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When I first heard about Automator it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure what I could use it for personally. After I had upgraded to Tiger, I got around to looking at automator and to be honest, I didn’t see anything that would really help me. I looked at the sample workflows and there was nothing that applied to my everyday or even once in a while tasks.

However, the other day I was in need of combining a couple of pdf files. I knew there was a way to do this in Mac OS X, so I set about searching the internet. I thought I had seen a terminal command process to combine pdfs, but I found instead some instructions on how to do it with automator. So I am posting here in case the reference gets lost from somewhere else…

1. First open Automator, select Finder in the Library and drag “Ask for Finder items”, check the multiple option.
2. Then select PDF in the Library and drag “Combine PDF Pages” set to Appending pages
3. Then go back to the Finder listing in the Library and drag the “Rename Finder Items” set things the way you would like here
4. Then drag a “Move Finder Items” and set it to where you would like the new file to end up

Save your workflow and then run it. Pretty cool. Other variations could substitute Get Folder Contents for step 1. Then you can just drop files you want to combine into that folder and run the command. You can include the Sort Finder Items to change the order the pdf files are combined (or you could just rename them in the finder). Now that I have a taste and feel for what Automator can really do, I have something else to play with/do in my non-existant free time. Here is the forum where I found this http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthread.php?t=239682.

I just noticed that I was not getting e-mail notices on posts being submitted. That has been fixed, so I will approve comments in a more timely manner… I also noticed I had a few poker scum comments awaiting mod… for those of you who are real I approved your comments. The reason I do not allow posts to go up directly is because of the poker/viagra scum comment spammers. If you are a real person and post something I don’t agree with, I will approve it (and probably respond), unless it is an ad or promotion of some product or service.

I am thinking of incorporating the poker comments in the site some way… without their links and without reference to their sites. As they are ripping quotes from some where… it would make the perfect rotating text message material or be used in some visual-type experiment.

My current workplace wants to get started doing podcasting. So I am setting up a podcast rss file. The unique thing here is that it will be dynamically updated. The audio will be saved to the server automatically. Then a script I am writing will check the directory for the 30 most recent files and then pull from a database a title and a description/summary that is entered by the production staff. All of this will be formatted into a rss feed that is usable by iTunes or other podcast aggregating software.
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