Paco Hope My Random Musings and Rants

8Sep/12Off

Managing my Old Home Movies

I'm finally getting a handle on my old home movies. Between 3 different tools I'm making them much more useful than they used to be. The tools I'm using are:

  • Handbrake — for transcoding old MPEG 2 files into more modern h.264 encoded video files
  • MetaX — for assigning metadata that iTunes will pick up
  • iTunes — for organising and watching them. Mainly because I want to put them on my iPad, AppleTV, etc.
7Jul/08Off

Tricking Office 2008 updater

I'm not sure what the problem was, but every time I tried to update my Office 2008 installation, with the 12.1.1 updater, it would say there was no version of Office to update, even though there was. Perhaps it's because I have Office 2004 also installed. I need to be compatible with some Office 2003 Windows users, and 2008 doesn't do it in a variety of specific places. Read on to see how you can trick the installer into updating no matter what.

23May/08Off

Microsoft is trying to kill the Mac by writing software for it

I plan to rant later about what a ridiculous flaming piece of garbage Microsoft's Office 2008 for Mac is. Today it is Remote Desktop Connection for Mac. It doesn't handle case-sensitive filesystems correctly, and I have to make a change to my filesystem to make their software work.

16May/08Off

Restarting MacOS Kernel Extensions

I find that both Parallels and the CiscoVPN client get confused with all the changing I do on my network (using wired, wireless, Verizon card, etc). Sometimes it’s tough to get it all sorted out again. I’ve gotten it pretty consistent now. I just restart the appropriate kernel extensions and it all works out.

Before I run Parallels, I run this command in a terminal:
sudo SystemStarter restart Parallels

Likewise, I can kick Cisco’s VPN extensions with a similar command:
sudo SystemStarter restart CiscoVPN

Filed under: DVD Camera No Comments
18Nov/07Off

Leopard Migration Assistant Let Me Down

I've upgraded 3 Macs in the last few days: a MacBook Pro, a MacBook, and a Dual G4 Power Mac. All were running the latest 10.4. I did backups to external firewire drives, then did a fresh install (formatting my old hard drive and then installing. It worked great for the MacBook Pro, but failed on the other two. Here's what I did to solve it.