Posts

Apples Vision Pro Headset strategy is all about its Arm-chips.

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  Apple has given us a vision of what their VR and AR future might entail. But as have others pointed out numerous times, the whole point of the showcase at the WWDC 23 was to let people experiment, I’ve heard others say that it’s like the launch of the Apple Watch when Apple didn’t really know what would become of it. This is similar and yet different.  Just like the Apple Watch (and the iPad before it), Apple sought to porting its whole ecosystem onto a watch – granted, the Apple Watch can’t live on its own and a better comparison would probably be the iPad. The iPad can live without any other Apple device and unlike the iPhone, never really had a clearly defined function other than to watch movies and browse the web. It was not until it gained the ability to be used with a pencil that artists and designers started to explore the potential.  I’m trying to point out that Apple took 5 years from the first iPad in 2010 to the iPad Pro with pencil in 2015 to find its “killer-app”. But th

Is crypto the new dot-com?

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(Source: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/MarkoAliaksandr)

Will smart phone cameras be better than digital mirrorless cameras?

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  If you believe Terushi Shimizu or rather, the way the press is formulating it , then camera phones will have better image quality in 2024 than your trusty DSLR or mirrorless digital camera. He backs this up with sensor technology advancements and computational photography. He has a point.     However, as a digital camera enthusiast myself, I must strongly disagree with this point of view. The message might be interpreted in such way that its meaning reflects a view that we are no longer bound by physics to get the best image quality.     The thing is this, the bigger your camera sensor, the more photons it can capture. However, this comes at the realization that big sensors require big lenses which in turn makes the camera big and heavy. I’m simplifying of course, but that’s physics. For camera makers it is therefore always a question of tradeoffs: do you want better image quality or do you want a smaller and lighter camera. Camera phones or cameras in smartphones, have changed this

My DIY home automation in a rental apartment

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I emphasise  the fact that we rent and not own - this is important because it’s always been the domain of home owners to do any sort of home automation - at least, it’s been perceived that way. I’m here to show how this doesn’t have to be the case and that you can do a lot of home automation even without the need of an electrician through the sheer magic of software.  However, I should note that you have to be handy with tools and in my example, you should understand your mains electricity. This is neither a guide or a how-to-manual, it’s simply to document what I had done over the last two years (coinciding with the appearance of a certain virus) to make my home smarter. Before I start this excursion, I’d like to highlight what some of my goals were. Clearly, my number one goal was to save electricity or rather, not waste electricity when we do not have to have the lights on or the TV or whatever else could have a power switch.   My second goal was to do it in such a way that I would

Is Web3 the new world order, or just utopia?

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(source: Adobe) As it is with all technological change, every industry must understand, assess, and prepare to incorporate the “new” with the existing. The payment industry, which is undergoing almost constant change, is no exception to this rule. But to understand this change, we must start at the beginning – with Web 1.0 or the “static web”, so called because you would load all the data at once from a web server. This would start to change at around the turn of the millennia with Web 2.0. In 1999, Microsoft experimented with what later would be called “AJAX” (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) , which was an enhancement to its web browser so that it could asynchronously pull data from the web server without refreshing the whole page. This enabled websites to become more interactive and behave more and more like applications.  It was this underlying technology together with Javascript frameworks that enormously simplified content creation and self-publishing, and ultimately gave rise to

Is the Metaverse a future we want or a construct of commercial interest?

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(Picture source: Beacon Venture Capital) Quo Vadis, Metaverse? If you read popular Science Fiction, then you probably already have an idea of what the Metaverse is or at least how it is portrayed. Basically, we would be immersed in a virtual reality world with the idea of meeting, playing and working together in a fantastic setting while remaining physically separated. If you look at the difference in vision between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (who thinks we could all have meetings virtually or at least augmented) and Epic’s Tim Sweeny (Who believes the Metaverse should be a world for games and interaction), then you will see these visions are somewhat different. My ideal Metaverse is a global, immersive, digitally created computer environment that is accessible via the Internet, is open to everyone (and is governed by both commercial and non-commercial interests), may require devices that can translate between the virtual world and human senses, and allows for interoperability with other

My adventures in computer restoration

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TL;DR I've recorded the outcome:  I am writing these lines on a computer system that has been in storage for almost 30 years. To be concrete, I am writing this on a NeXT cube with WordPerfect. Welcome to the world of vintage computing!   Goethe, the giant of German literature, concluded his experiences by bringing them to paper. I have taken that wisdom for myself on previous occasions and thus see this as essential to conclude not just a fun project but also something that has been nagging me for over 20 years. I started to collect computers around 1988. First, as a way to make some money (buying and selling) but it became clear to me that personal computer technology would represent an era in human development that would be akin to the most important developments of human achievements; so I started collecting computers that I thought would be a relevant representation of this era. Some of these computers I have used personally and, in my work, and are thus “sacred” to me. My coll