So before I did actually call it a day on Wednesday, I contacted Support at Google Play Books. The techie there had a good look at everything and asked me to send over the files to see if he could upload them. I did and he did, and that suggested there was an issue with my browser.
My beloved new Safari? Surely not.
So I thanked him and contacted Apple Support, who also had a good look at everything. She also suggested it might be an issue with the browser, so I had to close the chat to either load a new browser or try on my laptop.
I tried on my laptop, which does have an older version of Safari on. Because I don’t use it every day, it doesn’t get dragged into the updates cycle. And I was able to upload books again, to both the publishing arm and the reading arm.
I’d already waaaaay overstayed my screen welcome by this time, so I decided to try again in the morning.
On Thursday I was up before the alarm and over breakfast I limited myself to just 20 minutes of screen play time and even set a timer. Once the pinger pinged, I turned the tablet off and switched to my Kobo Clara to read some more of Book 2 in the 3-book omnibus.
When I hit my desk, the first job I did was share yesterday’s blog post to BlueSky. Then I tried again to upload an epub file to Google Play Books (reading), in case it was a blip that could be fixed overnight. It wasn’t, and it didn’t work. So off I went back to Apple Support.
This time I was able to spend longer with the guy who responded, and after a deal of patience on his behalf, calmly telling me how to do things, we discovered that it’s an extension on my browser that’s causing the problem. The extension that allows Fluff Busting Purity on my Facebook.
Well, I’d only learned how to get that working last week and I was really enjoying the ad-free, sponsored-free, paid partnership-free, Wordle-free, stories-free, etc-free experience. But we worked out that if I could open a private browser window, the extension didn’t interfere at all and I could upload books again.
All I had to do was uncheck it and restart my browser, but I didn’t want to let go of my really helpful techie, so we tried refreshing instead and clearing the cache and clearing the history and removing the extension entirely, but it still wouldn’t work. I had to bite the bullet, lose my Chat, and restart the browser.
BUT…it worked. And then I was able to reinstall the extension, check it for Facebook only (I didn’t know I could do that, and yes, Google.com was pre-checked as ‘allow’), and try again.
And…it worked!
I was soooo relieved. One of the main reasons I moved from Windows to Mac was because of the intrusion and extra work and trashing the auto Windows updates caused. The last thing I wanted was Apple updates to trash my system too. Forty years a PC I was; I’ve been a Mac since August. But I’m slowly learning my way around and, fortunately, it’s still sticking in my brain, which makes everything so much quicker.
Onwards!
I fed the birds, did my standing up exercises, shared this week’s gig list, and started today’s blog post. Then I turned to the client edit and it all went downhill again…
Last week I was feeling quite smug at having removed the latest MS Office suite and replaced it with an older version that didn’t include Copilot. Everything worked fine, until yesterday. I opened the client edit with a view to formatting it ahead of printing (for the hard-copy edit), and it wouldn’t let me do anything. Not a sausage. Every time I tried to change the language to UK British, every time I tried to change the double-line spacing to single, every time I tried to change the font to a single, consistent font throughout, Word crashed, burned and threw me out.
Turned out this older version was no longer compatible with newer versions.
So off I went again in search of a solution, and I eventually found a reply from a senior somebody at MS basically saying that while it was now easy to turn Copilot off for Windows users, they were still collating information in order to assist Mac users. However, in the meantime, here was a link to the latest oldest version that didn’t include Copilot but that still worked with later versions.
Fortunately, it worked, although his workaround for turning update notices off didn’t.
I don’t know why MS has forced this unwanted unrequested unsolicited intrusive invasion onto users. I don’t know a single person who has said, ‘Oh yes, Copilot – isn’t it great? Thanks so much for rolling it out unbidden to us all! I had no idea how much I needed it!’
I was going to go and grab the link for the temporary fix, but there was an error 503, which suggests traffic overload (hmm, I wonder why…). So instead, look at this update history for Mac here. The update the MS guy linked to is v 16.89 dated 10 September 2024. I’m not sure which version is the equivalent for Windows, but the Windows update history is here. There’s one dated 10 September 2024, but I don’t know if Copilot is missing or not, so you may have to do some of your own homework.
I did a quick scout of FB and was furious to see that Sainsbury’s, the supermarket, is making thousands of job cuts. They’re citing the extra £140million that employers National Insurance will be costing them following last year’s budget. In the same breath they reported more than £1billion profits. Even I can do the sums on that.
How DARE they plead poverty whilst making millions in profit and thousands of lower paid redundancies! Made my blood boil, it really did. I shared it and was SO ready with a great big massive FUCK OFF for any stupid, childish, pathetic, name-calling (d’ya see what I did there?), ignorant, knuckle-dragging oiks to jump on and have a go at Labour voters. Corporate greed, that’s what it is.
I had so much still to do, but tech issues, as ever, slowed me down and took up too much time. The poet was on his way home from a 4-day work trip, so I closed down for the day, taking Fallen Angel with me, hard copy not electronic.
Monkey Dust have their first gig since…September (?) tomorrow. Keep everything crossed that the singer doesn’t break his voice again.
And have a super weekend!
Sainsbury is acting like an American company, aren’t they?
Windows is going to force me to do an update this weekend, which I’m worried is going to short out just about everything. I have to do it on both laptops, and I am not looking forward to it. urgh. Thank you for those links yesterday. I’m going to poke into them as soon as the update is done.
It was while I was in the midst of all this Copilot crap that Lori’s reply to yours landed in my in box, so off I pootled to read your post in full. The temp fix page is working again now, which I linked to on yours. It really does look like the balloon has gone up over this.
If only we could all justify an extra spare laptop, then we could maybe trial Linux or Ubunto or Mint or Fedora. I would have done that if I hadn’t gone for the Mac in the end. It’s such a shame that Windows holds everyone hostage like this.