Steve Litchfield

I don't fly. Or at least not unless it's a dire emergency. I've tried to analyse my fear and can't really pin it down. Partly it's a fear of dying prematurely under circumstances not under my control - in a car or on a bike, even in a train, I can do a lot to reduce risk and escape harm. But in a metal tube 10,000 feet up there's really nothing that can be done to prevent the plane plummeting and crashing. As one did yesterday . And as planes do each month throughout the world, with annual fatalities well into the thousands.... Having worked in the aerospace industry I know how many things can actually go wrong. And the thought of being in a fly-by-wire aircraft with computers in (more or less) complete control just scares me rigid. Remember the near fatal 777 crash at Heathrow a month or so back when the computers failed and the plane plummeted? Add to that my gut feeling that man was not meant to fly. And just don't get me started on helicopters. And don...

It's about time that big power companies stopped messing around with green energy and took it seriously. Kudos to Southern California Edison for ramping up to 250 megawatts of solar power on the rooves of commercial premises ( reports Green Wombat ). Solar power in itself won't supply the earth's energy needs by a huge margin (quite apart from the green impact of making the solar cells/kit in the first place), but it's a good start. Add in more and more wind turbines and wave power generators and I can see some countries getting a quarter or even a half of their power from green sources by about 2020. Save the planet? Maybe we just will. But we need more initiatives like this one.

As someone who started with vinyl records (LPs) back in the 1970s and graduated through cassettes to CDs, I get fed up with so-called audiophiles who say that vinyl recordings sound better than the same pieces on CD. They're simply talking rubbish. In favour of their argument, they suggest that the 44kHz sampling rate of digital music means that the 'full' analog waveforms of music aren't stored when on CD. They'd be right, but unless we're talking about piano music and the listener is a 20 year old afficianado with perfect hearing the difference is completely inaudible. Certainly for 99.999% of people, and especially those who like listening to music a lot (and fairly loud), hearing won't be perfect. Even more so as we all get older. In favour of CD 44kHz sampled music, there are many factors, including: These days, most CDs are either recorded digitally in the first place, or digitally remastered, which means ZERO hiss, ZERO wobble/wow, PERFECT graphic equ...

Here's a great marriage of old and new. Microsoft's new Silverlight multimedia plug-in has been used to good effect by Hard Rock Memorabilia, to show off a multitude of classic guitars, outfits, lyrics and other miscellany in super-zoomed detail. Worth a look and a read if you're into classic 1970s and 1980s rock music!

We made the mistake of wasting an hour in the Tate Modern gallery in London last week. Floor after floor of 'modern art'. What a waste of time, space and electricity. The flagship work was a crack in the main floor of the gallery, apparently - I kid you not. There was another work on a wall which looked like a kid had thrown a can of paint on the canvas - I went closer and read the artist's description, which read "I threw a can of paint on the canvas"! I'm no art heathen. I love music and I love paintings by the likes of Monet, Constable and so on. But what I saw last week was rubbish, quite simply. Glad to have got that off my chest!

So YouTube has set up revenue sharing for approved contributors. Great. And they've got a whole heap of understandable restrictions to do with copyright, to make absolutely sure that you're not profiting from someone else's work. So you upload a video (such as my Smartphones Show ) and apply for it to be approved for revenue sharing. So far so good. But then they find some tiny piece of your video that might, possibly, potentially be a copyright problem. Does YouTube: a) Deny the request, email you to tell you what the problem was (in case you wanted to cut the offending word/section out) and invite you to reapply later on? OR b) Deny the request, delete the entire video from YouTube and put blocks in place to stop you re-uploading it for normal viewing? Yep, you guessed it, b) Which sucks, big time. I don't mind the powers that be getting picky over copyright and saying that I can't earn a few cents from it, but deleting the video so that people can't watch it ...

Staggering to watch my daughter and her friend playing for a morning. With two laptops, broadband and mobile phones, they were all set and had enormous fun. But what on earth did the previous generation do? I'm guessing books and Barbie dolls and scooters. Hmm... must get all those out, especially over the summer, else my daughter will turn into a prize geek like me 8-)

So I'm mid-40s and in dire need of getting fitter, if I'm to be mobile into my 50s and 60s.... Enter Nokia Sports Tracker , which runs on any S60 smartphone. On my E90, with built-in GPS, I just activate it when leaving the house for a fast walk and leave it going. When I get back to the house, I've got every stat imaginable (I'm walking at 9 minutes per km - is that good?) and a nice KML file to import directly into Google Earth. And Sports Tracker continues to log my progress over the weeks and months. Recommended. As to whether I'll keep it up - ask me again in 2 months!

OK, so I gave in to my daughter and bought a Nintendo Wii. And then discovered that it's not a games console. Well, it is, but it's also a full web browser, including YouTube video (on your TV!), Internet radio, etc. Plus it's a good way of getting exercise - you just try the boxing game that comes with it! More on this theme over at my new Nintendo Power Tips page.

Carbon what? Yes, I know it sounds strange. But fear not, go and download Tear Fund's excellent leaflet: http://www.tearfund.org/webdocs/Website/Churches/Carbon%20Fast.pdf (aimed at families). Judging from the careless attitude of my own daughter to energy, I can't emphasise teaching green principles to the upcoming generation enough. Make sure your kids read though the leaflet and implement as much as you can etc.

A couple of years back we (our family) had annual passes for Legoland Windsor . A great time was had by all for the year, but then Legoland got taken over by Merlin and the prices got hijacked. Thankfully sanity's been restored now and annual pass prices are back to 'visit twice and you break even' levels. Recommended!

I was always terrified of Outlook - it seemed a monstrosity of a program to carry out the functions it did - far too many settings and functions and they often got in the way. I used it because it was the only thing to reliably sync to my phones. But then I started to sync to 'the cloud' (GooSync/Google) and I've been migrating my working environment online ever since. As a result, I only fire up Outlook every once in a while, to check on some old data. But get this - even after 'File > Exit'ing Outlook, part of it still hangs around, auto-checking for new emails and grabbing them for itself! "I'VE CLOSED YOU DOWN, YOU STUPID PROGRAM" I shout, to no avail. I end up having to reboot in order to stop the auto-check behaviour. Application? Seems more like a virus to me.... mutter, mutter....

Wow. A reported $44 BILLION ?? How on earth do companies a) come up with these valuations and b) afford the price in the first place. I knew Microsoft were rich, but this sort of price is insane. And for what? Surely they already have everything that Yahoo has got in their tech-bank, and more? Well, maybe not Flickr, surely the best purchase Yahoo! ever made.... But even so.... This won't get them level with Google, it will simply cheese off existing Yahoo! users, who will then defect to Google and make the situation even worse for Microsoft. My advice: don't do it. Don't even think about it.

Ah, I just found out about Apple's new 'How to' videos. As a PC die-hard (by history, not necessarily by choice), I've often wondered just how one is supposed to 'use' a Mac. I've tried a few times in PC World and got into trouble. But credit to Apple for videos like this - I think a little light just went on in the back of my head....