Steve Litchfield

Well, it's all relative, anyway. Never mind corporate business practices, at least the big M deserve a bouquet for the way in which they treat children's food. Here's the current menu, snapped at my local restaurant: Note the way grapes and cucumber sticks are now promoted as alternatives to chips (yuck) and note even more impressively the way the healthy fruit juices, smoothies and water are promoted far more heavily than the incredibly unhealthy 'small soft drinks'. Good on you, McDonalds, you've deserved the custom of my family at least for the next year!

Assuming you're following me, my family and my rants, if you have a spare minute this week, perhaps you could cast a vote for my video entry for Nokia's 'Hands' competition ? Click on either link to go through, sign up to be able to vote (only takes a few seconds) and then vote for any videos you like hint, hint]... Hands of love

Here's a rant that should strike a few chords with regular geeks out there. The number of PC and Mac applications which state in their installation instructions: "Make sure you do the following before you install the software: Turn off any virus-protection and security software that you may have installed on your computer." - This is from installing Final Cut Express on a MacBook by the way but I've seen plenty of other examples on a PC. I can understand why the developers state this: it's because anti-virus and firewall software might possibly get in the way of the bludgeoning installer that the developer has bodged together. Look, let's get one thing straight: you should NEVER turn off your firewall or anti-virus, unless you REALLY know what you're doing. For example, my router has a built-in firewall and I know it's turned on, but most users wouldn't know this and it's a really bad idea telling them to 'make sure' to turn off their s...

Or so sang Hawkwind in the 70s, along with plenty of others in the 'hippy' music business. And yes, I know it's wonderful to have hindsight and we're now almost 40 years down the line, but I do believe that it's not too late to save the environment, to (literally) save planet Earth. There's no point in a long rant here, since you'll see appeals and reports from 'green' organisations almost every day in mainstream media. But I felt I wanted to comment on the latest little freebie from Nokia: we:offset , a Carbon footprint calculator, along with a facility to donate an appropriate amount to projects that aim to balance your footprint out. It's a worthy release, don't get me wrong , every little helps, and full credit to Nokia for good intentions. But the trouble is that it is just that - little - and way too late in the grand scheme of things. We're talking here mainly about transport, i.e. the energy expended and Carbon footprint incurred...

I have to confess that I'm not often amazed by something electronic - this is my line of work, after all. But I turned on my new Apple iPod Touch and idly started up Google Maps. The bottom left-icon looked like a 'My location' icon, but, knowing that this was an iPod Touch and thus had no telephony and no GPS, was actually quite surprised when it defaulted to a map of the UK. Heh. At least I didn't have to spin a globe to find my country. I tapped the icon, expecting to be taken to the centre of London, or similar (it's our capital city etc). I was GOBSMACKED when I was zoomed in to the right spot on the right road, EXACTLY where I lived. Magic. Had to be. How the ******** did the iPod Touch know where I lived? Had it somehow absorbed the information from iTunes, which in turn had somehow cribbed it from something else on my PC? I took the Touch outdoors and went for a walk. The My location crosshairs FOLLOWED ME . Arghh... HOW? As far as I can tell, the Touch'...

My daughter and I have been eyeing up a Pleo robotic dinosaur for ages - but our last purchase (the GUPI electronic guinea pig ) went a bit wrong in that the 'pets' are quite unreliable and prone to sulking. Now I read that the warranty on new Pleos is only 90 days! Given that most electronic equipment is warrantied for a year, a figure of 90 days (with a character reincarnation program!) surely points to the fact that the manufacturers themselves recognise that the device is so fragile and has so many moving parts that something's going to break and sooner rather than later. I'd rather read of products where there's a 'lifetime warranty' (e.g. the stuff that Proporta produce/sell) - indicating a real confidence in the reliability of their product. Yes, I know Pleo is incredibly intricate and complex - but still - 90 DAYS??

