After last year’s leisurely four-week Advent the hurried nature of this year’s Advent comes as a bit of a shock. Only three weeks and a day! A lot of activity has to be compressed into a small space, so please accept this short newsletter as our “Happy Advent” and “Happy Christmas” message combined.
Giving Universalis for Christmas
Posted by universalis on 13 December 2023
The easiest way to give Universalis is in the form of a Universalis registration code. A registration code really is a gift for life.
A Universalis registration code costs £19.99, which at today’s exchange rates is $24.54 or €23.30. It gives the recipient all the Mass readings for every day, forever, and all the Hours of the Liturgy of the Hours for every day, forever. There are also benefits such as the daily ‘About Today’ pages, with their stories of the saints and their illustrations. The registration code works on whatever devices your friend has – Android and iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and Mac and Windows – and also for making personal e-books.
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Problems on older Apple devices: corrected!
Posted by universalis on 4 December 2023
The versions of Universalis which have been in the App Store since last week have not been working on the following old Apple devices:
- iPad Air (1st edition)
- iPad Mini 2
- iPad Mini 3
- iPhone 5S
- iPhone 6
- iPod Touch (6th edition).
The affected version of iOS is version 12 (the latest release was 12.5.7). You can check your operating system version by opening the Settings app, selecting ‘General’ and then ‘About’.
This bug was Apple’s fault but we have found a way to avoid it. We created a new update which we sent to Apple and within an hour they had accepted it into the App Store. We are grateful for their promptness.
Catholic Calendar has the same problem: please wait 24 hours, and the update to that should be available as well.
How to get the corrected version
If you sit and do nothing, the App Store will probably update you to the latest, corrected version, but it could take a day or two.
To get the corrected version at once:
- Open the App Store app.
- Search for “Universalis”.
- Tap on the heading of the entry for the Universalis app. A full-page description of the app will appear.
- At the top of the description is the version number. This should be 3.115.
- Press the button to download and install the new version.
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Resurrection Is Now: a new book
Posted by universalis on 30 October 2023
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new e-book, “Resurrection Is Now”, by Dom Aelred Watkin OSB. This book has long been out of print in physical form and we have had many requests for it as an e-book.
This book, rigorously reasoned but with a keen poetic sensibility, shows how death is not only an end but a beginning, and how to live life as a preparation for death and resurrection.
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Reading and Reflection: a new book
Posted by universalis on 3 October 2023
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new e-book, “Reading and Reflection”.
This book contains the readings at Mass according to the official lectionary of the Catholic Church, for every day of every year. Each and every reading is accompanied by an accessible and scholarly commentary by Dom Henry Wansbrough OSB.
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Kindle Paperwhite bugs – 2
Posted by universalis on 16 September 2023
Like the previous post, this one describes bugs in the Kindle Paperwhite e-book reader. Amazon do not provide any way of reporting bugs, so these bugs are likely to be permanent.
Footnotes
Amazon describe a way for publishers to include a footnote in text and indicate that it is a footnote.
However, they have also decided to program the Kindle to decide that certain links within a text are to be counted as footnotes whether or not they are footnotes. A publisher is therefore likely to find that any link to a page in the book may fail to take the reader to that page, and instead present a pop-up window showing a version of the page mangled into “footnote shape”.
There is nothing whatever that a publisher can do about this. Amazon’s programming is completely secret and undocumented and there is no way of knowing what is making the Kindle decide that a page is a footnote; nor of telling it that a page is not a footnote. Or perhaps there is a way but Amazon are keeping it a secret.
To make things even more entertaining, Amazon provide no way for a publisher to try out any conceivable method of “footnote avoidance”. The only way to see what an e-book will look like when published is to publish it and then buy a copy.
So we are stuck, and you have the inconvenience of guerrilla footnotes.
- The problem affects links which point to a page later in the book.
- …but not all of them.
- Pages (and links) which look identical on the screen can suffer opposite fates. Tapping one of the links will pop up a footnote, while tapping a link on another page that looks just like it will jump, correctly, to the page it is pointing to.
The cure is this. If you tap on a link, and the page you asked for pops up as a footnote instead of a page, the Kindle will also show a button marked “Open footnote”. Press that button.
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Kindle Paperwhite bugs – 1
Posted by universalis on 15 September 2023
The Kindle Paperwhite e-book reader has a number of bugs. Amazon do not allow bugs to be reported to them, so these bugs will probably last for ever. We are documenting them here so that people understand that the bug has nothing to do with the e-book they are reading.
Blank screen
This applies to newly-installed e-books. The symptom here is that you open the e-book and when you try to turn the page, the screen goes white. After a few seconds the Kindle re-starts itself. When the restart is complete, it displays… another white screen.
The cure here is to press the power button for 10-20 seconds until the Kindle asks you what you want to do. Select “Restart” from the menu. After a minute or two the Kindle will finish restarting itself and you will be able to read your book.
This bug has also been reported on the Kindle app on the iPhone and iPad.
Jumping backwards or forwards
This bug applies to a wide range of e-books purchased from the Kindle Store. You are steadily reading through a book, tapping on the screen to turn to the next page, and then suddenly, on one particular page, tapping takes you back to the previous page instead of going forwards. Or it takes you back 20 pages. Or it takes you to the very end of the book.
There is no way of going back to where you were, short of remembering what you were reading and searching for a word or two.
The problem is permanently associated with the page in question and you will never be able to get past that page just by page-turning.
The cure is to keep a constant eye on what the “Loc” indicator in the bottom left-hand corner is saying. When the problem occurs, press the button at the bottom of the screen which gives you a miniature view of nine pages at a time. Scroll through this until you get to the page whose “Loc” value you have noted, and tap on the one after it.
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Electric Prayer 