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automation posts

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Automate your drive re-organizing with Download Mover

I've been writing about plenty of manual ways to keep your hard drive neat and clean recently. That's a nice start, but what about some automated help along the lines of Auto-Delete?

While Download Mover is no longer actively developed, it's still good at what it does. Download and extract the zip file and launch the executable, and DM will ask you where and what you want to monitor. Specify the interval for checks and set your notification options, and you're done.

You can specify multiple folders to watch and specify different targets for each file type you add. I often forget to change my Firefox download preferences to save things in my d:\downloads folder. Setting Download Mover to scrape .exe and .zip files into the proper directory keeps my desktop nice and tidy with no interference.

If you've got another automated tool for handling chores like this, please share it! I'm always on the lookout for another app that can tackle tedious tasks like directory cleanup.

Filed under: Macintosh, Productivity

Your very own personal assistant

Having a personal assistant is great. If you need a cup of tea, your dry cleaning done or someone to walk the dog simply send your personal assistant out to do those things. If you lack the finances to retain the services of a personal assistant you can get one for free from macscheduler.

Unfortunately, Scheduler for Mac will not get get you a cup of tea or any of the other stuff that a real live personal assistant would do because after all Scheduler for Mac is a program on a computer. But what it can do is automate.

Unlike other basic schedulers that just present you with a dialog box letting you know that you should start on those sales charts now, Scheduler for Mac will actually open up your spreadsheet application as well as the document ready for your review. Scheduler for Mac has incorporated a very easy to use automation process along side the standard scheduling options. When setting up a new task, select the file or application you want open and when the time comes Scheduler for Mac will handle the rest.

Aside from the usual office documents you can also schedule websites to open (think eBay), assign custom audio files to act as audio alerts and customize the visual aspect of the alerts as well.

So while Scheduler for Mac will never take the place of a real live personal assistant, at least your reports will be completed on time.

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Freeware

Mobilizer: location-based actions for Mac OS X

Mobilizer PrefsIf you're a Mac laptop user who is often mounting different network shares or picking different printers depending on which network you connect to, then you may want to checkout the free utility Mobilizer Lite. Mobilizer lets you add locations (in this example we've used "Home" and "Work") which would be different networks that you may use.

Mobilizer can determine your location in a few ways: when you select it manually via the Mobilizer app, when you're connected to a specific wireless SSID, when you receive an IP address from a specific DHCP server (good for wired networks), or even when your power adapter is connected.

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Filed under: Fun, Internet

Just type the letters you see in the box

CaptchaCAPTCHAs. You've probably seen them. They're those little boxes that show you a picture with some letters and numbers. You're supposed to type those characters in a box to prove that you're a human leaving a comment on a blog post or news website, and not a spambot.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automatied Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." And since most websites don't have spam filters analogous to the ones that keep your email box (relatively) clean, they seem like a good idea.

Until you see some really poorly produced CAPTCHAs. You know, the kind that are completely impossible to read. Like the one to the right. Or like the 20 or so found on the Headware Blog. Granted, some of these CAPTCHAs aren't so much difficult to read as incredibly inappropriate. But they do show why sometimes automation is not the answer.

[via GHacks]

Filed under: Design, Photo, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Shareware

Imaging tip of the day: Automation

automator logoAutomation seems to be all the rage in computing these days. I guess making computers do more of the work is finally catching on. A couple of weeks ago I posted an Imaging Tip on OSX Tiger Automator actions for Photoshop CS/CS2, and I figured it was time to expand our horizons to include a few more programs and and get Windows users in on the fun. More after the jump.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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