Until Dropbox provides a feature to easily redirect your local folders to the cloud-based Dropbox, you need to use symlinks or consider abandoning the default Documents folder on your Mac.

Being a purist, I wanted to keep using the entire Documents folder without symlinks for new subfolders I wished to place into Dropbox. This forum post at Apple Discussions provides a quick and easy solution.

Word of caution: if you drag the contents of a folder (such as Documents) into Dropbox and shortly thereafter change your mind (and drag it back) you may find all of those files are deleted from Dropbox and you Mac. Be sure to have an up-to-date Time Machine backup before you perform large file moves.

I don’t know what it is with Adobe Flash on the Macintosh platform but it’s a CPU hog. Safari is my main browser and any page utilizing Flash causes the spinning beach ball for a number of seconds, rendering the computer almost useless until Flash is good and ready to relinquish the CPU.

Waiting for pages to load was more than I could bear. Some searching unearthed the Click2Flash plug-in for Safari which inserts placeholders for every Flash element on a page.

No more waiting to load and if you wan to use a Flash object (such as the YouTube video player) just click the word “Flash” in the placeholder to enable it.

Click2Flash has options to load a single Flash object on a webpage, all of them, or whitelist the entire site so Flash objects are always visible.

Last week I purchased the upgrade version of Final Cut Studio 3 for use on a clean installation of OS X 10.6. Before proceeding I was curious to know what limitations would be enforced for the upgrade version.

• Could I perform a clean installation of FCS3?
• What sort of serial numbers would my retail upgrade accept?

The answers alluded me on Google so I plunged ahead. Let’s just say that Apple isn’t stringent on either point.

Clean Install – No Problem

The drive I’m using has the latest version of 10.6 installed – nothing else. I popped in the FCS3 Install DVD, clicked through the prompts and the installation proceeded without issue.

Serial Number Switcheroo

During install I was asked to enter my upgrade serial number and then my original serial number (see image). If this were not a clean install I’m guessing the old serial number would have automatically been found.

I had three serial numbers at my disposal: Retail, Not-for-Resale, and Volume. For the sake of experimentation I used the Volume serial number and the install continued without incident.

It appears Apple doesn’t check the category of serial number to ensure the Original/Upgrade serials are a match. Because the Volume serial worked it makes me wonder if the NFR would as well. This probably violates the EULA but that’s another subject entirely.

I’ve got an old Lacie BigDisk lying around which was rendered useless when the internal Fujitsu drives failed to spin up. This morning I decided to re-populate the Lacie with two Maxtor PATA drives.

The drives must be jumpered as Master and Slave. They mounted immediately but only as two distinct volumes, not spanned as originally shipped. This will work fine for my needs but if you want to span them as originally configured by Lacie, you’ll need a utility from Oxford Semiconductor.

Take a look at these posts from wwward and Prune’s Blog for photos and more details. If you have trouble finding the software mentioned (i.e.: uploadergui.jar) visit my Downloads page.

During my iPhone firmware update fiasco I had nothing but trouble getting a proper restore of my data. Some – but not all – of the applications would be restored using iTunes 9.

According to a post at Apple Support:

Although iTunes backs up most of your iPhone and iPod touch settings, downloaded applications, your audio, video, and photo content are not included in the backup.

Another post describes what is backed up with each version of the iPhone OS. The following is excerpted specifically regarding applications:

iPhone 1.1

• Application settings, preferences, and data

iPhone 2.0 and later

• App Store Application data (except the Application itself, its tmp and Caches folder)

iPhone 3.0

• Per app preferences allowing use of location services
• In-app purchases

What I’m reading here is that iPhone applications are not backed up in iTunes. This doesn’t explain why some apps get backed/restored while others do not. Nor have I found any backup/restore correspondence if the application was downloaded OTA versus purchased within iTunes.

Fortunately Apple allows you to re-download iPhone applications at no charge but this shouldn’t be necessary if iTunes actually backed them up.