the mergy notes

Since this doesn’t seem to be posted anywhere and wherever it is posted, it seems incorrect or overkill to reinstall Office 2008 entirely. In my case, there was a typo that was just an annoyance that needed to be corrected. I could see though if the Office Suite was installed for a previous user / employee and was not set to a generic name, it could be annoying as well.

Many sites tell you to go and remove the

/Users//Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist

Which is great, unless you do not have it.

There are many hacks out there to help with Windows and Office on Windows registration information correction, but nothing out there for OS X and Office 2008 which is a hassle. I didn’t want to reinstall everything just to fix my typo, so after some investigation I found

/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist

1. Copy/backup the OfficePID.plist file (in case you mess it up).

2. Quit out of all MS Office 2008 applications.

3. Open OfficePID.plist in Property List Editor (comes with XCode Development Tools)

4. Under the Property List Root/1000 is the entry for the user name. Fix it.

5. Save.

After that, open up Word and other Office 2008 applications and see the corrected name.

We have an old TiBook 800 that was sitting around after I moved the network from WEP to WPA encryption. The Airport card built-in the old Titanium Powerbook did not support WPA or higher encryption. So, I went looking on the net and found a lot of old information on cards that would work with OSX but most of those PC cards were no longer available and all the posts across the net were pretty old.

So, I went down to Besy Buy and got a couple to try hoping I would find one with a Broadcom chipset. Good news is that I did find one and OSX sees it natively as Airport Extreme. The card is a Dynex Wireless G Notebook card. It was $60 or so. The TiBook is running Tiger and is a great laptop outside of the networking limitation because of the orginal Airport card. I plugged in the card to the PowerBook and went the network control panel and it recognized it as a new Airport connection. I rebooted and it took over as the Airport Card.

More information on it @ http://www.dynexproducts.com

It is a great solution to give the older PowerBook a new life.

If you have a Series 2 Tivo, and have Tivo on the network it is very easy to get Tivo recorded shows to your iTunes and iPhone.

Using Tivo Decode Manager it is really a breeze. Basically, you want to record in ‘High Quality’ from Tivo then setup TDM to do the MP4 conversion. You will get a file that then can be imported into iTunes and be recognized as a TV Show or Movie. Of course, you need to know your Tivo IP and your Media Access Key, but this is a great solution to get high quality video off your Tivo in a very easy way. This is light years ahead of the way it used to have to be done. It has also been around for quite a while now and I have had tremendous success with it over the last year. It was shaky initially, but after the last TDM version, it has been solid.

Sample screenshot of TDM above.

It finally is possible and stable.

Thanks to MacFuse and NTFS-3G. I have it running on an Intel MacBook Pro and Leopard (OS X 10.5).

This is extremely useful in dealing with large files between operating systems. We have Lacie Firewire/USB external drive that is NTFS to handle large files (greater than 4 gig) and now read/write is a breeze.