…half-step back. I’m a big fan of the increase-text-size button in Safari, so while I appreciate the definite improvements in the version included with the 10.3.9 update, I have some…issues:

This anime review site displays just fine at the normal text-size setting, but Safari 1.3 persistently hoses the images if you’ve hit the increase-text-size button. Sometimes a forced redraw fixes it, sometimes I have to decrease text size and then increase it again.

M-Audio has announced this custom controller for it, with matching faux-wood paneling.

I’d love to see the market numbers that drove this decision. Macs have always been big in the creative market, but making custom hardware for an application that comes free with the OS? Hmm…

Update: I’m not exactly a fan of Nine Inch Nails, but any band that releases a track from their upcoming album in GarageBand format for their fans to play with is officially cool.

So, yesterday afternoon I went in for some quick outpatient surgery. Nothing major (or ahem life-altering), just some quick drainage work, and then I’d be able to drive myself home. I figured I’d stop at Costco on the way back and pick up some steaks to grill.

That was 1:30PM. At 2PM, the surgeon finished looking at my “right axillary abscess” and said he wanted to take me across the street to the O.R. and do the (still simple, still minor) procedure under general anaesthesia. Not having spent much time under the knife, I didn’t immediately translate this to “you ain’t driving home, son”.

After getting me into one of those silly gowns and inserting an IV, the nurse asked who was going to pick me up. I explained that everyone on my list of possibles was at least 70 miles away and stuck at work for several hours, and found myself being admitted for the night.

Then they told me it’d be at least 5:30PM before they started. Then 6:30PM. At 8:15PM, I was finally knocked out with a clever assortment of chemicals, and woke up at 8:45PM with a well-packed bandage under my right arm. I got about an hour’s sleep last night, and finally got out of there around 10:30AM this morning.

The point of this story? When I left the house to start this little adventure, I stuffed my iPod Shuffle into a jacket pocket, figuring I might need some entertainment for half an hour or so while I waited for the surgeon. It saved my sanity. Except for the relatively short time that I was otherwise occupied, I was able to stay entertained with an assortment of music and Japanese talk radio.

Being partially color-blind, I couldn’t decipher the red/orange/green LED that signals remaining battery life, but it never ran dry. It warded me from the chatter in the hospital hallways, the burbling of my roommate’s oxygen supply, the dreadful basic-cable offerings on TV, and the small stack of relentlessly defeatist newsweeklies that passed for reading material.

And since the Shuffle correctly syncs play count with iTunes, I knew which talk-radio shows to delete when I got home this morning, making room for more.

Oh, and everyone I ran into wanted one. Most of them found the price as attractive as the product.

Please take the iPod Shuffle design, and replace the headphone jack and shuffle button with a small microphone and speaker. Record in a standard audio format, save in a standard FAT32 file system, and please don’t make it a multi-function device. Just record voice memos really really well, for playback on any computer.

And make it a different color, so people don’t confuse it with the Shuffle.

Pretty much every new portable music device that comes out is evaluated for its potential as an “iPod-killer”. I’m sorry, but as long as they keep building things that look like this, they’re not the killers, they’re just a flat patch of fur on the side of the road.

Creative Labs has announced their new iPod Mini killerclone, the Zen Micro. It comes in ten different colors (face-plate only, and they all have a blue border), is slightly shorter and thicker, adds an extra gigabyte of storage, and includes FM radio, voice recording, and a removable rechargeable battery, all for the same price as the Mini.

Oh, yeah, and it’s hideous:

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So I decided to increase the iDisk storage on my .Mac account, mostly because I’m using the password-protected Public folder to share a largish database with some friends, and mounting DAV volumes is easy, convenient, and doesn’t involve bandwidth that I pay for. The fact that it autosyncs to every Mac I use is just a bonus, of course.

The problem? The confirmation screen for buying upgrades to your .Mac account includes your plaintext password. Sure, it’s a secure web form, but this is a receipt, and I print out receipts for online purchases. I suspect other people do as well.

This transaction did not involve changing a password, adding a sub-account with a new password, or anything similar, so why is my password being printed out? More significantly, why is .Mac storing plaintext passwords in the first place? This is an old security mistake, and anyone designing a service on top of Unix should know better.

Update: a few days later, they decided to bump disk storage for everyone and cut the price of bumping it further. Unfortunately, they also bounced a lot of email for a day with bogus “over quota” errors.

Update: well, that’s at least useful. The standard .Mac account now has a total of 250MB of storage, which can be divided up between email and iDisk however you like. My upgrade to 200MB of iDisk storage is now to a total of 1GB, divided evenly by default. I quickly cranked the email storage down to 50MB and put the rest into the iDisk. You still can’t safely sync it when you’re on a wireless network (your .Mac password is sent in the clear for non-SSL WebDAV), but it’s still a handy tool.

So, I just received email from Apple, thanking me for registering iLife ’04 and GarageBand Jam Pack. Which I registered in January.