> Okay, I'll admit it, I'm one of the last people to do the Tiger update. Just did it last week.

You're not one of the last. I'm a rabid Mac power user and I'm not on Tiger yet, primarily because QuickTime 7 needs to be fixed before I'm willing to migrate.

Okay, I know I should take my butt to bed, but this Automator has serious potential for me. Just made another one. Not a biggy, but it's good for lazy geeks like myself.

I call it the BookTV alarm. Basically I want the BookTV website to open up on Saturday morning so I can check what authors will be on for the weekend. Now because BookTV, IMHO, has more conservative authors than liberal or progressive ones, I just don't make the effort to go the website every Sat. morning. It would only take half a second, but hey, like I said I'm not that excited about seeing Ann Coulters and her comrades on BooTV. They're just not worth the effort.

So anyway I just created an automation to open up the BookTV webage and then saved it as iCal plug-in. I then went to the date on my calendar and attached the plug-in to the alarm for Saturday. Now the sucker will open up for me to look at on Saturday morning and if Noam Chomsky or bell hooks is not scheduled to appear then I can just check my RSS feeds for the day. Simple.

Well, hmm! I hadn't even looked at Automator, but now that I've opened the application, I recognize it as the thing my friend was using to search newsgroups for uploaded Dr. Who episodes.

I have no firking idea how this works, but I am going to enjoy figuring it out. Thanks, Bakari!

Okay, found another little Automator action that is useful to me and perhaps to you.

Think about the times you've taken a screen shot of something on your desktop and it creates a pdf file. But you want to change the pdf file into a jpeg file so you can post it in a Tribes album or somewhere else on the net.

Now, the only way I knew how to make this change is drag the pdf file into Photoshop or some other image conversion program in order to change to a jpeg file. Well, folks, that laborious task has kept me from doing a lot of album postings on Tribes.

Not any more. I now have a little app. that allows me to change an pdf file simply by dropping the file on top of the the app. and it does the rest for me. It even keeps a copy of the original pdf file after the change.

Now unless you already have something like this--and no doubt some of do--you can easily find it in Automator.

Just open the Automator application.

Click on Preview in far left column under application.

Click the Action "Change Type of Images" and drag it into the big window. In the number 2 action, change "To Type" to JPEG

Now go to File--save, and it will ask you a question. Answer the way you want and give it some type of name like, "Change thingy." Now save it as an Application, which is one of the choices you have for the file format button.

You probably want to save it to your desktop so you can try it out a few times before storing it somewhere else.

Now, just test it. Take a screen shot of something (shift-control 4) and then drop the resulting pdf file on top of your little Automator conversion application and presto, bingo you got your jpeg file.

For you visual learners, I'll try to post a screen shot of what I'm talking about in the tribe album.

Note: I think you can also save this JPEG conversion action as a Plug-in which means you might be able to control lick on a file and change it that way. But it's getting too late for me to test that now.