Net Work
Alan Winstanley
This month, Net Work asks what the longterm effect of lockdown and technology will have on
where we work; we look at legacy memory devices; and round up the latest exciting space news.
S
ome twenty years ago the
idea of ‘hot desking’ started to
emerge, first seen by the author
when he visited a new innovation
centre that the local authorities opened
in the early 2000s. This new service
for business tenants evolved from
the provision of accommodation
addresses, where for £50 a month
small businesses or home start-ups
could add a credibility-boosting bricksand-mortar frontage to their enterprise
and get mail sent to a ‘virtual office’
located in a smart business centre.
Offering their clients some flexible
desk space was a logical next step,
and some central office services (and
coffee) were also included. Everyone
was happy: ‘on the go’ business workers
could drop in when needed to access
office resources, without needing to
rent an actual office, and the business
centre gained more trade.
Hot desking is a form of time-shared
office space for workers, providing them
with a desk (any that’s available at the
time) to perch and power up a laptop,
meet and greet visitors and colleagues,
print things off, grab a drink or use the
network. It might suit small businesses
or regional sales staff working ‘on the
hoof’, but some trendy companies are
adopting hot-desking as the ‘norm’ for
their in-house work ethic too. In my
view, it deprives staff and co-workers of the stability and familiarity of
having their own regular workspace,
even if it’s just a cubicle that can be
personalised with family photos. On
top of that, the lack of routine face-toface human interaction with colleagues
can impact efficiency as well.
Peak Zoom?
We have rapidly become used to
dealing with all manner of sales and
customer advisors in the surreal two-dimensional world of online video chat,
even ‘talking’ to cartoon-like avatars
powered by AI because proper, costly
humans aren’t available. All of this is
accepted as totally normal by a modern
generation that has never known life
without the Internet. There are some
signs, though, of ‘Zoom fatigue’ setting in, with Zoom video conference
traffic falling in New Zealand by 76%
in February compared to roughly a
year ago, reports the Telegraph. The
Covid-19 lockdown spurred the move
towards staff WFH (working from home
– theirs), with colleagues and get-togethers now just a webcam or email
away. It can be disruptive and intrusive
for households, but many staff were
trapped into WFH and it was better
than closing down an office or going
out of business altogether. Other staff
have taken to WFH and don’t want to
go back: banking giant HSBC is reportedly looking at switching 70% of its
1,800 UK call centre staff to permanently working from home after they
volunteered to move out of the office,
Workers share space in the Spaces Ealing Aurora office rental agency in London (Image:
Spaces/ IWG)
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but 25% want to remain office-based,
according to a Reuters report.
WFH legalities
Working from home raises some other
considerations for employees: what
happens if the company laptop or PC
gets stolen from home or damaged by
the kids? Will household insurance
policies cover it? Do policies even
cover working from home to begin
with? These questions were highlighted when the family solicitor visited
the author recently: she too is working
from home as the main office is closed,
and we reckoned that employers and
home workers are just ‘winging it’ in
the hope that no unforeseen legal liabilities will arise from technically
carrying on company business in one’s
own home.
Hybrid working
As the coronavirus lockdowns start to
ease, the commercial landscape is edging
a little more towards normality with
some welcome signs of staff starting to
return to work. It’s a very mixed picture
though, as the idea of WFH has stuck
and some staff now face the prospect
of working in a ‘hybrid’ office instead.
Hybrid working is the latest buzzword
embracing the idea of spending some
time at the office, and the rest of it remotely (eg, at home). The Swiss-based
International Workplace Group (IWG)
sells workspace for businesses around
the world under various brands including Spaces and Regus, and they claim
their premises are home to some 2½
million staffers. IWG reckons that interest in hybrid working is soaring, and
some deals signed recently with Japan’s
NTT and Standard Chartered will provide workspace for nearly 400,000 staff
alone. In the UK, IWG says of hybrid
working that ‘employers expect the
proportion of regular home workers
to double, from 18% pre-pandemic to
37% post-pandemic,’ while Britain’s
Institute of Directors surveyed almost
a thousand company directors last year
and 74% said they would keep increased
home-working post-lockdown. The UK
Government is also heading down the
Practical Electronics | June | 2021
A rare 2MB 5V SmartMedia card (left) and
4MB 3.3V type (right) – note the opposing
corner notches and the write-protection
metal stickers.
post-Covid hybrid route, after signing
up with IWG offices in ten locations,
according to the Telegraph, which also
highlighted a paradox expressed by
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson: namely, the more people are able
to work remotely, the more they want to
see each other face to face. We shall see!
