Why AirPods 3 have no touch volume control

This article is now available as a video!

AirPods volume control

https://youtube.com/shorts/mIlYuuoWZ4Q

So volume is pretty important right?

I mean if you listen at too high a volume for too long you risk permanent hearing loss.

But AirPods 3 have no wireless touch volume controls – controls that are on everything nowadays from cheap wired and wireless earphones to the premium TWS earphones from Samsung, Sony, Sennheiser and every other major manufacturer.

So how do you change volume wirelessly?

Like this

You have to talk to your phone to change the volume. And if you’re using your buds on another device, like a laptop, you can’t even do that.

But Apple is a pioneer right. After all it got rid of earphone jacks to make its phones slimmer and so you had to go wireless – and stop listening when your wireless buds run out of juice.

Unless you use a proprietary Apple lightning port to jack plug adapter:

which they charge you for.

To plug in good old fashioned wired Apple EarPods with inline volume controls

which they charge you for.

Or you can change volume by rotating the crown of your Apple watch

which they charge you for – handsomely.

But Apple has some grander vision right? A world where volume isn’t needed because its players auto level.

What like the “Normalize volume” setting in Spotify you mean?

Or maybe their vision is of a world where AirPods magically know how much volume you want at any time?

Erm they don’t – and they tell you how to change volume remember. You need to talk to it, or buy an Apple watch.

Or is it that Apple got it wrong – but they can’t admit that because of the God argument. You know the one: God can’t change because any change is for the better or for the worse. Ergo, Apple can’t change for the better since that would mean some goodness was originally missing. And of course it can’t change for the worse because that would mean it losing some goodness.

Can Apple change?

Or does Apple hold its users in some kind of trance, some kind of Apple reality distortion field. I mean, this is a chat with an Apple user I know.

Conversation with Apple user

But guess what, Apple gives you a feature request form

Though they don’t publish upvotes like Microsoft do (or used to) – so you can’t see how much discontent there is or demand for a particular feature.

So take a listen to some recordings of the 3rd generation AirPods

Or take a look at some of their flaws

and see whether things make any more sense – if they do please leave a comment there to illuminate me!

Quick fix: Printing from Google docs doesn’t work?

Google docs printing doesn’t work?

Did you find that nothing appears at your printer when you print from Google docs?

To fix this, I’d anticipated having to update a myriad of device drivers and perhaps even my browser and operating system itself but as it turned out there was a quick and simple solution – though it’s only quick when you know how.

When the Microsoft Office 365 license expired on one of my laptops recently, I had no option but to use Wordpad or Google docs to write a simple letter – well no option short of installing free office software, like Apache OpenOffice, which I thought overkill for my needs and creaking laptop.

I wanted to embed a cropped photo in the document, which meant Google docs was the only candidate up to the job.

I quickly knocked up the letter (see my other article on Amazon recharging me if you’re curious to know why I had to post an old fashioned physical letter) and was very happy with the result.

When I came to print, however, it said it had printed but nothing appeared at the printer.

I’d used the print option from within Google docs itself so the letter would print in the chosen A4 portrait format, rather than my Firefox browser’s print option which would just print the contents of the browser rather than the document itself.

I checked my default printer was correctly set, tried a test print and printing some simple text from Notepad, both of which worked fine, but printing from Google docs did not do anything however many time I tried – not even an error message.

So the big reveal – Google docs ‘print’ does not send your document to your printer.

What?! Yes I know. It ‘sends’ the document to a pdf file in your browser’s downloads directory.

Browser downloads directory

You need to open that directory, double click the pdf file to open it in Adobe Acrobat and then print to your printer from Acrobat.

Easy when you know how.

Hope this helps! And for more free info about how to lose fat check out my blog https://www.gichow.com

Quick fix: Samsung SD card storage is full even after deleting files?

Samsung Phone Gallery configuration
Samsung phone Gallery recycle bin

If you find your Samusung phone storage keeps increasing and you can’t reduce it by deleting files there could be a simple solution.

You probably have one of your recycle bins turned on – even if it looks to be turned off.

