Prius "Microphone" not going away...another page in my endless techno dystopia

As soon as I took off from an audiophile society party on Saturday evening in my 2026 Toyota Prius, I noticed that the left half of the speedometer screen was taken up by a large microphone icon.

I pressed the "return" button on the steering wheel, and it went away for about 2 seconds, but then it came right back.

No matter how many times I tried to press the return button, or any of the other buttons on the right side of the steering wheel, or hold them down, the microphone would not go away and stay away.  I noticed that sometimes when the microphone was bouncing back, there was also a little red warning/error icon that appeared and/or blinked for about a half second.

As long as I didn't obsess about this too much, it wasn't really a problem driving my car home.  (Though a few times, as I was driving on side streets, I did almost obsess too much.). The speedometer was moved slightly to the right, but still perfectly useable.

When I had finally stopped the car, I noticed that the microphone icon essentially made it impossible to use the "menus" on the left side of the speedometer display (which are controlled by the buttons on the left side of the steering wheel).  So for example I couldn't disable or enable the various warning or semi-automatic driving features (some of which I actually find useful, others I have turned off).

There do appear to be DIY instructions online about how to fix such problems.  There is a checklist of about 7 different things that you can do which might make the microphone go away, ending up with disconnecting the Prius battery.  (I hope I don't have to do that, and if I get to that point, I'm probably going to the dealer first.)

I already went through a process of disabling voice to text conversion completely and permanently on my phone.  I was endlessly pressing the tiny microphone button on the right side of the text entry box of the messages app by accident.  It's very hard not to press it when you are trying to add one more word to the text, for example.  My (relatively small for a guy) fingers are too big AND I don't think these screens have as much touch resolution as you might hope either.  Often times it takes a serious effort to press tiny buttons in the upper left corner of the screen, for example.

Several times after I pressed the Messages app microphone button by mistake, the text entry box filled up with mumbles, curses and radio announcements in an incoherent and possibly defamatory screed I almost sent by mistake to my girlfriend.  That got me motivated to figure out how to turn off all speech-to-text conversion permanently on my phone, and that is going to be my plan from now on, though I expect I'm going to have to endlessly keep on figuring out how to turn these things off as updates and changes keep turning them back on again.

I care more about accidents like that happening that the theoretical possibility that someone somewhere is listening to me through the speech-to-text conversion system, or using it to train AI.  But there's that too.  I feel it's worth the extra effort to use my fingers encode exactly the words, phrases, and punctuation I want rather than to have words encoded that I never meant to be.

Just after I stopped the car at a supermarket, I tried turning off the Bluetooth on my phone.  That has helped with some issues sometimes, like when the car stole the audio from my phone's navigation system, and wasn't playing it either.  I hadn't enabled or even heard of CarPlay then, since then I've deliberately used CarPlay to capture the audio from the phone navigation and that works ok.  So I did have bluetooth turned on.  And now I figured that might have been what the problem was, somehow my phone was messing with the car.  But the microphone still stayed stuck after I turned my phone off.  Then I stopped my car for 10 seconds then started it again and the microphone was still there.  Then I stopped my car and went shopping for 45 minutes.  When I restarted the car, now with Bluetooth having been off for 45 minutes...I still got the microphone.

*****

After hours of Google searching, watching videos, and reading Reddit columns, I decided almost certainly the problem was that I needed to reboot my phone, because some phone app was advertising itself as a "microphone" on Bluetooth.  That should have been obvious too from the fact that I first experienced this issue at an audio party where I was using apps on my phone such as RTA and oscilloscope.  (Though, curiously, those apps don't seem to have access to Bluetooth.). The problem also seemed to coincide with a tiny orange dot that appeared in the upper window of the phone.  That tiny orange dot didn't disappear until the phone was deeply into the OFF stage, it was the very last thing to let go.

With all the endless security paranoia, it all comes to naught once two devices are both registered with each other on Bluetooth.  Then apps that you don't expect may take over and do weird things on attached devices, as I experienced.  Bluetooth seems to fit it's name, it's something of a pirate like Cap'n Bluetooth.  Once you let that pirate onto the ship, there's no telling what will happen.  There's no real "task" control, there's nobody in charge, it's a Bluetooth pirate ship.  Furthermore, if Cap'n Bluetooth issues some illegal or improper order, perhaps just interrupted or otherwise not completely intelligible, there may be no way to remand it.  You have have to throw everything overboard and start all over.* I pity the people who've gone down the checklist I first got from Google--ultimately having to disconnect the battery which they recommend having a dealer do--fortunately the 'problem' for me wasn't in my car at all but in the way the car was reacting to inappropriate apps on my phone.  But apparently a lot of apps may have a similar issue, and people may use those apps a lot, leading to issues like mine.

I was tempted to remove my Bluetooth access permanently on the Prius.  But the next day I finally figured out how to get CarPlay to run on my car showing maps on screen and even giving pointers on the "instrument display" that has the speedometer.  That's a useful thing to have Bluetooth for (although a USB cable might work as well).  So for now, I'm going to keep Bluetooth enabled even knowing it will occasionally do weird things.  Or if it happens again, I might start disabling bluetooth and using a USB cable instead.  I know other people who do that.

Further, in order to use CarPlay, I had to turn Siri on.  I don't really see any reason why CarPlay needs to use Siri.  But it does.  I enabled Siri so that it starts with a side button press, NOT "Hello Siri" or some such phrase, which it might think it hears as part of some other speech or media.

What I'd also really like to do is disable "Remote Start" on the Toyota app.  I now live in constant fear that I might start my car by accident when it's parked in the garage.  I've searched through the Setup on my Toyota Infotainment Screen and at first brush it seems the only way to do this is to visit the Dealer, and even that might not do what I want: keep the remote door locking but not the remote start.

*It's also damned annoying that it takes some effort to "quit" apps on an iPhone...and Mac's too.  You can't just close an app, you have to go through several fancy swiping moves to shut off any app.  Back in the day before Mac polluted GUI's with their limited ideas, real GUI's like X Window System generally had two kinds of close buttons on every window, so you could either close an app (like quitting it) or 'suspend' it which kept it running and it turned into an icon.  The close button was on one end of the title bar, and the suspend button on the other end.  The Unix command line interface was like this too.  Normally when you exited from an app, or summarily terminated it with Control-C, it was no longer running.  To "background" an app, you use Control-Z.  Now the default is just to keep everything running unless you take a lot of extra steps, which is often confounding if not an utter waste of resources.

Speaking of which, the Toyota app on iPhone is itself damned annoying because you can easily find yourself on a page which seems to have no way of exiting from if you happen to go there by mistake.  The only such choice you may seem to have is "logging off" which it advises you not to do if you try.  So lots of times I've had to suspend the app (swipe up), then bring up all suspended apps (swipe up again), and then terminate the stuck Toyota app (swipe up again).

RULE #1: THERE SHOULD ALWAYS BE A BACK BUTTON.

It's also galling that when using the Safari browser on iPhone the "back" button disappears once you have started scrolling down the page.  You are always obligated to scroll back to the top of the page before you can use the back button.  And then it seems you can't easily terminate that Safari instance (the way you might close a Chrome tab on a Mac anyway) and go back to the previous one.  You have to select a page showing all Safari instances, and then terminate the ones you don't want from that page.

The most egregious example is when you press on the VIN at the top of most pages.  This brings up the Vehicle page for that particular Toyota vehicle.  It has 3 obvious buttons, + (add a new vehicle), Remove Vehicle (no, I don't want to do that, who knows how hard it will be to get it back on), and Select.  Select would be the obvious choice, it would seem I could simply Select the vehicle I've already selected and just move on.  But the Select button is de-selected.  Pressing it does nothing if you haven't added or selected another vehicle.  So you remain stuck on the Vehicle page with no way of getting off the Vehicle page other than suspending the app (swipe up), bringing up all suspended apps (swipe up again), and then terminate the Toyota app (swipe up again), and open the Toyota app all over again if you still had more to do with it.

But now I see that near the top of the Vehicle page, just above where it says "Vehicles", there is a very faint grey bar that looks almost like a hyphen.  It is very very faint on my phone (and with my vision).  Actually, it's not a hyphen, there's a bend in the middle so it points almost imperceptibly downward.  Ahah, that's the "Back" button, because the Vehicle page envisions itself as some kind of scroll down page, and there's a larger and more obvious down arrow just underneath the VIN on the other app pages.

So, the notion seems to be that the Vehicle select page scrolls down from any other window so you can select a different car.  Then once you have selected the car, you should scroll back up the Vehicle selection page.  Except the almost illegible, nearly invisible, arrow on the Vehicle page also points down, instead of more logically pointing up.  Maybe that makes sense somehow, if you can actually see the tiny glyph and realize that it is intended to be an arrow.

I could go on and on like this about every app on the phone, although I think the Toyota app is the absolute most confusing and confounding of all.

Over time, all the iphone apps become larded with more and more tiny buttons it's far too easy to press (or bars to shift) by accident, or completely ignore, and auxiliary screens with mysterious protocols where you may end up.  Where once Apple meant simple (like the one button mouse, which was a bit too simple actually, two buttons are the clear minimum requirement) now Apple seems to mean feature-itis to the max, just as much as the other guys, and just as difficult (and sometimes even more obscure) to navigate.  Rather than simplicity, it now means obscurity.

X limiting reposts to 100 ?

In the last 24 hours, I spent less time on X than most days.  I was busy programming, which is a much better activity for staying alert.  (Doomscrolling always wears me down, but I feel obligated to continue).  I reposted around 40 times, and certainly less than 100.  This morning, X is telling me that I have hit my 'repost limit' which I can override by giving X my phone number.

Online sources say the daily repost limit is 2400, not 100.

We need public social media.

Most of my posts get 0 views, yet, whenever people do see my posts, I get follows.

I'm obviously shadowbanned to hell because of my views.  I never use violent language.

We need public social media.

Update: Now it's also preventing me from making posts, and I'm sure I've made fewer than 100 posts today also.

Canceling CPS energy "Special Products and Services"

I'm trying to cancel a long list of subscriptions, donations, etc, that were made by automatic payments.  These continue to be incredibly difficult if not impossible to cancel.  There is never any online means of doing so.  Often you make a call to a number which never answers, you leave a message, and they never return your call.  That was the case with Texas Organizing Project (TOP).  I emailed and called for them to cancel my donation, and they never replied and it never got cancelled.  Finally I asked my credit card to cancel it, and they refused to do so.  Finally I just let the credit card expiration date hit, I never gave TOP the updated date (though I got an automatic email asking for one) and it finally stopped.  Strangely some subscriptions I've had in the past automatically updated the expiration date somehow, so I worry about even this method.

To cancel XM radio in the early 2000's, I spent 3 hours in 3 very intense phone calls to their offshore "customer service" before it got done.  There had been at least another 3 hours of preparations, getting all the relevant information.  And there had been an entire month of agony, just thinking about it.  I was gratified when XM radio was bought out by Sirius.  I had previously found Sirius much easier to cancel than XM.

To cancel my ADT service (which was running $90/mo) I had to make two phone calls taking a total of about one hour.  They gave me a list of proposed rate reductions to keep the service, and I refused them all (knowing from past experience that rates are jacked up the moment any rate reduction offer expires).  That wasn't too bad, as these things go.  To cancel my AT&T landline, it took one phone call and about 40 minutes.  With both ADT and AT&T, they stuck me with an additional month of "service" but I was glad when it was finally over and I didn't see my checking account hit with the automatic montly charges anymore.

Currently I'm trying to cancel my "Windtricity," which is a contribution to the development and deployment of wind power in Texas, managed through my utility CPS.  When I signed up in 1997, Wind Power was barely a thing in Texas, now it's huge.  I've done my bit, and now I can't afford any extra subscriptions, so I'm trying to cancel it.

The easiest thing would be if they provided a website tool to cancel, but they never do.  IMO this should be a requirement.  I could cancel the automatic payments of my entire bill, but not the Windtricity charges within it.  To cancel that, it tells me I need to email a special department in CPS called "Products and Services" 

I emailed products and services on September 25.  In two days I had not gotten any response, and it looked like I might have used an incorrect address because my Yahoo email reduced the address to a token so it was hard to figure out where the message had actually been sent.  So I sent a second cancellation email.  Now it used the same token, and I was able to figure out that it was going to the correct address after all.

On October 7, I finally got an email from Products and Services which said my Windtricity contributions had been cancelled.

But my bill dated October 17 still showed me being charged the full amount.

Needless to say, the CPS customer service line is useless.  Then have endless menus and options, none of which apply to Windtricity.  This is typical of automated phone answering systems, they never have an option which applies to you.  If it were something simple, like the options they give you, you would have probably handled it already.  And there is never any way of talking to a real person anymore.  I tried pressing 0 and that did not work.

Yahoo AI deleting emails if you complain about it

 I got an urgent letter from my credit union today.  In order to best process it, I tried to print it out.  I got just two lines instead of the entire message.

I looked at the onscreen message, and seeing the AI on top, I decided it was the fault of AI.  (That was incorrect.)   I hate those redundant AI summaries as a general rule anyway, they waste space and I'd like to turn them off, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

So I gave the AI Summary a Thumbs Down.

A dialog came up for the AI, and I entered nothing in the explanation box, I just pressed Submit.

The message went away and I was back at my inbox where the original message had disappeared.  I checked my Trash folder, and it wasn't there either.

Fortunately, I had replied to the message, so I still had a copy in my Sent folder.  I tried printing that out, and once again I got just two lines.  It was at that point I realized that the original problem, the two line printout, was because the message was really a link or something (which still doesn't explain why it didn't print out).

From the sent message, I then cut out the text that I needed, copied that to a file in Emacs, and printed that file out.  So finally I got the text I needed.

But now, the Sent message disappeared from my Sent folder.

None of the messages show up in my Trash or in a Search either.

It seems like if you complain about Yahoo AI, it destroys all evidence of that by deleting the original message and your reply to it.

Diabolical.  I never asked for AI and hate it too.  And I thought I had already turned off message summaries.

I asked Google again how to turn off message summaries.  Google AI said:

To disable email summaries in Yahoo Mail, open your settings by clicking the gear icon or More Options icon, navigate to Viewing email, and then toggle the Dynamic message (or Message summaries) setting to off

But in the Viewing tab, I already had the Dynamic Message feature turned off, and there is no Message Summaries.  It turned out, that is in a different settings tab, the one called Appearances.

 My advice would be: unplug all those AI datacenters right now.  It seems like we've landed on Forbidden Planet already.  One AI covering it's tracks and the other misdirecting for it.

Will anyone read this?

MacOS 15 Finder is Broken Shit

When I upgraded my 14 year old Mac Mini to the latest Mac Mini Pro this year, I was expecting everything to get faster and mostly better.

But one thing has become slower than molasses.  And that is Finder with large folders.  And I'm not talking super large, like >32k files.  Just a few thousand files can slow Finder to a crawl when loading folders.

Apple says you shouldn't have large folders?  WTF???  I remember when folder sizes became virtually unlimited in Unix, and that was like 50 years ago.

In addition to that, the new Finder display modes are virtually useless too.  My old system did gallery displays with thousands of files virtually instantly, and I could quickly zero in on an image I wanted.  Now it's useless, and I'm better off using some other application like PictureView to scan files for one I want.

I waited about 10 minutes for Finder to load a folder of 3000 files.  Finally I gave up and rebooted the system.  It wouldn't reboot the first time because Finder was stuck and needed to be terminated.

Fortunately this doesn't seem to be true of the underlying file system.  I can work on folders with large numbers of files just as fast in Terminal as ever before.  That's getting much closer to the system functions, which may be OK.  It's just Finder that's been broken.

Yahoo Mail scrolls past message while you are reading it

 Ever intent to direct your reading habits away from deep reading and thinking, Yahoo email now automagically jumps to the next email when it decides you are done with the present one.

As advertised, this only comes into effect when you have reached the end of an email.  But many times today I've seen my message switch when I'm nowhere near the end in a long message.  Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent.

Theoretically you can turn this new misfeature off by disabling "Dynamic Email."  But I have turned that off, and the same behavior persists.

Now I can scroll to the end of the message and nothing happens.  But if I'm in the middle of reading a message, 60-80% done, and turn the scroll wheel a bit too fast, it jumps to the next email.

This is usually a problem more with long emails, but I've seen this happen in relatively short summaries from Washington Post.

Recent complaints

My iphone had been endlessly asking me if I'd allow notifications from the Toyota app.  I'd be in the middle of doing something else, or nothing at all, and get one of these popups from the Toyota app to which I had to respond before I could do anything else.  But I had all the Toyota app notifications already turned on.  Finally I got tired of all these popups and simply turned Toyota app notifications off.  That's helped but not completely.

One thing the Toyota app always reminds me of is when I leave doors unlocked.  After so many minutes it sends a notification about this.  But I normally park in my private locked garage with the car doors unlocked so I can conveniently add and remove stuff from the car.  There is no way to specifically turn off the "door unlocked" notifications or add geofencing to them.  (It would be fine to remind me about unlocked doors somewhere else.)

