I did hell desk for Apple for a bit. It was weird. I alsodid it for Microsoft, who were really nice to work for, and much nicer to their customers.
Wait, thereâs a help desk for microsoft? Their updates keep breaking my audio on the windows side of the one dual-boot box Iâve got, and I was unable to find any customer support number at all. They sure do a good job of hiding it.
I imagine it must feel like youâre trapped in this comic:
Oh, and while Iâm at it, this oneâs relevant too:
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Dunno. This was in the before times, when XP was new & shiny. Mainly it involved unfucking grandmasâ PCs whenever Media Player or their HP printer received an update. And poor benighted souls whoâd mistakenly installed Norton of course.
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Thanks Mark, I was just getting ready to share on another device. Now I will wait.
I bet you are not the only one, or last one.
I have two teenage sons and a wife who has three devices (she is a doc). The crap about having each person with their own PC or laptop for syncing or charging bugs me to death. God forbid you accidentally plug an iphone into the wrong computer. Even so, I have never and will never buy DRM infected media, unless I can immediately strip the DRM off. Everything we have is kept on a couple of hard drives in a safe. No cloud. My main apple gripe right now is the music player. My car is set up with a cradle that charges and plays when you insert the phone. I used to be able to set it on shuffle, where it would play all the music on the phone randomly. With the latest update, I cannot find that function. It wants me to select and play albums, one at a time. Since I mostly have only one or two songs from each album, I have to spend way too much time scrolling and clicking, which I do not want to do while driving. Every time I drive, I get more and more pissed off at Apple.
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What you have there is a âCold Cloudâ.
eta - I have a cold one and a hot local. Both serve a purpose.
you will buy more apple ebooks because you too are a consumer!
wait - is this that one group with the na na na .> infinity song?
I think youâve mistaken friendly advice to help Mark get his books back, for a defense of DRM.
You seem like the sort of guy who says âsheepleâ unironically.
Oh, god, do people actually say that? Thatâs even worse than when we originally started saying âthe cloud/in the cloudâ to mean âthe internet/on the internet.â (Reversing this substitution works in 100% of all cases. Try it!)
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We had terminology like that at a place I worked. A cloud provider, of course.
Things arenât as cloudy around here as they used to be though. 
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Wrong problem. Replacing an iphone with another iphone doesnât come anywhere near the joys of managing an apple ID⌠its the soft bits of technology when things get really interestingâŚ
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Hereâs a crazy thought, did Mark think to reach out to Apple support for assistance?
Bearing with it is better than a support phone call.
Before they started Clouding things up, the ridiculous nonsense of their iTunes âsyncâ that would erase data if it thought you werenât using your main computer made me just start using Android phones instead. I have never looked back.
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A few years back my iTunes acct. was hacked. Then the computer (my only) died a permadeath before I got it sorted. End result: no way to update my two mobile devices without wiping them and losing the purchased music(maybe there was a way, but Apple support wasnât able to make it so).
I fired Apple. I donât care how pretty their toys are --itâs all gold-plated crap to me.
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No; sorry. As Mark has already said, âdonât blame Appleâ doesnât work in this situation.
I can certainly respect that view, but itâs not one I share. I buy music and books in digital formats IN ORDER TO have nothing tangible cluttering-up my home - I specifically donât want doorstop novels (eg Neal Stephenson - a gift paper copy of âREAMDEâ went straight to the charity shop and I went straight to the Kindle store), and I got tired of musicians being precious about âalbum as artefactâ and piling-on novelty packaging (eg Steven Wilson).
That said, I tend to buy ebooks for âread-onceâ purposes, and still buy paper copies of books by favourite authors, which Iâm likely to repeatedly re-read - ultimately, I do prefer the versatility of the physical format - and I buy films on DVD, in the absence of a legal way of downloading and keeping films in a packaging-free format.
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Well, everything Calibre uses is likely to be Python, so if youâre comfortable with setting up a folder watch to run a Python script, you can grab what you need somewhere like this.
I agree that Calibre is largely a hassle - I find it unintuitive and unpleasant to use, much as I appreciate the important role it plays. Itâs a difficult tool to recommend sometimes, but the alternatives are usually more daunting.
Best format? epub and mobi are the ones to try if you want to stick with âproperâ ebook formatting and features. epub used to have wider support, but I donât know if thatâs still the case. Converting to txt or pdf usually comes at a price, one way or another - both can be enormously convenient, but they can also wreck texts that have been set up for ebook use.
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