Wednesday 21 February 2024: Chasing rabbits

By the time I finished faffing on Monday it was midnight, so it was well after midnight when I closed the office down. I spent the next couple of hours straightening the kinks out of my body and playing games. It was after 3am by the time I went to bed.

And it was FREEZING! I don’t know why. It had been a mild day. But I was frozen. I went to bed with a sweatshirt on over my nightie, socks on, and a blanket on top of the bed clothes. I did sleep like a baby, though. The dog woke me up at 7:40am and I realised the poet hadn’t called yet from Ireland.

Ten minutes later the dog finally came in, after one of his legendary slow walks around the garden. And I called the poet, who was thankfully still alive but had skipped breakfast and gone straight to work from bed. Normally he calls me when he’s back from breakfast.

Apparently they’d had their one day of sunshine for the winter in Cork, where he is, and yesterday it was getting ready to start raining again. The poet walked from the hotel to the factory in the dark, even though it was bright and sunny already here.

I settled the dog back in his basket, removed all of my extra winter wear, apart from the blanket, and I went straight back to sleep. Three hours later, the dog woke me up again. It was almost 11am, so I thought I’d better get up.

I was going to be really good yesterday. I was going to allow myself a faffing Pomodoro to dump some more of my book ideas into Plottr, but I made the mistake of catching up on a friend’s blog instead, in which she complained about the Copilot AI bot inveigling itself into her Word and how a pal had shown her how to get rid of it.

Well, I hadn’t even noticed it, but apparently it came through in the most recent Windows update. And there it was, sitting in my taskbar tray. So off I pootled to find out what it was and I decided that I too didn’t want it on my laptop. But could I delete it? I could remove it from the taskbar tray and I could toggle it on and off. But I couldn’t remove it.

So off I went again in search of how to get rid of this thing from our systems, and the next fix I found kept coming back as access denied. Eventually, I found a fix on YouTube, showing me how to edit my group policy something or other. But I couldn’t find that either, and the next thing I did was find another video on YouTube that showed me how to create it. Once created, I could edit it and disable the Copilot.

In one of the forums that discussed Windows forcing whatever it likes onto the users without permission, someone else suggested Linux. And off I went again in search of what Linux is and does and how I get it on my machines. That led to LibreOffice, and I also wanted to check if Scrivener for Linux was still a thing.

Scrivener for Linux isn’t a thing now, as the developers clearly chose to concentrate on Mac/iOS and Windows versions. I’m still waiting for the Android version too. However, there were two fixes for that:

1. Wine on Linux means we can still use Scrivener apart from just 2 features that don’t work: embedded websites and… something else I can’t remember.
2. There’s an alternative: QuollWriter.

And yup, you’ve guessed it, off I went looking at this Quoll thing, downloading it for Windows, and trying it out.

It’s not really a patch on Scrivener, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as Scrivener has far too many bells and whistles on it for most people I know. But it does do what it says it does and I think it would be workable in case I can’t get Scrivener working via this Wine thing.

And there you have it. Already I’m thinking how I can get things working in Linux, although it might wait until I’m changing the current laptop anyway. Then I’ll either see about getting a new one with Linux already installed, or I’ll think about downloading Linux to the current laptop. For both scenarios, I can work with them side by side.

Honestly, I can faff for England, I really can.

I pushed the Copilot/Linux/Quoll thing to one side and instead turned back to the books page on here.

I created a small epub graphic and added it to both the shop page and the individual book pages, just so people know that’s only a generic epub they can buy direct. I do also have links to my Books2Read page too, though, in case anyone prefers theirs in a more familiar format.

And then I had to push the books page and the website away too and get on with some work.

I started today’s blog, then finally allowed myself that faffing Pomodoro for the book dump in Plottr. It was something I had fixed in my head that I wanted to do, so I did it before falling down another rabbit hole on Facebook to read comments regarding a face lift one of the magazines I write for has had, and some complaints it’s getting.

If anyone fancies watching Troy from Plottr explain his book dump planner, here he is doing his thang: