Steve Litchfield

Got to get this off my chest. Here's the situation. Joe or Josephine Bloggs uses their Windows PC every few days. Sometimes. For a few hours at most. Sounds OK, doesn't it? Except that they keep saying to you "I still use my PC but it's so slow now, do you think I should get a new one?" Tempting though it is to say "yes'(!), what's actually happening is that Microsoft's update system doesn't take into account PCs which are only turned on for a few hours every few days. With patches being pushed out weekly (or so), they get no chance to download and install in the background (because the computer is - literally - not usually turned on), so when the user does fire up the PC, they have to live with 'updates downloading' in the background. All the flippin' time. Because they're rarely turned on, and online, long enough for the updates to complete. Add in that when they do boot up their PC it takes 'longer and longer' ...

I'm posting this here, since other short form social networks are proving inadequate 8-) Here's the problem. Friend's iPhone, latest iOS, patched up to date etc. She has a PC with Windows 7 and iCloud installed. Again all up to date. iCloud is on default settings, set to sync all photos to Pictures\iCloud Photos etc. The iPhone is set to upload all photos to iCloud and 'My Photo Stream' and, after taking a photo, something seems to happen in terms of uploads. However, we've waited a few DAYS now, and iCloud doesn't seem to have synced anything down. Any clues, from Apple experts, as to what to try next. It's driving us insane!! Comment below to add your tuppence worth? Ideas from me so far: re-install iCloud on the PC pray smash the iPhone with a large hammer and switch my friend to Android or Windows Phone Cheers! [I'll update this post with more info as requested by anyone kind enough to help!] Hmm... http://rianjs.net/2014/...

Well done to the Connects team for a well done April 1st prank - creating a mini-clone of MS-DOS (from the 1980s) that runs under today's Windows Phone. It's semi-convincing too: And there's a promo video to go with it: The packages sent to bloggers missed a trick though - there was a fully working USB floppy drive (I last used one of these in the early 2000s!), with a floppy disk on it. I was expecting the video again, or some PowerPoint or PDF presentations or a special multimedia message, but in fact the 1.44MB floppy just had a tiny TXT file pointing people towards an online URL to grab the app on their Lumias . Plus a neat notebook with floppy disks as covers, shown above! 8-) Not that I'm grumbling - hey, who knows when someone will next need me to read a floppy disk(!) - but I think the April Fooling could have gone this one step further in terms of production! Still, the prank application does work, and even kicks off the likes of Cortana i...

It beggared belief. There was I accepting a second hand Android smartphone as a 'thank you' for a favour done for its previous owner, and undergoing my usual 'clean it up, check it out, before re-selling or passing on' routine. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. Bog standard Android phone, Gorilla Glass screen and... the owner had put on a crude screen protector, seemingly fashioned out of a sheet of OverHead Projector slide. I sighed, peeled it off and set to work trying to clean the glass underneath with my wipes. But there was still a 'ridge'. I looked more closely. There was a second screen protector! Yep, you read that right, the owner had put on a crude screen protector to err... protect the protector underneath. Which was 'protecting' the Gorilla Glass underneath. #facepalm Complete and utter experience-ruining overkill. Two, repeat two sheets of shoddy plastic to get in the way of using a capacitive touchscreen, all to 'protect' ...

“Hey!”, came the shout from Tom, across the office, “Are you coming along to my river bash at the weekend?” “First I’ve heard of it”, I shouted back. “I sent you an invite on Facebook Messenger!”, he said, coming over to chat in a more civilised fashion. “Did you not get it?” “Nah, I uninstalled that a while back”, I replied. “I use GroupMe now.” “GroupWhat?” Tom came back at me. “Never heard of it!” “It’s really powerful, look what it can do…” “I’ve never heard of it either”, chipped in Diane from the neighbouring desk. “What do you use to keep in touch with everyone, then?” I asked, somewhat resignedly. “WhatsApp, of course, silly”, she said. “Though it doesn’t do any good with my teenagers, they only use Snapchat these days. And neither help me with Ian (her husband and better half), he’s dotty on BBM, which I can’t stand…” “So Tom, who else did you invite?” I said, inviting more trouble. “Well, I was going to invite Daniel, but I know he’s a bit of a geek only uses Goog...

Call me somewhat obsessed if you like, but ever since acquiring a car (2006 Renault Scenic ) with an actual computer inside, along with a miles-per-gallon readout, I've been taking rather an interest in the efficiency at various road speeds. Yes, I realise that petrol has become cheaper in the last month or so, but it was downright pricey for most of 2014, so every gallon saved is the best part of £10 back in my wallet. So what IS the most efficient speed to drive along at? Classic car manuals and Internet advice often throw up '56mph', but then we've seen that speed quoted from as early as the 1950's, when car shape and aerodynamics were incredibly primitive. Surely modern cars, designed in wind tunnels, should be able to slice through the air better and this should have some effect on fuel efficiency? [The problem with going fast is that there is far more air resistance - this increases as the square of velocity, so there's four times as much drag to over...

Noises heard from below ground in Palo Alto... Now, I'll get pilloried for this, no doubt, by Apple fan boys - and note that I own lots of Apple kit (Macs, iPads, iPhones), so I'm no hater - but it has to be said, the Apple Watch is a terrible, terrible design that will go down in history as a huge flop. I'm not talking about the physical appearance - though that's rather thick and clunky if we're honest (though no more than other current smartwatches). I'm talking about the interface and operation. This is 2014 and we want elegance, we want consistency. The Pebble smartwatches are quaint in just having buttons, but OK. Last-gen, a little limited, but great battery life (thanks to the screen tech). The Android Wear smartwatches are purely touch driven and relatively elegant as a result, though current hardware is still first generation, obviously. Apple, of course, will get it right, we thought - show us how simple, how elegant a smartwatch interface c...