Thanks for the memories
Hutber’s Law says that ‘improvement
means deterioration’ and this could
apply to some memory card issues that
the writer has been grappling with recently. In the pre-USB days of the 1990s,
when home computing was taking off,
the first consumer digital camera to
land in the UK was the Casio QV-10,
which was also the first digicam to have
an LCD screen. Trendy estate agents
(realtors) photographed houses with
them, often with barely recognisable
results. The Casio had a very slow 2MB
internal RAM for storage, and images
captured by its quarter-VGA CCD had
to be downloaded onto a PC using a
serial cable. If the camera’s power failed
during this time, the camera’s internal
memory could become corrupted, and
owners had to return it to Casio for a
factory reset.
The author has several early Casio
models in his collection, along with a
legacy Windows 98 PC and the 16-bit
software to download images. Out of
interest, we believe the first use of a digital camera here in Everyday Practical
Electronics (EPE) was in 1997, when
the author took digital photos for the
Teach-In ’98 series, followed by Clive
Maxfield’s PhizzyB (Physical Beboputer) series launched in the November
1998 issue (with cover-mounted CDROM). The author’s Sanyo VPC-G210
camera proved totally indispensable
when writing complex and fast-moving series like those, even though VGA
digital imagery and the idea of ‘pixels’
were anathemas to the typesetting department at the time. Interested readers
might enjoy the History of the Digital Camera and Digital Imaging on
the DigitalKamera Museum site at:
http://bit.ly/pe-jun21-dk
Then came a rash of removable
memory cards that enabled files to be
downloaded using a card reader, starting with clunky CompactFlash (CF)
cards. IBM even produced a miniature
hard disk with a CF form factor called
the Microdrive. SmartMedia (SM), wafer-thin cards that were 45mm long
or so then followed, and seemed very
delicate compared to CompactFlash
cards. They were not always reliable
and different operating voltages (5V
or 3.3V) often made them incompatible with other devices – the only way
to tell was via the corner notch. They
could be write-protected using a small
round foil label. A plethora of Multimedia (MMC) and Secure Digital (SD)
cards joined the fray as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) caught on, and
Sony launched its Memory Stick too.
As for accessing legacy memory cards
today, some multi-format USB card
readers can read them but it’s potluck
whether they will work in Windows
10. Several card readers from the author’s junk box seemed to work OK in
W10, but others did not. It’s also problematic if elusive drivers are needed
to run them on older PCs.
Manage your MicroSD
A legacy IBM 340MB Microdrive CF disk drive
compared with a modern 64GB MicroSD
card that weighs less than 2% of the CF
disk but has nearly 190 times the storage
capacity. The USB3 MicroSD reader shown,
permits very fast downloading of files.
Practical Electronics | June | 2021
Nowadays, high capacity MicroSD
cards smaller than a thumbnail and
weighing just 0.25g are commonplace,
and they find their way into smartphones, tablets, home security cameras
and car dashcams. I covered several
IP security cameras in the past, and
all of them hosted a MicroSD card
to record video or JPGs, giving cameras the ability to stream recordings
via the home network. Unfortunately,
MicroSD cards can easily be removed
from many domestic cameras, always
Underneath a Samsung SD card adaptor
for MicroSD cards – unlike some brands,
the write-protection slide switch is clearly
labelled here!
assuming the camera isn’t stolen or
vandalised. If that’s a risk, then cloud
storage is probably the safest solution
(see Net Work last month).
If SmartMedia cards were unreliable in their day, it seems that modern
MicroSD cards aren’t much better, as
recent experience of using a Nextbase
dashcam showed. Such HD dashcams
need fast memory cards to record high
volumes of video data, but regular motorists can be forgiven for ‘fitting and
forgetting’ a suitable MicroSD card and
then leaving the camera to do its job.
