My bad, it's Androsa, not Andorra. The password appears to be the one that everyone on our project uses for project-related documents.

le nub, thanks, but it's not the PDF encryption. He used Androsa rather than Acrobat's encryption, so the PDF breakers won't even recognize the files.

I think my plan of action is two-pronged at this point: 1) kick the encrypted files up the mgmt chain to our boss; 2) coat coworker's desk with vaseline.

Does it get as far as creating AFP files? I do see there are a number of AFP to PDF conversion programs out there.

Can you print it to another .pdf file? I have done that to rescue strangely encoded .pdf files.

Does it get as far as creating AFP files? I do see there are a number of AFP to PDF conversion programs out there.

I do end up with AFP files. But when I try to run a conversion program (I've tried three) the converter tells me that "filename.afp is not an AFP file."

But when I try to run a conversion program (I've tried three) the converter tells me that "filename.afp is not an AFP file."

I hate that error message. Similar ones have left me pounding the desk and screaming "But it says it's a ____ file!"

I even tried to rename it "filename.pdf" and open it with Reader.

In tech-success news, I added a second monitor, new speakers, and a new webcam to my PC at home. Then used them to skype my FiL, and ended up walking him through connecting his new Xbox to his home theater.

I know that this list is a couple years old, but since I'm putting my Mac back together I wondered if there was anything else one "needs."

Other than what's on this list I had to have:

• Bluephone Elite: integrates my phone with my Mac desktop. I can text from my computer and I get call notifications onscreen (in combination with Growl, methinks) that can even be read aloud in annoying voices. It's not free, but I like it enough to buy.
• Skype. My family is overseas. 'Nuff said.
• Opera. Browser of choice
• Chicken of the VNC, so I can control my desktops in the other room.

They got most of my big ones in there. I also love me some NetNewsWire, but if you're not an RSS Client kind of person there's no need. I also install LaTeXit about 20 minutes after installing because I require it for teaching, but that may not be a thing for you.

I use CyberDuck instead of Transmit because it's free and works fine. I like installing Gimp.app (and, by extenstion, X11) since I need image editing rarely but it's great when I do. iStumbler (wifi tool) is useful if it's a laptop. MacTheRipper and Handbrake if you do DVD encoding, ffmpegX for pretty much any other video encoding, PDFLab for editing, breaking up, and connecting PDF files. I don't use TextWrangler, preferring the look of Smultron, though it might not be as good for hardcore programming / editing (for which I tend to use vim in the terminal anyway). Transmission is my favorite bittorrent client. XSlimmer is cool if you have limited hard disk space (it strips the PPC code and useless languages from apps, making them much smaller). And last of all, audacity for audio editing.

MacTheRipper and Handbrake if you do DVD encoding, ffmpegX for pretty much any other video encoding

MPEG Streamclip is better than all of these put together. All Hail MPEG Streamclip.

I'd only used TextWrangler for, um, text, but recently I was writing a little JavaScript on the iBook and it really worked so well!