I'm not (yet) spending the $15/mo to get Toyota navigation, thinking I could just use my phone like I always have.  But on my first trip, after setting the destination in the Maps application on my iPhone, and pressing go, I wasn't getting any verbal instructions.  I pulled over several times and tried to turn the audio on.  I turned the ringer on, I turned the volume up to max, I fiddled with the audio buttons in the map application itself.  I tried turning up the volume on my Toyota infotainment screen.  Nothing helped.  Inevitably I got lost and had to make a huge detour to get back on route.  Finally, after I arrived at my destination, I discovered that I could get the audio for Maps back on simply by turning Bluetooth on my phone off.  I never told Maps to use Bluetooth, and it should have indicated Bluetooth was being used and allowed me to turn it off through the app.

I was hoping the phone should actually display maps from my phone on the infotainment screen.  I've heard of other cars doing that, but I have found no way to do so on my new Toyota.

Supposedly I can show notifications on my iPhone from the unlocked screen by swiping down from the middle.  Instead, it shows me some kind of "shortcut" screen.  Supposedly I can expand the notifications from that screen by swiping up.  When I swipe up from the shortcut page it puts me right back in the normal page.  Why can't they just give me a button to see notifications?

The iPhone camera app is so full of fiddly buttons now I can hardly take a simple photo without engaging some weird mode by accident.  Particularly troublesome is the long slider at the bottom of the image which selects different camera modes.  I often touch that by accident when I'm trying to take a picture.  I long for the camera app of my iPhone 3 which was so easy to use.

It's nice that the bright/dim controls for the Prius displays have separate modes for daytime and nighttime.  But the dial brightness control on my 2006 Prius was much easier to use and more reflexive than the push button Up/Down controls on my 2026 Prius.  Sometimes you have to turn the lights on even when it's more or less daylight, then the display is too dim and it's nice to quickly bump it up then and bump it down later when it gets dark.  It's terribly inconvenient to do this with the push buttons.

My TigerSECU security DVR started making noticeable and annoying disk drive seeking sounds every few minutes.  I just replaced the drive about 3 months ago with the quietest 3T drive I could find, and normally it is very quiet.  So I went into the TigerSECU menu and turned off motion detection in every single zone.  I don't use motion detection anyway.  That fixed the problem.

But I couldn't turn off motion detection in every zone with the TigerSECU remote.  Even when I navigated to the channel selector pulldown, it wouldn't work from the remote.  I had to attach a mouse to fix zones beyond zone one.

If a SimpliSafe keypad is installed in a location where you can't clearly hear the alarm, you might set off the alarm without knowing about it.  During an alarm, the keypads should give some kind of sound so you know an alarm is happening.

Every serious Mac user should know about and have Macs Fan Control installed, or it should be standard.  By default my M4 Mini was running quite hot but I got it cooled down easily with Mac Fan Control set to 1687 RPM.

It's nice that Toyota lets you control various key modes from the settings screen in the car.  But weirdly you cannot control how the door unlock button on the remote works.  It always takes two presses to get all doors to open.  I'd change it to one press but that's the one thing that can't be changed.

The default of unlocking all doors when you engage Park is stupid.  I engage Park when I'm waiting for my garage door to open, and in similar situations.  Then the doors re-lock when I shift into drive for pulling into the garage.  Fortunately I was able to turn auto door unlocking off.

It's incredibly stupid how the Mac interface ties menu bars to the docking strip in a concept called 'Spaces.'  I have three displays and run VLC in one of them.  If I have "Displays Have Separate Spaces" turned on, then I can access the menu bar for VLC in the screen in which VLC is running full screen by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen.  But then frequently the dock will also appear in the VLC screen, being stolen from the main display.  So when I'm doing things on the main screen, whenever VLC starts a new video the dock is stolen again and I have to mess around by clicking on windows and moving the mouse where the dock is supposed to be to get the dock back to the main screen.  If I turn "Displays Have Separate Spaces" off, then I can't access the menu bar for any application running full screen in a non-primary window in that same window because it always moves to the primary display.  (I have an explanation why Apple has chosen to screw things up like this.  It's a way of ensuring you buy a Mac for every room rather than sending displays from the Mac to other rooms the way I do.  It's similar to how Tivo made pairing an RF remote virtually impossible so you were forced to use remotes only in the IR mode...forcing you to buy a Tivo for every room.)

It's stupid the way my old DiscoverCard has a half circle drawn at the top of the card.  It makes it look as though you are supposed to put that end of the card into a card reader, when it's actually the other end (which has the visible chip).