Steve Litchfield

Here's something that's been driving me crazy over the last week. My Renault Scenic (diesel) has developed an odd and annoying noise. It's directly related to engine speed (i.e. dies away as I move the transmission to neutral and let the revs drop. I've videoed the problem/noise below, in the hope someone can suggest what the problem might be. You're listening for a highish pitched whistling/rubbing noise. Renault Scenic belt system noise for troubleshooting from Steve Litchfield on Vimeo . I thought it might be the belt itself, but the addition of a little talc didn't help. Anyone ever seen/heard this before? Possibly a dry bearing somewhere, but where do I start looking? Alternator? Water pump? The car only had a new cam belt fitted a year or so ago, complete with new tensioners. Many thanks if you can rack your brains for some pointers here! [SOLVED] Turned out to be the tensioning pulleys, one of which did indeed have a dry bearing. New kit f...

I just had a startling revelation, a discovery. And it will help anyone struggling with listening to stuff on headphones on an Android smartphone. But please be patient while I describe the scenario... You're out for a walk listening to a podcast or music. The phone's in your pocket or in its belt case - and you're using the supplied wired stereo headset to deliver the tunes or spoken word. All is right with the world til you get interrupted.  Perhaps you meet someone and stop for a chat? Or arrive at a shop and have to conduct some business or other. Either way, you press the single button on your headset and the music or podcast pauses. Or you're in bed listening to a podcast, drifting off happily to sleep. OK, there's a fair chance you'll fall asleep and you'll miss most of the podcast, but I find I know when I'm too tired to listen on and I pause playback and remove the earbuds just before I settle down to actually sleep. In either case, yo...

By popular demand, for anyone local to Berkshire, UK, I'm hosting another Phones Show Chat pub meet-up for smartphone enthusiasts on Tues day 17th April 2012 , from 7pm until whenever we call it a night. The venue is the usual The Lands End Pub, Park Lane, Charvil , Twyford, RG10 0UE. See below for a map. The Lands End is perfect for meets because there's no piped music, plenty of space, good food and drink, and plenty of parking. Oh, and it's also my local! 8-) 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,...

This is just really cool and heartwarming. OK, perhaps I exaggerate a little, but bear with me. This is our guinea pig run, complete with prowling neighbour's cat: We've had the guinea pigs since they were babies, which means they've only ever known friendly life forms. So when they hear us, they rush to the wire (probably wanting food, but hey...) They have ZERO experience of predators, the only other furry creatures they've EVER seen are each other. So they see this cat and quite happily go on grazing on the grass without a care in the world. For all the guinea pigs know, the cat is just another large furry friend. They have no concept of another creature that might want to tear them limb from limb. So we see the cat sitting there each day, occasionally trying to pounce and coming up against the wire every time, all the while its intended prey just point blank ignores it! I suspect that this isn't a reaction a cat is used to getting! 8-) Quite something, to live ...

The sheer hatred I have for these people and companies knows no bounds. Today alone: - chap at the front door wanting to know if he could quote me for a new conservatory - endless emails (thankfully mainly filtered by the excellent Gmail) and tweets offering me free iPhones and medication - telephone call on my landline saying I could be entitled to thousands of pounds back on a "mortgage, credit card or debit card" (thanks for being so specific, guys) - all I had to do was press '5' and enter my personal details and account numbers It has got to stop. The only consolation is that I do seem to have won 15 million euros on a lottery. All I've got to do is reply to a Mr Smith in Italy.... oh wait. *#*^^*# DEATH TO SPAMMERS! Phew.

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...