Steve Litchfield

I'm hosting a Phones Show pub meet-up for smartphone enthusiasts on Saturday 10th December 2011, from 6.30pm until whenever we call it a night. The venue is The Lands End Pub, Park Lane, Charvil , Twyford, RG10 0UE. See below for a map. Use your sat nav to get to the general area. You can approach The Lands End from the East, but you have to go through the ford - not recommended if there's been a lot of rain. Usually about a foot or so deep, so 4x4's only! Approach via the arrowed directions if possible. The idea is to swap phone tech stories, try out other people's favourite devices, down some decent beer and (maybe) do a few short pieces to camera for the show. If it turns out well, you might be a star(!) If you want to come along, just confirm by emailing me at slitchfield@gmail.com with the subject line "Christmas Phones Show Meet". Thanks! As long as even four or five people make it, the event's a goer. Hopefully we'll have quite a few more than...

For the Fring folks!

My move from the 3lib.ukonline.co.uk server to my own stevelitchfield.com one (forced by UKOnline's closure) has confused a lot of people - including Google, it seems. If you've got any of my sub-sites bookmarked, make sure you re-bookmark them at the new addresses: For example Renault Scenic problems, troubleshooting, models - the most popular sub-site, dedicated to storing resource info on this terrific car, especially the Mark I and Mark II shapes. All about Heelys skates - the craze has died down now, but they're still a great design and piece of mobility footwear! Furreal bears and toys - our family still owns most of them!! Legoland Tips and Travel - haven't been there for a year or two, but still recommended, with caveats.... Many thanks. Google's link adjustments seem not to have caught up with my server move either, my ad income has fallen off a cliff 8-( Let's hope all the links and rankings gradually get adjusted etc.

OK, same friend, different problem. Same head-scratching (though it's possible I'm just being stupid)... My friend, Brian, receives regular (joke) emails with inline images, posted as far as I can tell by the original sender by inserting a direct image URL into their email app. In Brian's Gmail, i.e. viewed using the Gmail interface, these emails look fine, i.e. Google is displaying these images. But when Brian forwards these emails to his friends, the images all get lost and replaced by white boxes. Here's what they see: Is it because Gmail is blocking the re-transmission of images which are inserted by URL? I did try looking at the HTML element code for the received image (i.e. after forwarding) and see: <img width="320" height="240" src="http:/?ui=2&ik=c4edab4db2&view=att&th=12da1cbef02d5ea6&attid=0.1.1&disp=emb&zw" /> But again, inline, they come out like: Is this me being stupid? Is this supposed to work? ...

Hi all, I've got a friend (no, really) with an iTunes problem. It's on a Windows 7 PC and he has a 256GB iPod, more than sufficient for his 150GB music collection. The problem is that chunks of his music don't make it across at sync time from iTunes. After investigating, it seems that the missing music is all on compilation albums and that the iTunes 'Artist' and 'Album artist' fields are possibly to blame. We've filled these fields in within iTunes for the missing albums but they just don't make it across to the iPod. I've already tried consolidating the library and restarting the PC and doing multiple syncs. Very strange. I wondered if anyone can think of something else to try?

I'm hosting another in our series of pub meet-ups for smartphone enthusiasts near Berskshire, UK, on Wednesday 9th February 2011, from 7.00pm until whenever we call it a night. The venue is again The Lands End Pub, Park Lane, Charvil , Twyford, RG10 0UE. See above for a map. Use your sat nav to get to the general area. You can approach The Lands End from the East, but you have to go through the ford - not really recommended. Usually about a foot or two deep, so 4x4's only! Approach via the arrowed directions if possible . The idea, as usual, is to swap phone tech stories, try out other people's favourite devices, down some decent beer and (maybe) do a few short pieces to camera for the show. If it turns out well, you might be a star(!) If you want to come along, just confirm by emailing me at slitchfield@gmail.com with the subject line "Feb Phones Show Meet". Thanks! As long as even four or five people make it, the event's a goer. Hopefully we'll have a fe...

