Steve Litchfield

I'm surrounded, in the UK, by people trying to commit suicide. They don't actually know that's what they're doing, probably, but in effects that's what happening. Because these (usually) young people are cycling around my town at night: dressed in dark clothing with no helmet with no lights on their bike often cycling without hands on the handlebars often cycling while holding a phone in one hand And one young man went for the bonus level by doing all of these!  When I was growing up, in the 1970s, it was drummed into us by parents and teachers that it was illegal to cycle at night without working lights. And over the last half century, I've watched as this rule has become less and less enforced or cared about. To the extent that young people on cycles clearly give no thought at all as to their own safety. ("I'm 17 and I feel immortal", etc.) So far, I've managed to avoid them all but surely we're close to some serious accidents, as yet ano...

A bit of a rant, but... it's all so meaningless. I open up Google Maps to look something up and am told that I'm a 'Level 6' 'Local Guide' and I'm 'only 2743 points away from Level 7'! Moreover, I'm being prompted to 'Earn my Novice Director badge'. As I drive around or walk around in my town, do you think it matters one jot how many points I have, or what my Level is, or what my virtual title is? Of course not! To detox from this nonsense, I head into Booking.com's app to plan an away day. Ahem. Front and centre, I'm told that I need to 'Complete 10 bookings before 20 November 2024 to unlock Genius Level 3'! Eh? What? Why? What happens when I hit Genius Level 3? Did anything happen when I reached Level 2? Nope.  Time to relax and chill. I start up Audible. Apparently I've collected the High Noon, Marathoner, Night Owl and 'Done & Dusted' badges. What do I do with them? Print them and sew them on a jacket??...

Guest writer (and friend) Mike Warner chips in with clarification on things that I (and almost everyone else) gets wrong about Android security... In Android there are three levels of security and updates to functionality. From the highest to lowest levels we have: Google Play Services Google Play System Update … and the (often monthly) Android Security Update Google Play Services implements all the Google developed services, such as App Notifications, Location, Advertising, Google Pay and Mapping and is updated by the Google Play Store automatically to fix any security issues or add new functionality. Google Play Services is distributed only to Google Certified Android devices, so some Chinese phones like Huawei and devices running forks of Android, like Amazon Fire tablets, do not contain this module. Without Google Play Services, the OEM has to provide their own App Store and replace the Google defined services with their own set of services to ensure that Android apps expecting th...

YouTube has popped up several hands-on videos with Huawei’s latest (and rather mis-labelled, if you examine the form factor) 'tri-fold' Mate XT, officially only available in China so far, but several people have paid stupid money, up to $5000, to get a sample.  The Mate XT has two hinges, one inward and one outward, meaning that one 'edge' of the phone has a fragile plastic display crease exposed to the world permanently. I know, I know, the geek dream of a phone which magically expands into a tablet is oh so cool. But physics is heavily against it. At least in the real world, away from cosy first week YouTube reviews. Heck, physics itself is against existing folding screen phones. I’ve just about accepted that the Flip idea (as here) now works because the crease is small, because the device is always closed when not in use to protect the fragile interior, and because the purchase price is now sub-£1000 (though that's still a lot).  But the folding screen failure ra...

Unusually, for me, this case wasn't sent in for review - I sought it out and bought it and for good reason. The last few years have mostly seen me with a clear TPU case on my phones, in this case an iPhone 14 Pro Max, and usually a Ringke case with MagSafe built in. I've had about four of these, one for each year because the clear material starts to 'yellow' and look a bit tacky. It's a common issue with clear TPU, it seems - something to do with ultra-violet radiation when outside. So yes, I replace the case each year, and sized for the iPhone I'm currently rocking. Except that this time I wanted to look further 'up market'. Given that I wasn't upgrading to the 16 series (I still prefer stainless steel to titanium and I'm not convinced by the new 'Camera Control'), I had funds to invest in a top notch case. In the end it only cost me about £24, I read up about this TORRAS case and it fit the bill across the board: Being smoked black, it...

