I finished reading Andrew Taylor, The King’s Evil, the third in a series set in Restoration London but the first I’ve read. I’m not going to write about it till I’ve read the others. Contemporary with last decade of Marvell’s life, though he isn’t mentioned in this one📚
OK, this worked: I unchecked iCloud Drive in Finder preferences, rebooted the MacBook Air, and then rechecked iCloud Drive. It took a minute or so to refresh but, when it did, the user-created folders were again visible. I’ll know next time. iCloud is a nightmare.
Help! Last week, my MacBook Air wouldn’t sync with iCloud, so I signed out of iCloud and then back in. Now, some folders on iCloud, including Web, containing most recent html pages, isn’t visible from Mac, though I can still see it in iPad’s Files. How can I get it back again?
I had my booster yesterday followed by a restless night but I think that had as much to do with the high winds and rain as with the vaccine. Thanks to said wind and rain, I noticed that I hadn’t closed one of the Velux windows fully when I had it open during the summer.
I was racking my brains trying to remember Bruno Bettelheim’s name this morning and it just wouldn’t come. I kept thinking “Brigid Brophy”. Right initials, anyway.
A tweet from Adam Roberts yesterday, comparing the volumes of two collections of Basil Bunting’s poetry (the smaller of the two titled Complete Poems) sent me back to a post of mine from last year, Reading poetry in scholarly editions. I’d forgotten a lot of detail.
In the latest issue of Talk about books, I attempt to deal with an entire series of detective novels in a single post. In the end, I had to skip two (Medusa and Back to Bologna) but I’ll come back to them in future. After all, Zen was just a policeman: Dibdin’s Venetian detective
After my previous post, I tried logging the Mac out of iCloud and logging back in again. Fingers crossed.
Since I upgrated to Monterey, my Mac won’t sync with iCloud, and it’s extremely frustrating. I also upgraded to iCloud+ so I could use iCloud email with my own domain name. I’m definitely going to cancel that. What happened to “it just works”?
Three book reviews that I originally posted on Literal.club. (Charles Cumming, Box 88; Louise O’Neill, After the Silence; and Michael Connelly, The Law of Innocence) 📚
I get really annoyed when I Google the distance from one place to another and I’m told it’s “a 5-minute drive” or “only a short taxi journey”. How do I convert that into kilometers? (It seems to be about 3Km, but I’d like something more precise.)
The Wheel of Time is the latest fantasy to plunder Irish culture. Are we okay with that?
I don’t see why not — we weren’t using it 😜
I’m likely to add two paid subscription levels to Talk about books newsletter: PDF and print editions.
I think I’m going to delete my Literal.club account. I’ve no desire to track my reading, or to rate or review books. I like my choice of things to read to be haphazard and serendipitous, not organized and regimented. I’ll write a blog post about this in next 2 weeks.
… a political writer convinced that political dogma (of any sort) is inimical to writing itself … the country’s most popular writer who holds some of our least popular opinions.
Ira Wells (scroll down) on Margaret Atwood’s contradictions 📖
I’m reading the 4th in a row of 5 of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novels 📖 that I’m going to write about in next week’s newsletter. I wonder if that explains why I’m listening to more Danilo Rea and Stefano Bollani than usual — and at least as much Enrico Pieranunzi as usual?
And, speaking about toggles in iOS/iPadOS, I’d love a quick (instant!) way to switch smart quotes on and off. As I’ve said before, I usually want curly quotes but often need straight ones. This switch is quick and easy on Windows and macOS, but it’s tedious on iPad or iPhone.
I wish iOS and iPadOS had a way to toggle “select mode” on and off. I’m fed up trying to position the insertion point precisely only to find that I’ve selected a word instead. Yes, I know the thing to do in that case is to delete the whole word and retype it but … habit.
I haven’t read all of this WSJ piece because paywall but the accessible part suggests wired headphones are back because AirPods are “too widespread to be cool”, and credits “contrarian trendsetters”. Surely it’s more complicated than that?
the press release/back cover copy genre does what I spent decades telling undergraduates not to do: it turns the concrete vague, it generalizes at the expense of the specific, it irons out emotions and renders them placid nominalizations.
—Anne Trubek, Notes from a Small Press
I just opened the Maps app for the first time since I upgraded to macOS Monterey about three weeks ago and … everything is clearer, sharper, more detailed and more legible — at least for places near where I live. The difference is remarkable.
I just renewed my .ie domain name for a fourth year, so I guess I must be serious about it. I haven’t been posting a lot there recently as my Substack newsletter has been taking most of my attention and effort but there are still signs of life.
I just posted A year of “Talk about books” (already). Seriously, a year? The rate at which time is accelerating is increasing. Exponentially.
I’ve been noticing recently that some pages on my site (hosted on GitHub Pages) don’t fully load, or at least aren’t fully “painted” on the screen. Refreshing doesn’t help and I can’t select any text on the page. This one, for example. It’s a bit worrying.
The book Antifragile is pretty bad. Like most popular management books, it’s a single useful idea padded out with anecdotes.
I haven’t read the book but I’m happy to accept Terence Eden’s judgment. Years ago, I bought Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness because I liked the title 📚👎