Now, let me emphasise the quotes above - what I'm describing (ok, ranting about) here isn't illegal, it's simply.... misleading. And I'm not singling out any one phone network here, I'm simply using Three UK as an example - all the others do the same. Look, I get the idea of contracts, especially at the upper end of the price spectrum - you get a nice, cheap, subsidised handset, you get more minutes, texts and Megabytes than you need, and all is rosy. You're paying £30 or more a month, but you're happy and, essentially, sorted. However, down at the budget end, there's little or no subsidy in terms of hardware, yet there's massive possibility for swinging overage charges. Let me explain. I'm looking at a Three UK run down of plans. They offer one at £6.90 a month. Which sounds great. 500MB of data, 200 minutes and 5000 texts. Perfect for a teenager, perhaps? Maybe. Except that you can bet he or she will occasionally go over, with 'that...

After a number of years on eBay, you learn the danger signs, the whiff of something not quite right. I won't quote actual eBay usernames here because I'm only 99% sure and not 100%, but I thought the procedure was still well worth writing up. The task for me: to buy an item, in this case an iPhone 5, a high value item, we looked at it, at £190 or so with a day to go, with local collection (which was OK for us, it was only 20 mins away) and put in a max bid of £290 - the idea being that eBay would auto-increase this if needed, as other people bid on the item. In hindsight, we rather overvalued the item and should have pitched in lower, as will become apparent. The task for the seller: the sell us the iPhone for as much money as possible while dodging both PayPal AND eBay fees. And he almost managed it. Here's the scam: He specified cash only on collection. Uh-oh. I queried this. It was to avoid PayPal's 3.4% fee, he said. Hmm.... OK, let's press on though.....

Dear Phones Show and PSC viewers and listeners....(!) Just a small status update regarding the shows. PSC records on a Sunday evening and thus clashes with Easter Sunday - I think Ted and I did a show last year anyway, but this year I'll be knee-deep in family, so we're going to miss a week. I'm sure you'll have your own family time and won't miss us too much? The main Phones Show has been hit a little by several general factors, worth noting: a continued decline in the number of people financially supporting the show , meaning that I've had to take on extra writing work to make ends meet.  the critically poor health of one of my parents, a factor which may well play a bigger role as the year goes on. This factor in particular has to take absolute priority, as I'm sure you can sympathise? a huge number of other online video shows, often with far bigger financial resources and offering higher production values. When I started The Phones Show (as ...

I've ranted before about the potential perils of sealed batteries on phones, something of a worrying trend in mobile design. Yes, I know designs can be simpler and more streamlined, but it really hurts the long term flexibility of the device. Not least because there's precious little way back from human error. In this case, me. My error. I charge my smartphone, like most people, with a microUSB mains charger beside my bed. Each night I plug the phone in and settle in for a good sleep, confident that my phone will wake me up at 7am in the morning, fully charged and with my morning alarm sounds. At some point yesterday, I needed to plug something else in and so the phone's power adapter got unplugged. You can probably guess the rest, but... As I drifted off to sleep I noticed that the usual Android 4.3 DayDream clock face (usually on during charging) wasn't showing. Yes, it was my clock during the night, but hey, I was tired and couldn't care too much. Zzzzzz...

Mac vs PC debates have raged through the ages, of course. And I can't hope to summarise the pros and cons of each in a simple blog post here. But I did want to shout about something that delighted me in recent months about my Mac and that's discovering how to use the Automator utility. Here's the use case. I had a bunch of photos and screenshots, all of which I wanted resized to 600 pixels wide, for inclusion in a Wordpress blog post elsewhere. Painstakingly, I opened each in Seashore ( v0.1.9 , the older one, is the best to use, IMHO) and resampled down, then saved. There must be a better way, I thought. I started browsing through the Mac App Store and did find a few batch resizers, but they all cost money and seemed too complicated. I wonder.... I remembered seeing Automator a few times in my app list on the Mac, so I gave it a whirl: Start Automator Click on 'Application' Click on 'Photos' Drag the 'Scale images' action to the applicatio...

In a mad world where I change my smartphone almost weekly, as part of the review process, one thing has remained constant: the case I carry said smartphone in. You see, and I realise I run a huge risk of being declared uncool here, I'm a passionate believer in belt cases. As slimline and unobtrusive as possible, of course, but a belt case nonetheless. Cynics will point to the fact that I'm already married and thus don't need to attract the opposite sex in quite the same way as younger folk might need to, and I accept that there's a certain 'geek' impression created by a belt case - but then aren't geeks supposed to be cool now too? Aren't we geeks supposed to inherit the earth, etc.? The advantage of a belt case are: you don't have to keep standing up and taking a phone out of your trouser pocket - the case is accessible in any position you can't easily leave your phone behind somewhere - less lost phones there's greater protection th...

Sometimes a product just works like magic. This is just one such.... The problem is this, you see - JPGs. Photos, screenshots, scans, just about anything graphic uses the JPG compressed image format these days. As a journalist I use a lot of JPGs and there's always this terrific push-pull going on between quality and byte size. Not many people realise that a JPG can be any size. it's essentially a lossy approximation of your original image (e.g. from a camera or screenshot or scan), but intelligently degraded such that you don't notice any difference. Take a 5MP photo from your phone. Uncompressed, you'd be looking at 20MB or so, but the device probably spits it out at 2MB or so, applying a particular JPG 'quality' (usually about 85% or so) - your eyes can't tell the difference most of the time, but look down at the pixel level and you'll see artefacts. So the photo could be represented by a 5MB JPG with almost perfect 'quality' and almos...