Only later, when downloading video
footage onto a PC, does the realisation
dawn that the memory card is full, but
it hadn’t ‘rolled over’ properly due to
failure of loop-recording (overwriting
the oldest files first), or files that had
been corrupted or were missing altogether. This has happened several times
to the author, with the camera missing
some interesting footage when checked
afterwards. (Note that a G-sensor in the
camera might save video into a separate write-only ‘protected’ folder, to
preserve it in case of accident, but a
bump in the road triggers this too.) In
practice, it’s apparently necessary to
reformat MicroSD cards regularly, say
every few weeks. But formatting eventually wears MicroSD cards out and they
may only last maybe 12-18 months of
constant use, Nextbase tells me.
It’s not only the author’s dashcam
that failed – a ‘trail camera’ went the
same way when its MicroSD card lost
some night-time wildlife recordings.
The trail camera has an SD memory
slot but, somewhat stupidly, an SD
adaptor bundled with one brand of
MicroSD card did not show which
way the write-protection slide switch
should go; hence recordings also failed
because the memory card had been accidentally write-protected! Samsung’s
SD adaptor, though, does show the way
to write-protect the memory.
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Video files are best read directly from the card using a USB 3.0
reader rather than connecting the
camera itself via USB. For reliability
it’s probably best to periodically replace MicroSD cards with new ones
of a suitable speed rating: look for C10
or U3 write-speed class markings. In
the authors’ recent experience, some
brands of memory do seem more dependable than others, and for now the
author is exclusively using Samsung
EVOPlus cards. (Care is needed to
avoid buying counterfeits, so source
memory from established sources.)
More details of write-speed markings cards are on the SD Association
website at: http://bit.ly/pe-jun21-sd
In years to come, as high speed 5G
network coverage increases, it’s conceivable that dashcam and security
camera videos could be uploaded in
real-time to the cloud without needing unreliable memory cards at all;
one day we may be wearing discrete
video cameras, perhaps embedded in
our spectacle frames, that will upload
video directly to the cloud for personal protection. Work is already under
way to develop 6G wireless mobile
technology, potentially operating
in terahertz (THz) frequency bands,
although concrete developments
are still a decade away. Samsung
has laid out its own vision of 6G at:
http://bit.ly/pe-jun21-6g
Space Race
SpaceX continues its drive towards
achieving global Internet coverage
(literally) through an array of laser-interconnected low-earth orbit (LEO)
satellites being launched at a rate of
60 at a time. Nearly 1,400 have been
lobbed up so far and a basic global
service is taking shape, reports Space
News at: https://tinyurl.com/3hcsd6ta
The re-usable SpaceX Starship heavy
lifter rocket is also undergoing development, often resulting in dramatic
failures during an iterative testing
process. The stubby space vehicles
seen so far are early data-gathering
Under construction – NASA’s Artemis mission aims to put a man and woman on the Moon.
Orion capsule pictured during assembly – see man for scale. (Image: NASA)
prototypes made of stainless steel
that are part of a two-section rocket (a
booster rocket and a cargo stage), capable of reaching the Moon and maybe
Mars: a good insight is on YouTube at:
http://bit.ly/pe-jun21-sx1
Starship test flights are preceded
with ‘SN’ for ‘Serial Number’, and a
remarkable test flight of SN10 shows
us what’s in store: see http://bit.ly/
pe-jun21-sx2. Sadly, it exploded several minutes later after landing. SN11
launched a high-altitude flight test in
March but it too ‘experienced a rapid
unscheduled disassembly’ or ‘RUD’
during descent. SN15 was due to fly
in April from their launch site in Boca
Chica, Texas, and we can expect many
more Starship test launches as SpaceX
aims for the Moon and beyond.
Smaller SpaceX rival OneWeb successfully launched its fifth mission to
place 36 satellites into LEO aboard a
Soyuz launched from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome, making a total of 146
so far. OneWeb is owned jointly by the
UK Government and India’s Bharti
Group, and the company hopes to beam
Internet services down to Earth using
some 650 satellites in total, as pressure
mounts on the Government to justify its
£400m rescue package. Services are expected to open before the year end, and
ground stations have been constructed
in Norway, Portugal, Alaska, Connecticut, Florida and more, they say. In April,
OneWeb signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the AST Group that
will offer satellite Internet to maritime
and offshore clients.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter gets up to speed on the surface of Mars (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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Practical Electronics | June | 2021
UK Government is investing
£20m into the scheme.
