As my good deed for today, I’m posting a solution to a problem that I’m sure is plaguing others. I hope Google points them here.
I’ll say this much for brick-and-mortar booksellers: Not one of them ever sold me a book, then showed up at my house two years later, pulled the book off the shelf and started highlighting passages for me. I can’t say as much for Amazon, which has been selling me books for many years and has suddenly decided to highlight passages in all of them. Effectively, they’ve vandalized every book they’ve ever sold me.
Yes, I know about the checkbox in the settings for “Show Popular Highlights”. (This is in the Android Kindle App.) Yes, I have that box unchecked. I am not an idiot. Unchecking the box has no effect. Checking it and then unchecking it again has no effect. The highlights remain highlighted.
Here are some other things that don’t work: Clear the app cache. Reboot the phone. Express rage.
So I called Amazon customer service and had the good luck to hook up with Brandi G., who was fantastic. She instantly understood the problem, instantly understood everything I had tried to do to fix it, and, unlike what I’ve come to expect from customer service reps pretty much everywhere, she did not insist that I try all the same things again. Instead, she suggested that I uninstall the app completely and reinstall it, and she stayed with me on the phone to see how things would turn out. Presto! Problem solved. Yay Brandi.
Then an hour later, the popular highights came back.
So I uninstalled and re-installed about six more times (because that’s the kind of guy I am) and finally called Amazon again. This time I had the bad luck to hook up with Devan J., who kept me on the phone for 35 minutes, mostly in silence while he researched the problem. (When I suggested that we hang up and he could call me back when he had an answer, he insisted that I stay on the line, to no apparent purpose.) One of the first things I asked him was: What if I install an older version of the app? No, said Devan, unfortunately that’s impossible.
Like an idiot, I spent about 24 hours believing him. Then I decided to go ahead and do it. Here is the solution:
1) Fully uninstall the app. This means going to the phone settings, then Apps, then Amazon Kindle. First choose “Force Stop” and then “Uninstall”.
2) Go to apkpure.com, search for the Kindle app, and you’ll be presented with a great variety of choices, all representing different vintages of the same app. I chose one from June 2020, two months ago, well before my problems started. Click to download, click to install, and voila. Problem solved.
I hope this works for you too.
Coming soon, I hope: Tricks I’ve discovered for setting up a new Windows 10 machine, which has been something like a fulltime job for me for the past two weeks. Why can’t things just work out of the box?
I agree, this is one feature I keep turned off. My main beef was that people seem to highlight the LEAST profound passages (and I don’t really need more reasons to despair for humanity!)
Conversely, I love the ability to make highlights, especially for non-fiction reading. I just wish Amazon would make it easier to review your own highlights.
Why can’t things work out of the box? Monopoly.
I use my Kindle mostly for fiction and found the occasional highlighted section only very slightly irritating, but I never considered it further. I just went to turn off “popular highlights” but it is not available in the universal settings and must be turned off from within the book setting options.
I agree with Dan Hill, the highlighted sections appear almost random and do not seem to reflect important or significant passages.
I would find it much more annoying in non-fiction books where I may wish to highlight my own sections.
All I have to add to this discussion is the following question: “Cui bono?”
About Windows 10, I have set up at least 2 such systems, and they worked just fine out of the box. At least in so far as basic OS services go: It boots, connects to the network, and I can start other programs. I’ve noticed people have a tendency to blame Windows or Microsoft for issues that are really rooted in a PC manufacturer’s design choices.
Henri Hein:
Out of the box? Really? Here is a small sampling of the things I just wasted much of two weeks on:
1) Wrangling permission to write to the root directory on my own damned computer. This turns out to be not just a matter of resetting some permissions; you first have to take ownership of the directory before you can set those permissions. It’s hard enough to figure out how to do this in the best of circumstances, but nearly impossible when the pre-installed McAfee software won’t let you change owners but Windows sends you an error message suggesting that the obstruction was raised by Windows itself, not a third party program, leading you merrily astray for a long time. Even when you figure out that McAfee is partly responsible (I am not absolving Windows of responsibility for the misleading error message) and uninstall it (because you can’t figure out how to suspend it) you are left utterly baffled by your inability to change the write permissions, because the Windows error messages don’t tell you that the problem is one of ownership, let alone how to change that ownership.
2) Having figured out how to change ownership and grant yourself the needed permissions, and discovering that you still can’t write to the damned root directory, finally figuring out that you have to go to Local Security Policy, then to Security Settings, then to Local Options, then to Security Options, then wade through about a quadrillion or so settings and pick out “User Account Controls: Run All Administrators in Admin Approval Mode” and figuring out that this needs (counterintuitively, at least to me) to be DISabled, not ENabled.
3) Trying to figure out why the “help” command won’t work, discovering that Microsoft has intentionally disabled it for some unfathomable reason, guessing (correctly) that all you’ve got to do is copy over some files from your old version of Windows, but not being able to figure out what files they are because Microsoft, instead of just deleting those files, has replaced them with files that have the same name but don’t do anything, causing you to think those files are there. After a day or so you discover that the culprits are \windows\winhlp32.exe AND (much less intuitively) \windows\en-us\winhlp32.exe.mui . Restoring them solves the problem. Not vandalizing them in the first place (as Microsoft could easily have done) would have prevented the problem from arising in the first place.
4) Discovering (the hard way) that your scheduled tasks didn’t run, because you need to take ownership and set permissions on the directories where the executables live, which Windows chose not to warn you about when you scheduled the tasks.
5), 6), 7), 8), 9) and 10). I won’t bore you with the details, but there was more. Much much more. Much much much much much much more.