Hi all As you may have seen, UKOnline, my web host for the last 15 years(!) is closing its doors at the end of December, which means I've had to find a new home on the web for my Psion/Smartphone site, as well as all my little sub-sites on various topics. In short, everything's now on a different host/domain. If you've linked to any of my pages or if you have me on your blog roll then please, please take a few moments to amend the URLs so that we don't end up with '404' broken links! The new address is stevelitchfield.com , i.e. http://stevelitchfield.com/ and this is a direct substitute for the old http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/ , so you can hopefully just do a spot of copy and pasting! Many thanks, everybody! Steve

This has blown me away. You know when you switch from one Windows PC to another (i.e. upgrading), you have to spend about a week re-installing all your apps, setting up all your plug-ins and preferences all over again, hoping you haven't missed a setting? I just switched from an old Mac mini to a new one (double the RAM and hard disk, faster graphics etc) and restored the user folder from my Time Machine hard disk backup. 98% of my entire working environment (files, folders, icon placement) got put back straight away on the new machine. I was stunned. But there were a few "?" icons on the dock, where a few of my third party apps were missing (Handbrake, Seashore, Audio Hijack Pro, Cyberduck). So I installed them from the latest versions off the web. And you know what? ALL of their settings, preferences and plug-ins were just 'there', stored in my user folder. There was ZERO work to do on any of them. Upgrading to a new computer used to be a nightmare for me, once ...

UPDATE: Gah. 24 hours later and the phone's started going back to its old tricks. Utterly weird how it can be perfect for a day or so and then go back to not re-connecting. Watch this space! UPDATE 2: OK, I have a reliable workaround. With the setting below, Wi-Fi comes up sometimes. And, for the other times, I've installed "Blade wifi fix" from the Android market, which monitors Wi-fi status after each screen-power-on and restarts Wi-fi as needed, with a small visual notification. Yes - for me, at any rate, and the fix is trivial and has proved rock solid all day today. The Orange San Francisco is the best value smartphone in the world, at £99 all-in in the UK, i.e. no contract. Here's my review of it in Phones Show 124: The sole issue, as mentioned in the review and also referenced here , is that Wi-fi didn't get re-established after a period of disconnection. So the phone goes 'off' or you move away from the house and when you're back in range o...

For anyone else struggling to find the RSS address of the Macformat This Week audio podcast (they hide it REALLY well.... 8-) it's http://clickcastmedia.com/macformat/macformatthisweek.xml I think the idea is that they want you to use iTunes, but the address above works fine in S60 Podcasting and other Podcatchers. Hopefully this will help someone else out there too!

I grew up with LPs (1970s) You know, huge, fragile things that wore out quickly but did at least have big, colourful album art and (usually) sleeve notes. Then I moved to cassettes (1980s) Small, fragile things that wore out quickly and had quite titchy (but still colourful) album art and (even titchier) sleeve notes. Then along came the CD (1990s/2000s) Slim, rather robust discs that never wear out. And which sound AMAZING. And the album art is reasonably readable and just as colourful. Great for collecting and for ripping at any quality I like. And so we come to the download generation. Music stores (e.g. iTunes). Almost faceless MP3 and AAC music files. If you're lucky you get a tiny thumbnail graphic. Sound quality is a lot worse than CD if you listen closely. Just as expensive as CD, but you can find popular albums for free in the shadier corners of the (cough) Internet. But you know what? I'd rather buy the CD for music I like than a collection of computer files that I...

Updated: Nov 2010 So I'm three months into (nearly) full-time Mac ownership. What applications have I found essential and worth downloading? For my own memory (should I ever need to re-grab everything after a re-install or on a new Mac, and to help others) here's a brief rundown: Nokia Multimedia Transfer - essential for integrating a Nokia smartphone into a Mac iSync for Nokia - lets your Nokia smartphone sync to Address Book and iCal Seashore - somewhat basic but useful image cropper/manipulator KompoZer - not supported anymore and 1% buggy, but a terrific visual HTML/WYSIWYG editor Cyberduck - the best FTP client for the Mac Copernicus - small screen video grabber, useful for odd extractions from web animations Audacity - the famous audio editor Open Office - the equally famous full Office suite Burn - additional disc burning functions beyond the built-in bits of Mac OS - still not sure if I need this, but it's got a great reputation JumpCut - multiple clipboar...

A.k.a. Things for you and your family to do that don't cost a lot of money!  A new idea for a mini-site, over at my 3-Lib server. I was fed up with the way weekends and school holidays were just turning into huge money-drains - hence the suggestions. I estimate that it costs roughly £1000 to get one child through the summer holidays in the UK, living by the world's 'rules'. Add 50% for two kids, double that for 3 children. I aim to halve those numbers (at least). What do you think of the ideas and do you have any other suggestions?

Maybe it's the nicer weather and longer days (light-wise). Or maybe it's the fact that I've cut down on my evening commitments recently (including leaving Shed Music - though I wish them well for the future). Or maybe it's that my daughter is now old enough not to need constant attention all the time. Either way, I seem to have evenings back. You know, that time of day when your main work is done and you can genuinely potter around in the garden, watch a little TV and generally relax.  As someone who is self-employed, it's sooo tempting to fill some of this time with trying to work (or looking for work) - memo to self: must try to stay away where possible. As a wise cousin once said "I work to live, not live to work".