Following the savaging
that China’s Huawei has suffered in the West after being
blacklisted by the US authorities, rival Xiaomi has
reaped the benefits and is
now the third-biggest maker
of smartphones after Samsung and (second) Apple
followed by Oppo (fourth).
Huawei has dropped out of
the top six brands ranked
by unit sales, according to
Trendforce. Xiaomi is also
investing a further $10bn
over the next decade in electric vehicles, and rumours
abound of EVs coming from
The Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) successfully captured the orbiting Intelsat 901 satellite in both Apple and Huawei.
Last, this month, if you
2020, paving the way for more ‘in-flight satellite servicing’. (Image: Northrop Grumman)
head over to the PE website
at www.electronpublishing.com you’ll
In March, NASA successfully test- geostationary satellites whose fuel is
find a new Net Work ‘blog’ which brieffired the four engines of its new Space nearly spent, as mentioned in Net Work, ly summarises this month’s column
Launch System (SLS), the most pow- July 2020 – successfully latched onto – the links mentioned in the text above
erful rocket NASA has ever built. The an Intelsat over a year ago. The MEV are also on our website, conveniently
goal of NASA’s Artemis I mission is to physically clamps onto the target and ready-made for you to click. Give it a go!
launch an unmanned Orion spacecraft manoeuvres it to extend its working
See you next month for more Net Work!
using an SLS on a round trip to the life until it’s no longer needed, before
The author can be reached at:
Moon and beyond, as a three-week- moving onto the next ‘client’. A second
alan<at>epemag.net
long deep-space endurance test. The MEV launched last August which
vehicle’s mission service module, docked with Intelsat 10-02 in April,
which will supply propulsion, power, where it will remain for five years. By
air and water for crew later on, is the way, the term ‘LEO’ (usually, ‘low
being supplied by the European Space earth orbit’) means something else to
Agency and built by Airbus Industries Northrop Grumman – the term is used
after a decade of development. The for an advanced fragmentation missile
Artemis II mission will be manned – or ‘Lethality Enhanced Ordnance’!
and womanned!
Meanwhile, back on Mars... NASA’s News roundup
Ingenuity helicopter has been deposit- The world’s first ‘clean carbon’ hydrogen-fuelled power station is set
ed safely by the Perseverance rover on
the Martian surface (see last month’s to be built in Britain. The plans by
Net Work) and, at the time of writing energy companies Equinor and SSE
Thermal will see a 900MW gas-fired
has already stretched its legs (rotor
blades, actually) having successfully plant with CO2 captured and piped
made three test flights – the first ever out under the North Sea for secure
on an alien world. See a video clip at: storage, and a potential 1.8GW 100%
hydrogen-fuelled power station. The
http://bit.ly/pe-jun21-ingen
Poignantly, the Ingenuity helicopter sites will be located at Keadby near
is carrying an extra-precious piece of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, not
cargo: underneath its solar panel NASA far from the Humber estuary on the
has fixed a small piece of fabric taken east coast which is rapidly becoming
from the wing of the Wright Flyer, the a major area for offshore wind turbine
flying machine devised by the Wright production in itself. The power plants
70 years of technological developments
Brothers which made the world’s first aim to come onstream by 2027.
have brought us to today. Some of
Britain’s east coast, which borders
powered, controlled flight in Decemthese advances were monumental
ber 1903. There’s more background at: the North Sea, has also attracted the
and game changing in their own
the Smithsonian Institute website at attention of American giant GE Renewright. Some significant spin offs have
able Energy, which has announced a
https://tinyurl.com/dn76snpc
revolutionised many unrelated areas.
new factory in the UK, located by the
The author has had a front-row seat
through most of this revolution and
Mission Extension success
River Tees in northern England. It
puts it in perspective in plain English.
Largely unreported was the remarka- will make the 107m-long blades for its
ble feat by Northrop Grumman whose Haliade-X wind turbines that form the
Available on Kindle or in
Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) – a huge Dogger Bank offshore wind farm,
paperback at Amazon
sort of space tow truck that revitalises being built by Equinor and SSE. The
Practical Electronics | June | 2021
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