Video files are the worst culprit since when you delete a bad take it does not free up the space the file was taking up.

The first you’ll know about this is when a video you’re filming stops mid recording and you wonder whether you forgot to press the record button at the end of the scene- until you make sure you press the record button and it happens again.

As a workaround you might switch your camera application to store files in internal storage – assuming you have enough free space there.

Or you can delete some old unneeded large video files from your SD card to get you going again – but the problem will just occur again.

Note: if you were using Internal storage as your camera storage location, rather than SD card, the workaround would be to switch storage to SD card.

The issue is that your Samsung phone has different recycle bins for different apps. You might think your recycle bin is switched off when you go into the “My Files” app.

If you delete a file from My Files you get a simple “Delete file?'” warning, press “Delete” and all is well.

If, however, you delete a file from the Gallery app you get a “Move one video to the Recycle bin?” warning.

If you press “Cancel” and go back to the My Files app nothing looks to be stored or even storable in the Recycle Bin, since when pressing it you just get a message asking whether you want to turn it on – and if you do, then nothing shows up there.

If you then turn off the Recycle bin from settings:

..and then go back to Gallery and delete a file you get the same “Move one video to the Recycle bin?” warning.

So what is going on?

This took me a long time to work out and after a lot of googling I was close to taking all the files off my SD card and reformatting it in the hope this would solve things (I’d previously transferred this SD card with all its data to a new phone).

Happily I discovered that there is a simple setting to resolve the issue.

There is in fact a separate recycle bin used by the Gallery app, which can be turned on and off by clicking the 3 dots top right of the initial “Albums” screen and then Settings.

And if you click the 3 dots and then “Recycle bin” you can see what’s in it, taking up all that space you found being consumed despite your attempts to free it up from the “My Files” app.

Gallery recycle bin

Just tap “Empty” top right and then to confirm tap “Empty Recycle Bin”

..and your space will be freed, giving you that wonderful feeling of not having to do any phone storage housekeeping for some time! If you like you can also turn the Gallery recycle bin off to avoid deleted files ever taking up storage space.

Now the opposite problem can also occur where the Gallery app recycle bin is turned off but the My Files recycle bin is turned on:

Again, just tap “Empty” top right and then to confirm tap “Empty Recycle Bin”

Emptying My Files recycle bin

..and your space will be freed. As before you can also turn the My Files recycle bin off to avoid deleted files ever taking up storage space.

If you had both recycle bins on you can turn either or both off if you want files to be gone forever when deleted rather than just moved to a bin and so still taking up phone storage.

Hope this helps! And for more free info about how to lose fat check out my blog https://www.gichow.com

How to get photos from an iPhone on to a Sony Bravia TV – photo slide show!

This article is now available as a video!

Show iPhone photos on Sony TV with AirPlay

https://youtube.com/shorts/1FRmnR8qEcM

It took me a long time to work out how to show photos from the girls’ iPhone on our 55″ Sony TV and I was close to giving up but it’s actually very quick and easy to share photos and stream videos to the big screen when you know how.

1) On your TV, press the input selector button on the remote control to select AirPlay

and turn AirPlay on. There was no need to go into the TV settings.

2) On your phone, make sure it’s connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the TV, bring up the photo or video you want to share, touch the share button and then select AirPlay – this is not the round ‘AirDrop’ icon that appears first but further down you will find the rectangular ‘AirPlay’ icon.

3) Select your TV from the list.

4) If a 4-digit code appears on your TV, type it into your phone.

That’s it! Your phone screen is now mirrored to your TV. You can zoom in or swipe to different photos and videos as usual, and they will simultaneously appear on your TV screen for everyone to see comfortably.

It let us get photos from both an iPhone 7 and iPhone 12 on to a Sony KD-55XH9505 TV so I guess it should let you send photos with the iPhone models in between those too.

After first searching for how to do this I initially tried navigating to the TV settings, Network & Internet and Wi-Fi Direct and then connecting to the TV network from the iPhone but that didn’t let me send photos to the TV screen.

If this helped you please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel!