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).

Good and Simple

One good and simple idea is worth more than a solar mass of approximations.

Why Prius ?

Ever since I bought my first Prius in 2001, I was hoping my next vehicle would be an electric car.  Then I got 2006 Prius, which lasted until now, so I got a 2026 Prius.

What happened?

Well I did put a deposit on a Tesla Model 3 back in my working days when I made enough money to pay for one.  But then when they actually came, I found 3 major issues for me:

1.  It was nearly 10 inches wider than my Prius, which was already difficult to get into my narrow garage.  (I've recently heard that Teslas might be able to do this automatically, maybe it could squeeze through narrower openings than I can.)  And then there's getting around the car once it is in.  The 2026 Prius is about 3 inches wider than the 2006, which is just about the limit in my garage.

2.  No standard instruments in front of the driver.  I considered this a modernist fascist design flaw.

3.  Too high back window (that's a bit of a problem with the 2026 Prius too).

So I canceled my deposit.  Then I retired early, and wasn't putting too many miles on my old car anyway.

But, what about now???

Well, the standard Prius LE (the lowest trim level) is already stretching my income to the limit.  I could barely think about a Plug In Prius, let alone a Tesla model 3.

I'm now into affordable cars, and the Model 3.  I see two EV's I could have bought:

1.  Nissan Leaf

2.  Fiat EV

But above all, I wanted a reliable car like my last Prius.  I was very used to the size, format, and luxury features of a standard Prius too, including especially automatic climate control, and the size of the hatchback loading area (which is little different on the 2006).

EV's simply haven't become widely available enough, cheap enough, to make the exact model I need at the price I need.

And, there's actually a good reason for this.  There simply isn't enough lithium to make all vehicles EV yet.  Only a small fraction.  (And lithium mining is horrible, toxic and all that, though lithium is fairly ubiquitous.)

Given that there isn't really enough lithium to make EV's for everyone, what should be done?

Well, plug in hybrids would be one thing.  And nearly all cars should be hybrids simply to save gas.

Sadly, plug in hybrids aren't as reliable as the non plug in types (yet).  And the larger batteries are far more expensive to replace (come 15 years or so, and I hope I get more than that).

Smaller EV's with smaller batteries would be another thing.

Limiting EV to cases where it could do the most good.  That would not apply to me because I hardly do any driving anymore.

So it ultimately made the most sense for me to simply have a regular non-plug-in for long term lowest mechanical costs, though perhaps somewhat more fuel cost, but that simply wasn't much a factor for me.