it was like "finally these products can live forever".  Unfortunately "forever" for typical electronic solid state products means just a couple of years. And capacitors are in most part responsible for this failure. Initially I thought this problem applied only to electrolytic capacitors , which I have been regularly replacing in some of my aging gear. Recently, however, I have experienced a couple of failures of the so-called "actor" modules in my smart home system. These actors are small electronic cubes mounted in walls behind regular wall switches. They are a great way to upgrade an analog electrical installation to ...

It seems people are still underestimating the role (embedded) software plays today in delivering high performance and robust products. From the Bluetooth mesh turf I can say the common wisdom is the "stacks" are all equal and the product performance is defined by the Bluetooth specification  Actually it is quite the opposite. The specification offers a lot of room for innovation. That has always been the principle of Bluetooth SIG - make the spec such that people can go and implement the requirements and the independent products will work together. In particular Bluetooth has been avoiding so called "golden implementations" - products that all other products try to align to. Instead the specifications are tightened and polished to the level that enables many-to-many interoperability of products from different vendors. But interoperability basically means "it works", while how well it performs (throughput, scalability) and how robust it is (e.g., does it re...