My frustration was compounded by the fact that installing MikTeX brought a whole host of equally incomprehensible and entirely unnecessary problems, apparently due to programmers trying to make themselves indispensable by “fixing” a whole lot of stuff that was never broken in the first place, so that it’s no longer compatible with the dozens of scripts you’ve written over the past N years. A pox on them all.
I will never use a highlighter or its digital equivalent and I’ve never understood how much other library patrons love to color words they read with a yellow marker.
I have always hated it – one of my greatest pet peeves.
How do you keep it from updating? I cannot deal with these freaking popular highlights anymore and I too have called Amazon help and done what they told me to do, which included deregistering every device and app that I own and then logging back into them.
Heather: You have to start from the Google play store (not the most intuitive thing, I know). Open it, touch the three-horizontal-bar symbol in the upper left, then choose “settings”, and you’ll have an option for “Auto-update apps”. Choose this, then choose “Don’t auto-update apps”.
It is infuriating to me that “Don’t auto-update” is not the default and that all of the obvious things (like a way to do this via your phone settings) don’t work.
I’ll be glad to know if this helped you. Let me know if anything’s unclear; I’d like to make this a useful resource for others.
Steve:
Yes, in my case, systems worked out of the box. Most recently, I got a new Mini PC to run my svn server. I installed svn, imported my repo and was up and running. Smooth as Dutch butter.
I was not trying to do the same as you, though. I have long adopted Windows’ directory location philosophy. So all casual and temporary contents go somewhere under %USERPROFILE%, including anything I would back up with standard backup programs/methods. Then I create a working directory somewhere for my source controlled work. My own scripts and apps always use something under either %TEMP% or %APPDATA% for working areas.
1) Yes, they deliberately make it hard to use root for anything. The reason is that it has been a favorite place for malware, both as a working area and for exploits. That may be poor consolation if you do need to use it for something. If you have applications that use it, I recommend replacing those instead.
2) Windows has an epically confounding array of security options. I have found that a few lines of PowerShell script is sometimes an easier option than to navigate the GUI.
3) They are deprecating the Windows help engine and therefore it is not included in Windows 10. I believe the stubs are there to reroute help requests to web help, when possible. I’m personally saddened by this, as I developed some of the early help technologies back in Windows 95 days, but I understand they can’t support everything forever. They do provide download links to users that still need the engine. See for instance: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/917607/feature-not-included-help-not-supported-error-opening-help-windows (might help others with the same problem).
Pat, I would suggest you’re missing a great feature. I never got highlighting like our parents did. And, I don’t get these young folks that use the Kindle app. But, for those of use who love the traditional feel of a Kindle in our hands, the highlighting feature is fantastic. All my highlights are added to a file. That allows me to search that file when I remember somewhere I read about something and highlighted it for such a later search.
Good news! I just ran Kindle on this PC for the first time in quite a while. I ran an update immediately (causing me great fear). But, no problem with getting highlights from others. Look at the version ans it was dated today (8/20/2020). So, it seems like Brandi G. got their attention.
Do not click Popular Highlights on View. You cannot stop them from appearing in notes. However, you can hid all notes.
Sorry, quick update. If you click Popular Highlights in View, you will always have popular highlights if you have notes open. However, if you close and reopen the program, the problem goes away.
Henri (#10): I realize, of course, that you are not the enemy here, so I hope my frustration does not appear to be directed at you. But….
1) I have, at this point, several decades of scripts that move, edit, delete and execute files all over my computer. When I get a new computer, it is important that the paths to those files don’t change; otherwise I’d have hundreds upon hundreds of scripts to rewrite and debug. Therefore it is important that I should have the same permissions on the new computer as on the old. Surely it should be obvious to the folks at Microsoft that this is going to be an issue for a lot of users, even if not for all of them.
It is certainly true that my patchwork of scripts, all calling each other and sometimes rewriting each other, is not remotely close to what any sane person would have devised from the top down. But it grew organically over a long time, and now it is what it is, and it’s infuriating when Microsoft chooses to make it impossible to continue using my admittedly ramshackle but perfectly workable system. On top of which, for God’s sake, how can I not be the owner of all the directories on a computer that belongs to me? If I’m worried about malware, I can choose to block off some directory paths, but the default should be that I own everything, or failing that, it should at least be easy and transparent for me to take ownership.
2) I have a bunch of scripts that implement a variety of color schemes that I like to switch among. For example, a script called “blue.bat” changes all my active window title bars to a certain shade of blue, my inactive title bars to a different shade, and a dozen other little things to other shades that I like to have together with those. There’s also a file called red.bat, and altblue.bat (with different shades of blue) etc. These files work by rewriting registry keys. The original versions invoked the actual full path/file names of the registry files and used the “sed” command to rewrite them. Then one day Microsoft updated Windows and changed the names and locations of those registry files, rendering all my scripts inoperative. Why on God’s earth would they do such a thing? It’s hard to imagine a motive that isn’t outright malicious. I’m sure that not all users were affected, but I’m equally sure that I was not the only one. (I eventually rewrote all the scripts using “regedit” instead of “sed”, to insure against the same thing happening again, though I expect that Microsoft will eventually figure out a way to screw them up again, by doing something equally unfathomable.)
I have added a comment to “Two Universes” that I think may explain what is going on.
Just wanted to drop in a quick line that this fix has been working for 2 weeks now, which is better than freaking Amazon could do. I can finally speed read in peace again without being super annoyed by the dotted lines pulling my attention!! TY
Heather: I’m so glad this worked for you. It’s continuing to work for me, too. Spread the word!
True dat. Just opened a new box. On the first try, the dice, the tokens, the Community Chest card all worked flawlessly. And none of the instructions were highlighted. Got hotels built on the purple and orange properties and cleaned everyone’s clocks.