Steve Litchfield

[Updated with a few new data points and musings, 20 Sep 2022] Now, I know you're going to think I'm being a little contrary - and I possibly am. But as someone who's been saving their pennies for the 256GB iPhone 14 Pro Max for a year or so (to replace my existing 12 Pro Max), I've been underwhelmed by some of the things Apple has done for this generation of their flagships. Now, I appreciate that the chipset is faster and the display is more adaptable (going down to 1Hz, enabling a form of optional Always on Display), so there are some real positives. But, after playing with the iPhone 14 Pro Max myself and after watching many reviews and camera comparisons, I can't help but feel that some of the 'improvements' aren't necessarily so. Let me explain, I have four things I want to comment on: 1. Dynamic Island gives less screen real estate, not more This seems counter-intuitive, but it's true in practice. Although the notch in previous iPhones used mo

This is a really odd Mac OS bug - I'm so reliant on pressing the space bar in Finder to look at or play files (e.g. PDFs or MP3s or MP4s) that, when it stopped working altogether, I was thrown. A dialog comes up with information on the file but there's no preview. At all. And restarting Mac OS doesn't help. Clearly something is well and truly stuck at the system level. Happily, a pointer online led to a quick fix and I thought I'd share it here.  Start Activity Monitor (you'll find it in Applications/Utilities) On the View menu, choose ' All processes ' Use the find tool (magnifying glass at the top right of the window) and type in 'Find' The process ' QuickLookUIService ' will show up. This is the system process which is corrupted/stuck/foobar(!) etc.  Double click this and choose ' Force Quit ' Done! Next time this happens (it gets stuck for me about once a month), at least you can fix it in seconds without having to worry about re

You have to wonder at the cost of labour back in the 1500s, along with priorities in the stonework business. And I apologise in advance if I'm about to be something of an architecture heathen. You see, I was visiting York and gazing up at the Minster, destroyed and rebuilt a number of times over the last 1000 years. And, while I was hugely impressed by the size of the thing (and yes, we went inside for the tour), as my eyes focussed in on some of the details, I started to notice something. Details on the details. And those details had details added to them. Almost fractal. As an example, take one of the very smallest spires on the Minster, only a few feet high and positioned a hundred feet off the ground. One of them is helpfully displayed on its own inside: I can't really imagine the discussions between the foreman of the time and the stone masons, perched possibly precariously on 1500-era scaffolding, 100ft off the ground.  "Yes, can you put in 50 little spires, each 5ft