Steve Litchfield

What's ultimately the point? People! It was trawling through my mother‘s 15,000 printed photographs a few years ago, after her death, that made me think about what a photo is and what it’s for. Alongside this, there are photographs of birds and planes (in my case) and general landscapes/scenes shot by others and submitted to social groups, and it has all made me think again about the point of taking a photo. For example, you’re in front of a robin in your garden. You use your skill and judgement and a good camera phone or camera to take a photograph of the robin, you crop in and zoom in, and you end up with a nice photograph of… a robin. Is this picture of a robin different from the literally tens of millions of other photographs of robins taken by other people in the past, in printed form and on the Internet? Effectively, it’s not.  Take planes, a passion of mine. An Airbus A380 is overhead, heading for (Heathrow), about a mile up. I use the lovely 8x telephoto in my high-end iP...

There are some questions I get a lot. One in recent days is "Why are you using iPhone?" A decade before that it was "Why are you using Windows Phone?". And around these there was Symbian, Palm OS, and Android, ALL of which have kept me in their clutch for multiple years between 1996 and 2026. So three decades! But what did I use when? And, perhaps more importantly, why?  (not my actual office!) 1996-2001 (EPOC and infrared) While not a smartphone per se, these four years introduced me to wireless comms, thanks to a smart OS, SIBO/EPOC on the Psion palmtops, and using their IrDA (infrared) capabilities to hook up to various 'dumb' phones which had infrared capabilities or dongles. My favourite was the Ericsson SH888, which was made of titanium and which had IrDA built-in, so I'd position it next to my Psion Series 5 (for example) and then be checking email. (You have to remember that in this time period, email was about all you could do online. There wer...

I 've discovered something wonderful about Bluetooth speakers and desktops... Listening to music while working on my laptop at my desk usually involves my Creative Pebble Pro v2 speakers - they connect to my MacBook via Bluetooth and generally work very well for glorious stereo either side of the screen. However, I recently picked up a Marshall Emberton II on PSC Classifieds and I love the meaty bass and rocky feel from this. Yet the stereo effect is minimal. Can I have both at once? The wide stereo from the Pebble Pros and the bass and oomph from the Marshall? Yes, as it turns out! I know this sounds geeky, awkward and clunky, but two sets of Bluetooth speakers can be hooked up at the same time ! On both Mac (the built-in Audio MIDI utility) and on Windows (with the third party VolumeMeeter freeware)! The latter can be studied by any Windows users, but for me on the Mac it involved: finding and starting the Audio MIDI app in the Utilities folder creating a new Multi-Output Devi...

32GB is quite a lot, really. 32,000 Megabytes, or 32,000,000,000 bytes of information. give or take some rounding errors. But it's actually a problem in the iPad world.  You see, iPads are kept far longer than iPhones. It's not unusual for someone's main iPad to be five or six years old, they just carry on doing the job they've done for so long. So keeping the software updated year on year is a larger project than on phones, where people normally upgrade after three or four years. Over The Air updates are wonderful, of course. No need to do anything except say 'Install' when Apple auto-downloads and offers the iPadOS update. Except in the modern era, when iPadOS 26 minor updates can still "need up to 12.5GB" in order to unpack and install in-place, on the iPad directly. With a modern iPad with 128GB or 256GB of storage, this isn't a problem. But for iPads of a certain age, in this case six years (2020), launched with a 32GB storage option, these la...

Just because you can see me doesn't mean that I can't see you. And run into you. Bikes, bikes, pedestrians, accidents are on the increase. And unnecessarily so. When I was a child, road safety on a bike or on foot was drummed into me. Lights, reflective bands, torches, the works. At night, such things are vital to keeping everyone safe in suburbia. Yet, in 2026, I see - everywhere around me - cyclists, escooter riders (already illegal in the UK by definition) and pedestrians, all moving around dressed in black or other dark colours, with no lights or reflectors of any kind.  At least once a week, at night, I have a narrow escape with one of these - let's face it - stupid people. And if there was a collision then I content that it would be 100% their fault. Careful lighting or reflecting should still be mandatory. As it was in the 1960s and 1970s when I was growing up.  I've ranted about this before , but an incident last night causes me to rise up once again... I was tu...

It occurs to me, browsing through my own extensive library of Shorts on YouTube (most now, since YouTube's expansion of the format, up to 3 minutes long), it's not trivial to find videos on a particular topic or of a particular type. Hence, I thought I'd try an index of sorts here. That I could point people towards and also refer back to myself when needed. [Updated March 2026] NB. The video lists are sorted in approximate chronological order (i.e. oldest to newest) in each section. NB2. I've gone back only three years so as not to burden you with too much out of date or more primitive content. For the full set of videos, see my YouTube channel generally ! NB3. The lists below show just how much video content I've created in this format. If you'd like to show your appreciation via PayPal ? iPhone-related reviews and comment AirPods Pro 2nd gen: the best of three worlds? Clicks Keyboard review: part 1: Multi-tool, Multi-accessories Clicks Keyboard review: part 2...