Steve's Rants 'n' Raves, Reviews and Ramblings

As usual for my case roundups, I'll cover a variety of styles, with most samples supplied by MobileFun, kind people that they are. See their  complete range of iPhone 12 / 12 Pro cases and covers .  But on with the individual cases, each link goes to the relevant product page, of course. Of note is that Apple introduced 'MagSafe' magnets to this year's iPhones, with the result that official Apple cases also have circular MagSafe features - and the prices have gone up again, with the Apple cases now being £49 (in the UK). Almost fifty quid for a case!  Far better to pay a quarter (or less) the price and get a simpler affair from a third party. OK, you won't get a 'cool' MagSafe animation when you put the case on - but Qi charging still works through all of these designs, it turns out you really don't need magnets after all if you're happy centring the phone on a Qi pad yourself. Having said all this, there will be a part 2 to this round-up, covering n

This had been driving me mad - Windows 10 on my Surface Go has a competent music player in Groove Music, but it had been misbehaving. What happens is that I start a local (i.e. on my device, on microSD) track playing and I get the animating dots as if it's loading from the Internet. Which it's not, so it should be near instant. And yet I wait, and wait and wait. The music never starts playing. Groove is stuck. I can select other tracks but they also don't play. What's going on? The only references to similar problems online pointed me towards an issue with an output device or at least with the sound system in Windows. In other words, Groove Music was looking for... something. I racked my brains for something which might have changed in my Surface's setup. And then remembered installing MP3 Skype Recorder , which, as it sounds, grabs audio from incoming Skype calls. Moreover, I've noted that this auto-starts when I boot Windows occasionally, meaning that it's