Oh yes. I made the mistake of ordering new roof fascias a few years ago from Anglian, a windows, doors and roofs company in the UK. The fascias were fine, and I didn't take any nonsense from the sales person, who turned out to also be a Christian and to have an ounce of integrity. Unlike the current Anglian sales team. I've been getting call after call, sometimes 2 or 3 a week, trying to sell me things. On the last call I virtually screamed down the line "Stop calling me - if you call again, I'm going to complain to BT and report harrassment". No doubt their installers are hard working people. But stay away, stay well away from Anglian's sales teams. Another Anglian anecdote from six months ago, before the current call spate - I'd been looking for companies to give me a quote for a front door. Anglian got someone to call me and he kept going on about he didn't want to come and visit when it was just me in the house - he insisted my wife was present. Ob...

I really had had it with Microsoft Office this time. Specifically the monster that it Outlook. Slow, over-complex and cumbersome. Into Windows Control panel I went and clicked on Programs | MS Office | Change. I unchecked Outlook and away went the routines. After two minutes of crunching, it popped up a message that I needed to insert my original Office CD. I guess I could have done, but I was utterly outraged by having to insert a CD in order to install some bit of middleware in order to uninstall an application. What kind of software madness is this? In fact I was so annoyed that I felt compelled to remove the whole Office Suite in disgust. After all, Word, Excel and Powerpoint had gone years ago - I use Open Office very happily - but enough is enough and I wanted Office's bloat and inelegance out of my life and off my hard disk. I went back into Control panel and this time opted for 'Uninstall'. And waited. And waited. 15 minutes later, the progress bar had reached 50%. ...

A shout out to the guys at the UK-based Automated Home for their well researched list of the top 10 tech podcasts in the world - and my Smartphones Show comes in at number 10, which is pretty cool. I don't get a lot of time to listen to other podcasts, but I've certainly sampled over half the shows on their list. Check it out!

You can tell that summer's here (at last) in the UK. The kids are coming home from school talking about fun things which involve fresh air rather than batteries and plug-in cartridges. The latest craze in the playground seems to be the Lolo Ball , referred to by my daughter as a 'Space Hopper'. But it's not, the SH was a big ball with horns that you held onto. The Lolo Ball (also called Pogo Ball or even Moon Ball) is something you grip between your ankles. Sounds improbable, but it's great fun for youngsters. Just be prepared to plaster up some chafed ankles....! Skipping's also apparently 'in' this year, but hey, when was it not ?

You've got to love Google - and got to love mashups. In this case it's a clever use of Google Earth's interface, accessed via a web browser page, and with very basic (left/right) controls for a simulated fighter jet . And you can't crash. Or go up or down. But hey, you can type in any location on earth (such as your home town) and fly around the area at (simulated) great speed. Very cool. Don't worry about the meaty browser plug-in, by the way, I'm sure other mashups will be along shortly to make further use of it 8-)

I've posted about this before , by the way... Having been driven to distraction by other video editing software under Windows, I thought I'd try Adobe again, give them one last chance. After all, Premiere Elements was supposed to be a top video solution still, and there was a shiny new version 4 to play with. I started the download going, via their 'Download Manager'. 2.7GB. That's GIGABYTES. For a single application! Nero Vision 5, another video editor is ten Megabytes or so, FIFTY times smaller. I gritted my teeth as 2 gigabytes crawled down by ADSL connection, whiling away the time by browsing for reviews of Adobe Premiere Elements 4 - to be met by a barrage of 'buggy', 'slow', 'broken' and worse. So not much change then for an Adobe product. I cancelled the download. How can any company issue a product (for download) that's 2.7GB in size? Where's the common sense? Where's the efficiency? Developers these days, especially in th...

SNAKE Game in the Student House - video powered by Metacafe You just knew that students were behind this escapade - programming a modern building's lighting circuits to play a game of Nokia's Snakes! Awesome and yet a complete waste of time. Wish I were young again!

The modern world is just ridiculous sometimes. Looking at my latest phone bill from BT, I see they're now charging an extra 'Payment fee' for the privilege of paying them!! Sure, businesses have admin costs, but aren't these suppose to be built into the price you agreed to pay for the service in the first place? If it wasn't for the 12 month contract I signed with UK Online for Internet access, I'd ditch my BT line right now, out of protest. It's a LOT cheaper to go for a combined Internet/phone deal with any number of cable suppliers - and that's exactly what I'm going to do in 2009.