Steve Litchfield

...instead, buy it, perhaps, for larger-screened regular applications and for dual-pane productivity? But no, don't buy a Galaxy Z Fold 5 or Pixel Fold or similar 'in order to have a larger display for watching movies and YouTube'. Because the dimensions don't work out that way! Back in the day, TV pictures were 4:3(ish), but they moved to 16:9 in the 2000s, while video content itself has been 16:9 and then 18:9 for years, at least in terms of high production quality output, while movies are often shot at 21:9 or wider for that extra 'cinematic' look. You'll see where I'm going with this. If you watch, say, a 18:9 YouTube video, on a folding phone like the Samsung Z Fold 4 or Google Pixel Fold then you'll be faced by large black bars above and below the content. That's just physics, that's just maths. The diagram below is based on actual measurements of display size, though not 100% due to limitations in Google Drawings(!) - it'll give yo...

Just over a decade ago, writing for AAWP, I declared that Qi (wireless) charging was the future . And I'm convinced it still is, even if less than 10% of phone users know about it or use it. They're the ones missing out. My friend David Gilson did a post a few months before, in 2012, highlighting the physics behind Qi , and that's a good primer to how it all works. In the intervening decade we've seen: standardisation of coil sizes higher supported charging power protocols for how a phone and Qi pad work out what power to use pads with multiple coils, so that two devices can be charged at once - or one, but positioning isn't as important circular magnetic alignment rings (Apple's MagSafe) to ensure that both devices are always perfectly aligned, for maximum efficiency The upshot is the same, whether in 2013 or 2023, mind you. And as a data point, I've only plugged my main smartphone to a charging cable about twice in eight years . 99.9% of my phone charging ...

As 'how to's go, this one's really, really simple. But worth documenting, as it has me scratching my head every time. So your Macbook's SSD is filling up and you've had a bit of a spring clean. Gone are all those temporary video and audio files, those duplicate folders of images, and so on. You've deleted, say, 15GB, but... the free space shown in Finder is exactly the same. OK, you think, empty the (recycle) 'bin'. That'll do it. Nope, the free space stays resolutely where it was before you started your clear-out. So what's going on? It turns out that emptying the 'bin' actually did delete the files permanently, but that Mac OS has a wealth of checks and tidying up procedures that it needs to do under the hood before it's happy to declare the space genuinely freed up. So the answer to the 'how to', after all your deleting and bin-emptying, is...  Wait! Leave your Mac on, feel free to keep on working and doing what you normall...

It occurred to me, when listening to a 'deluxe' album, remastered from a 1970s classic, with loads of bonus tracks, that recording music used to be a lot more fun, a lot more spontaneous. In 2023, in fact since about 1983, so for the last 40 years(!), recording music is about assembling parts of a jigsaw - drum parts here, bass there, keyboards there, vocals, and so on. All of which are recorded in 100% isolation and can be replaced, broken up, and generally juggled until the rendered whole, down to stereo, is as the artist wants it. I have some knowledge of all this, having at first done lots of home recording onto Foster and Tascam multi-tracks, then recorded an album in a real studio, plus lots of 'live' recording along the way in a variety of settings. So I'm listening to some of these 1970s out-takes and bonus tracks and it's blatantly clear how different recording was, especially for rock bands. Several tracks started with studio chatter "This might b...

Not a click-bait title at all - I'm quite serious. And the point won't take long to make, I promise. Exactly as they sound, Bananabix are Weetabix cereal 'biscuits' infused with chunks of dried banana - and they're delicious. Add cold milk and enjoy any time of the day, etc. There's one problem, however. They're darned hard to get hold of. In Berkshire, in the UK, we have supermarkets everywhere. Large and small, almost a dozen chains of shops. Every single shop sells the 'plain' Weetabix, most sell the various chocolate-infused Weetabix (nice idea, but way too sickly IMHO), many sell the 'Protein' variety, and a few sell 'Oatibix', presumably made without wheat. There's also a fruit and nut version seen occasionally. And, just as occasionally, I see a shop selling my favourite. The legendary Banana Weetabix. And so I buy a clutch of packets - because I know darned well that it will be weeks before I find anywhere else that both s...

No, this isn't a detailed treatise and specification comparison between the various car propulsion technologies. More me musing on where to go and what to do, in terms of 'choosing my next car'. I currently drive an eight year old Ford C-Max with a three cylinder 1.0 litre turbocharged 'EcoBoost' engine - those exact details becoming relevant below, as you'll see. Definitions The year is 2023 then. 'Hybrid' cars (see definitions below) have been around in production form for 25 years (since the first Toyota Prius), so are almost ubiquitous now. 'Electric' cars (ditto, definition) for about 13 years (since the Nissan Leaf), so are more common but still considered new technology. ' Hybrid ' cars have both (small batteries with) electric motors and  Internal Combustion Engines ( ICE ), with the former handling low speed, low acceleration duties, and the latter handling higher speeds and higher accelerations over longer distances. Most hybrid...

