Steve Litchfield

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...

By popular demand, for anyone local to Berkshire, UK, I'm hosting another Phones Show Chat pub meet-up for smartphone enthusiasts on  Wednes day 26th June  2013 , 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(!...

I've ranted in the past about the implicit dangers of 'sealed' batteries (as on the iPhones, HTC One range, and so on). In summary, batteries degrade over time and, a year down the road, do you really want to be struggling with a smartphone whose battery is at 70% original capacity and now won't last you beyond tea time? I thought not. Having a replaceable battery means that you calmly source a new cell - or perhaps even upgrade, as I did with the Samsung Galaxy S III, to a larger capacity battery. The choice is yours when you've got access to this most vital component. Plus, of course, there's the road warrior option to own a spare battery and keep it in a pocket for evening power emergencies. Such flexibility is lost with sealed devices. In fact, there's more at stake than just battery power - microSD expansion is something else which keeps getting forgotten by trendy manufacturers like Apple, HTC and LG. Your music collection won't fit on your...

Please excuse the brevity of this post, but there's a very good reason. The kind folks at RHA, based in Scotland, sent me over a set of their MA350 in-ear headphones to review and, after some initial testing and photography, I foolishly lent them to my wife to 'try'. Who liked them a lot and lent them to a relative to 'try'. And I haven't been able to get them back since. From which I can draw two conclusions: Never lend out stuff you really want back The RHA headphones made a very positive impression with each of us Hey ho. I was very impressed by the build quality, from the aluminium speaker housing 'cones' to the anti-tangle material coating on the cable, while audio was clear and distortion free. If I had to be picky, it would be that there wasn't as much bass as with the same music tracks on my Monster in-ear headphones, though in fairness the RHA MA350 are only a third the price. As a replacement for a generic 3-pole set of in-...

So which blithering idiot scheduled 'Switch off fortnight' in the UK for two weeks in the late Autumn? When it's cold enough that every device left 'on' actually contributes to heating our buildings and thus means less work for the heating system to do? In other words, switching stuff off at this time of year has almost no 'net' effect whatsoever..... 'Switch off fortnight' needs to have happened in the SUMMER term, when dramatic overall savings could have been made. As a physicist, I sometimes despair..... 8-)

It's true that I've been objective in the past - I wrote a long and detailed article here, pointing out the pros and cons of sealed vs replaceable batteries in smartphones . I was honestly trying to see both points of view, despite my own feelings on the matter. However, enough is enough. I realise that most tech commentators, supplied with far more loan/review phones than me and never getting to the point with any device where it's 'old', have been very vocal about 'sealed batteries being the way of the future' and that I should get used to it. The argument is usually along the lines that 200 million iPhone sales prove that Apple's 'sealed' designs are right. But just because the other appealing factors of the iPhone make it desirable doesn't mean that Apple are right about batteries. But yes, Apple started the rot. And now we have the HTC One X and One S, the Nokia X7 and E7, the Lumia 800/900/920 and even (horror) the LG-made Nexus 4 a...

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 ...