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Friday, 29 August 2025 Dereel Images for 29 August 2025
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Google POLA
Topic: technology, general, opinion Link here

I seem to have spent the whole week fighting “modern” technology. Yesterday I established that the method of answering a mobile phone had changed with neither warning nor explanation. Today, while searching through the maze of twisty little menus, all different, I found that Google had updated the phone app yesterday. Admire the formatting in the description:


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I still don't understand why they do this. If there has ever been a violation of POLA, this is it. What do they hope to achieve?

Do Google Gemini know? Yes:

Q: Why has the Google phone app changed the way you answer an incoming call?

A: Google has recently rolled out a major redesign for its Phone app, which includes a new way to answer incoming calls. This change is part of a broader "Material 3 Expressive" update, aimed at refreshing the look and feel of several Google apps.

Here are the key reasons and details behind the change:

Can you change it back?

While you can't revert the entire app redesign, you can change the incoming call gesture back to the old style:

  1. Open the Google Phone app.
  2. Go to Settings.
  3. Look for an option like "Incoming call gestures" or similar.
  4. Change the setting from "Horizontal swipe" to "Single tap."

This will replace the swipe gesture with the more traditional "Answer" and "Decline" buttons.

There's this “intuitive” word again. Clearly “some users” are the people migrating from Apple, since it's anything but “intuitive” to people who are already using the app.

So what is this really saying?

  1. Google has found a reason to change things for what appears to be cosmetics at best. This is probably in keeping with the industry habit of changing appearance for change's sake.
  2. Google didn't see any reason to inform users
  3. Google didn't give users any choice. A vertical swipe would be an easy enough alternative.

No wonder they gave up their motto “Don't be evil”.


Authenticating with driver license
Topic: technology, general, opinion Link here

Another pain I had yesterday was activating the new SIM card. I could barely read the partially obscured tiny text on the back of my driver license, even with a magnifying glass, so I ended up having to pay $1 to bypass it.

But I have this digital driver license. Does that show the second number as well? Yes! It hides it behind a misleading layer of false security, but it's easily legible.

And it's clearly not the same as the one on my physical driver license! Never mind, I have two, in case one fails. Look at the other one. The text is in a different place, much more legible, and the same as on the digital license.

How do I have two licenses? I lost it two years ago and applied for a replacement, which received the same number. Then only a month later I found the same one, identical in every respect.

Well, no. This one detail was different, and it seems I gave my best guess at the old number. Somehow this all still seems really silly.

A whole week fighting “intuitive” modern technology!


Saturday, 30 August 2025 Dereel Images for 30 August 2025
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Cats: change of prey
Topic: animals, general, opinion Link here

Early this morning, Bruno came up to the door wanting to come inside. But he wasn't alone:


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So I didn't let him in. Instead he dropped the mouse and let it escape under a flowerpot:


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OK, I can help there, but it seems that he didn't know what to do with it:


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But then Mona came out and got interested. They chased it off to the edge of the terrace.


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I thought it had jumped into the water, but no, Mona had it:


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Those two seconds were taken in the same place 2 seconds apart. What's the liquid in the second photo? It was still alive.

She played around with it for some time. When I went out to take my house photos, she was on the windowsill with it, though it's hard to see in this crop of my panorama 20 minutes later:


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This isn't the first time the cats have caught mice. But it's interesting that Mona took the lead, leaving Bruno behind. On the other hand, Bruno is no longer very interested in birds, which can only be a good thing.


History of Kuala Lumpur
Topic: history, photography, opinion Link here

I've been reading a number of documents about the history of what is now West Malaysia, and I came across this one about Kuala Lumpur, which gave me a little more perspective. Some images are strange. The subtitle to this photos reads “Imperial Japanese Troops Entered Kuala Lumpur”, which is clearly an anachronism.


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I was rather pleased with myself when I recognized the location exactly. The old building on the left was the Bank Negara Malaysia when I lived there, and it's looking south towards the railway station. But none of the buildings behind were there when I lived there. Here's a photo I took looking in the opposite direction on 28 August 1964, three days before the first-ever independence celebrations of the newly created country of Malaysia (and thus the decorations):


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Then on, and got about as far as the time I lived there, where I found:

 
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That looks right, though it's clearly Mountbatten Road, not Jalan Tun Perak (the modern name). But I once took a photo from exactly that vantage point:


https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/19640914/big/Kuala-Lumpur-from-IBM-building-4.jpeg
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Yes, no doubt about it, a plagiarism. But apparently not by this site, which at least acknowledges the source: says.com. And sure enough, this page contains this and another of my photos, both attributed as “Image via R.S Murthi”, linking to a non-existent domain http://www.rsmurthi.com/OldKualaLumpurPhotos2.html. Here first his crop and then my original:

https://images.says.com/uploads/story_source/source_image/509658/2265.jpg
https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/19640914/big/Kuala-Lumpur-from-IBM-building-3.jpeg
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Time to create a page describing them and their (ab)use.


Instagram responds
Topic: technology, general, opinion Link here

Instagram seems to have forgiven me, and now I'm getting mail telling me that I have some kind of activity, including from stucchimax, who still doesn't recognize my new nick. See if I care.

But one clip was from somebody called graeme.jean, showing a dog being walked and a kangaroo jumping out in front of them. We can do that too. In fact, the landscape looked very similar to here, and I commented so.

Then I discovered that the nick graeme.jean is really Linda (Jean) Swift, our next door neighbour. No wonder.

And then I got a reply, suggesting that Linda didn't know that my nick (Gr00gle) relates to me. Don't obscure (and obligatory) nicks help?

In passing, Instragram must be one of the most unnavigable sites I've seen Doubtless I could work it out if I tried, but I see no reason. While writing this article it took me forever to find the post, and all the comments (including mine) seem to have gone away.


This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days, but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it.     Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so.


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