You'll have heard of the Surface Duo? Running Android, it's a dual screened phone with unique form factor that is being abandoned by its maker, Microsoft, in a month or two's time. Begging the question as to what happens for people using it at that time. In fact, the situation isn't unusual, especially in the Android world. People all over the planet are still using 3, 4, 5, even 6 or more years old phones with nothing really bad happening to them. Manufacturer updates typically stop around the three year mark (more if it's a Samsung, less if it's made by Motorola or a lesser Chinese brand), so it's a valid question to wonder just how safe using these older phones with old operating system versions really is. I realise that this is a topic we keep coming back to on the Phones Show Chat podcast , but for everyone else, here's a primer... and my take. There are various aspects to manufacturer updates that get offered to your smartphone: Operating System (O...

This post was first written and published by me on AAWP and is both backed up and updated here with extra text and images... When a smartphone falls out of use in your life, there's a temptation to find a good home for it. Often a family member, often a second hand market like eBay, but sometimes - just sometimes - the phone is special enough, is unique enough, in fact is downright collectable enough, that you might like to hang onto it. Not necessarily just for pecuniary reasons, but perhaps sentimental reasons as well. As an example, I've picked out a dozen smartphones from my own collection that fit this bill. Classics one and all... I'm sure you'll agree with some of my picks, but you'll also have your own favourites. That's what the comments are for! I had a quick round-up from the office and found most of the devices listed below, at least. A spring clean does indeed beckon, I think, to find the rest! Note that some phones I've used were game changers...

Long time readers of my scribblings on camera phones will know my passion for photos to be captured as they look in reality, not in some high contrast, over-saturated, edge-enhanced version of reality. Sure, the latter look better on 6" phone screens. That's why these trends have become common. But the photos themselves are terrible in terms of image quality. By which I mean they've been messed around to look great on the phone or embedded in a narrow social web feed but you can't do anything else with them. Say you want to use a section of the photo only, cropping in to a group of people or an object in a scene. Or you want to show the photo on a large desktop display or TV. Good luck with that with a photo grabbed at 12MP on an iPhone or Pixel or Samsung flagship with all default settings. You'll see artefacts, jagged borders where there should be none, and general 'over-processing'. Which is why I applauded Nokia's 'PureView' approach ten yea...

This happens at least once a week to me. I'm with a customer (or friend) and we're talking tech. I whip out my Surface Duo, currently the main Android phone in my pockets that's signed into all my stuff (social, banking), to look something up or demonstrate something in the OS. And their jaw drops. "What is that?!" I then have to explain that it's actually quite an old device, brought out in 2020 by Microsoft and then quietly forgotten. True, there was the Duo 2, which I loved in its own way, despite a compromised form factor - and this was also forgotten about. No real updates to either after Android 12L, with the Duo about to hit end-of-support this year, and the Duo 2 Autumn next year after yet more mandatory Android security updates. Oh, and you can't buy them new anymore. And if anything breaks then they can't be repaired. So almost impossible to recommend, then. I proceed with a quick demo. Two apps at once, something spanned, laptop mode, with Q...

We've all been there. Listening to a well known podcast and the host says 'And now a word from our sponsor', followed by three minutes of waffle about mattresses or pelvic grooming tools or NordVPN or whatever. What do you and I do? Immediately hit the 'skip 30 seconds' button a few times in our podcatcher, until our ears detect that the advert slot is over. So we hear perhaps the first few seconds of the advert and maybe the last few, if we're unlucky. So what's the point? Annoying those listeners who don't have a hand free to reach out and hit the skip button? It beggars belief that there are still companies willing to pay significant money for multi-minute ad spots on podcasts. Isn't it just a big waste of their money? The same applies to video podcasts and embedded sponsor slots in videos too, since the timeline bar has a handle and it's trivial to slide this over a few minutes to miss out anything that's not core content. So what's t...

[Yes, yes, a little self indulgent, but I was musing on such a list recently and thought 'Why not do it properly and do it in a blog post?'] I was chatting to my daughter and talking about the 'old days' when we used to make 'mix tapes' on cassette, painstakingly copying on tracks from other tapes or LPs to create curated compilations. She paused for a brief moment and then said 'you mean like a playlist?'(!) Ah. So yes, turns out the mix tape is redundant in 2023, but the idea of picking 10 (or 15, as has ended up here!) favourite tracks from a band, an artist, an era, or a genre, and then theoretically putting them into a playlist is a good idea still. Not least because it filters out a lot of the rubbish that every artist inserts. Because none are perfect and all are guilty of putting in 'filler' songs, let's face it. The better artists or bands have less filler, but it's still there, and therefore warrants a retrospective curation. In...