Kindle Whispersync fails synching bookmarks and furthest read position

If a book refuses to sync properly between different devices with Amazon's Kindle Whispersync, one can reset the furthest read position on amazon.com (or amazon.fr, amazon.de, etc...). After that, the sync seems to work fine across iOS, Kindle, Mac, PC etc.

The steps to reset the furthest read position are slightly different on different Amazon sites, but if you can find a page which in translation is something similar to "Your Kindle Library" with a list of all your Kindle books, there should be an "Action..." button to the right of each book. Click on that button and select "Clear furthest page read" or something similar in your favourite language.

(I had this problem and found no match in Google, so perhaps I am the only one in the world with this problem. Or I am just really bad at googling. Anyhow, I thought I'd post the solution on the world wide tissue.)

MS Word for iPad - still not quite there - Skydrive up in the air

Hopefully a lot of people will love the new MS Word for iPad. I'm sure it is a fine Word processor that can do wonders with Word processing.

However, one of its potential advantages is stymied: the Cloud. I use my iPad on the road. I use it in airplanes, in trains and buses going through tunnels and in distant mountain villages where there is no internet. I can do none of the above with Word for iPad.

If I were to subscribe to Office 365, I could use my iPad to edit documents in Microsoft's Skydrive cloud. However, I can only do so when I am connected. Basically, I cannot do much more than I can in a Webbrowser. 99 Euro a year is not a huge amount, but it is far too much for a product I cannot see I would ever use.

For those who already are heavy users of Skydrive, Word for iPad may make sense. Personally, I will stay with Pages, which works properly with iCloud and synchronisation of offline documents.

Buy one song, and you get another one instead for the same price. Or none - for the same price.

Apple's customer support is often ghastly. In June 2012 I reported to them that several tracks of this recording were empty: https://itunes.apple.com/fr/album/bach-matthaus-passion-bwv/id309852339 

Check for example tracks 14, 15, 24, 25 and others. Apple reimbursed me. (Thanks!) But they still have not removed the broken recording, and they still sell it to other people. After 18 months! The tracks are empty. There is not even 4′33″ of silence. There is 0'0" of nothing. But Apple charges 0.99€ for each of them.

I thought that was an isolated case, but I recently bought Beethoven's complete string quartets: https://itunes.apple.com/fr/album/beethoven-complete-string/id152213181?l=enhttps://itunes.apple.com/fr/album/beethoven-complete-string/id152213181?l=en

It turns out that the 15th string quartet has cembalo and a singer. It seems to be Vivaldi: Juditha Triumphans, R.644/Pars Altera-"Haec in Crastinum Serva" with Vittorio Negri & Berlin Chamber Orchestra & Birgit Finnlä & Julia Hamari. Click on the preview buttons to hear it.

Not Beethoven. Not a string quartet. But Apple charges you for it.

Can't they afford to check what they sell?

Tracks 14 and 15 in this screen shot are 0.00 seconds. 

Bonus exercise: calculate the price per minute.

Damnosa quid non imminuit dies? A Review of Pages 5

The Latin question in the title means "What does not perish with time?" The question was asked by the poet Horace, who apparently had had rich experience with Apple software. Apple's software is slick - "slick" in the sense that it contains nothing superfluous. Neither does it always contain what we consider necessary. And strangely, as time goes on, a lot of Apple's software seems to perish.

Some years ago, Apple had a magnificent piece of software called AppleWorks. It was capable of mixing drawing, calculations and word processing and other features in a very elegant way. It had a number of happy users all over the world, so Apple scrapped it. There were probably good reasons for scrapping it. AppleWorks had been written using old technology, and it was difficult to port it to Mac OS X. There was a half working Mac OS X version, but in 2007 Apple finally gave up and stopped supporting the product altogether.

The replacement was iWork, a suit of three programs, Keynote, Pages and Numbers, which had very little in common with AppleWorks. iWork cannot open AppleWorks files and a large amount of data must have been lost when AppleWorks was buried - similar to the loss when Apple had cancelled Hypercard a few years earlier, with no replacement whatsoever.

Pages, the word processor part of iWork was elegant in its own way, completely different from AppleWorks' word processor, and it got a number of fans who tried to use its interesting features in innovative ways.

Recently, Apple took another step towards slickness by releasing Pages 5, a new version of Pages with a new file format and a number of removed features: the customisable toolbar, non-contiguous selections, comment listings in the sidebar, mail merge, style import, internal hyperlinks, outlines, RTF export, delete-copy-paste of pages, captured pages, linked text boxes, a lot of Applescript support, facing pages, alignment guides, vertical rules, and so on.

Each of these removed features is bound to upset some people, who use them.

However, to me it is all good news. A lot of the removed functionality was not very well implemented, and none of it is vital to me. What I want is a word processor that processes text, and with the addition of phonetic symbols (for Japanese and Chinese) and right-to-left support (for Arabic and Hebrew), Pages finally seems to do what I have been expecting it to do since it was released in 2005.