Clicks is a fascinating story, from start to, well... it hasn't finished yet and even as I write this, (what is effectively) a version 2 with notable improvements is being made for the new iPhone 16 series. The whole 'you don't need keyboards' motif came in with the Apple iPhone in 2007, so 17 years ago, but while that's true on the whole, there are a number of use cases where a keyboard is surprisingly handy: When writing anything more than a couple of sentences, in a social or messaging or business app, it's really handy to have the full display of content and the keyboard separate. In particular, when working with numbers, perhaps a spreadsheet, having 40% of the screen full of number or QWERTY input makes things very tricky. Clicks solves that elegantly. Using hot-keys that you've learned on, for example, a Mac. So Command-F to find something in a web page in Safari, or Command-N for a new message or email, or space bar to play/pause in YouTube or any o...

(I answered this in video form, but I thought an article would help people find it too!) As part of my research into buying an EV or hybrid, one complaint I heard was that, perhaps especially on the Toyota Yaris models, the 12V battery tended to die if the car wasn’t used for a few weeks, then requiring a jump start from a battery pack or another car. And there’s a lot in this. Not least because the problem is endemic to all cars, though more so with more recent models, as there’s more going on - literally - under the hood. Let’s start with the 12V battery itself, a lot smaller in hybrids and EVs than in traditional pure petrol cars because it doesn’t need to be beefy enough to crank a starter motor. Which is mainly why you don’t hear of 12V depletion in those cars - the larger batteries can withstand much longer periods of inactivity. A 12V battery is used to run the car’s lights, computers, air conditioning (usually), cabin fan, engine pumps and fans and power steering, that sort o...

Everywhere you look online, companies are trying to sell you a VPN (Virtual Private Network), it's the in-thing these days. Getting online using a VPN will 'keep you safe' they say. And they're absolutely right. Except that you're absolutely safe without a VPN too - don't believe the scare stories. You see, every Internet-facing application, including web browsers, in 2024, accesses data over an already-secure  connection. The layers of encryption already in place as you access, for example, your iMessages or Gmail, mean that there's nothing bad guys could do even if they were to somehow intercept random batches of your over-the-air 1s and 0s. But why not pay a subscription and use a VPN anyway, I hear you say - isn't that just even more security? Well... it's over the top security. And the main effect of paying out for a VPN for regular online activity is that it will make that activity significantly slower, because of all the extra encryption being...

I’ve been covering aspects of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 in video form, I’ll leave the media embedded here (7 different videos, each less than a minute long!) - if it works. If not, then see my YouTube Shorts output at https://www.youtube.com/@stevelitchfield/shorts   But I wanted to go into more detail on its hardware and software proposition for the man or woman in the street. There’s only so much you can say in 58 seconds in a Short! For a self-confessed geek like me, phones, smartphones, PDAs, pocket computers, I expect them to be sizeable - else they won’t be useful. So I can put up with a flagship like the S24 Ultra. Or Pixel 9 Pro XL. Or even a fold of some kind. Or even my precious iPhone 14 Pro Max in the Clicks case.  But the average phone user, while liking a large display area, also secretly wants their phone to be smaller in the pocket or bag. Which is where the Flip series come in. Simply fold your large screened phone in half and tuck it into any pocket. ...

It occurs to me, thinking about ICE cars versus hybrids versus EVs yet again that, in addition to all the points I’ve covered so far in my video series , that there’s also a time and convenience factor. Time is a factor when recharging takes much of it, of course. And convenience is hit if there’s a significant time penalty, plus there’s the inconvenience of having to stop to charge more often in the first place. But I’m not bashing EVs here, as I’ll explain after a couple of data points. First of all, traditional ICE (internal combustion engine) cars, typified by my outgoing Ford C-Max family car: I managed to get 40mpg out of it across all journeys, it cost £70 (and about three minutes) to fill its sizeable tank from scratch, giving me 450 miles of range.  Then we have my current ‘self-charging’ Toyota Yaris Cross hybrid, with a much smaller petrol tank but a 1kWh hybrid battery, constantly renewed within the battery ‘sweet’ range when the engine is on. I’m getting 75mpg average ...