One of Mac's slogans is "it just works". Well, this week I've found an exception to that. It was all running just fine, then I decided to upgrade to Macromedia/Adobe Flash 9 on my new(ish) MacBook. The installation appears to have worked just fine. but when I tun on my browser, it's obvious that it failed, as the 'missing plugin' notification appears - both in FireFox and in Safari.

I tried down-grading to Flash 8, that didn't work. I tried the fixes on various forums, they were no good. Finally I stumbled across a fix in VersionTracker. It turns out that the Flash installer is not using super user privileges, therefore it can't write to the /Library/Internet Plugins directory. I also found this hack to make it work (you should know a little about unix shell commands):

This is what i did:

1. Open Terminal.app

2. Type:

3. Look at the owner of the Internet Plug-Ins directory by typing:

4. In the command result is the owner name, remember it

5. Change the owner temporarily to your user name:

6. Remove old flash installation files:

7. Launch the Macromedia installer (yet again)

8. Change back the owner of the directory:

Just as the original poster, I take NO RESPONSIBILITY if you made mistakes and something screws up.

Did you used to play the classic NES game Bomberman? Did you ever want to play it online? Well now you can(sort of)! Play Bomb It, it's a flash-ported game very similar to the original, but with better graphics and music.

Don't forget to leave a comment with your high score!
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So I recently blogged about a free online backup service, which allows you to have up to 2 Gigabytes of free online storage space. After making that post, I found out about XDrive, which gives you up to 5 Gigabytes for free. (more…)

So I've been looking around for ways to automate a regular backup on my Macbook to my server, which is a PC. I found some free software (which I'll blog about later), mounted the network path as a drive, and ran the backup.

But if I realized that if I want to automate it, I'll have to have the drive mounted automatically as well, otherwise the backup will fail. So I did some digging online, and found out that's it's incredibly easy to auto-mount a network share when you logon to your Mac.

All you need to do is just mount the drive once, make a link (by dragging the drive icon into an empty folder) and then dragging the link into the login items. Alternately, within login items, you can just select the share/drive, and add it to the list.