Cause sought in fire that killed Saco woman, 83. The blaze on Hillview Avenue that left the elderly woman dead and two other people homeless started in a home office, investigators report.
Apple’s built-in automation tool, Automator (in /Applications), is capable of performing wondrous feats, yet far too many people ignore it—believing their work wouldn’t benefit from automation or that Automator is too difficult to use. Neither is the case, as evidenced by these tips for the Snow Leopard version. Access your media anywhere If you spend much time with Apple’s $79 and suite applications, you’re probably accustomed to having your media close at hand via the Media Browser—a pane that displays the contents of your movie, photo, and iTunes libraries so you can more easily use these elements in projects. Yet when you want to access these files with a different application, you often have to open your Movies folder, iPhoto, or iTunes to do so because the pane is absent. It needn’t be, as a collection of Automator services makes the Media Browser available anywhere. Fond of the iLife and iWork Media Browser? Download a free Automator workflow and you can access it from anywhere.
Travel to the Mac OS X Automation Website and download the. When you install it, you’ll discover that the Services menu—found in all your Snow Leopard applications under Application Name - Services—includes three new entries: Browse iTunes Library, Browse Movie Library, and Browse Photo Library.
Choose the most appropriate one based on your needs and a Media Browser window appears, containing your media. Just select the file you want and drag it into a document. Listen to your documents Snow Leopard includes another helpful Automator service that lets you take your documents with you in audio form. This is a great way for both those always on the move and those with visual impairments to access text documents. To invoke it, launch System Preferences, select Keyboard, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and select Services in the window’s first column. Scroll down to the Text heading and enable the Add To iTunes As A Spoken Track service. (If you like, select the service, press the Return key, and assign a keyboard shortcut to it.) Now open a text document that you’d like to save as an audio file.
Select all the text, choose Services from the application’s menu (for example, BBEdit - Services), and then invoke the Add To iTunes As A Spoken Track command. An Automator workflow kicks in that uses OS X’s built-in text-to-speech feature to convert the text to audio and then saves the file to iTunes.
You’ll find it under the new Spoken Text playlist with the name Text To Speech. Trigger workflows through iCal When you launch Snow Leopard’s Automator, the workflow sheet that appears contains a list of templates. One worth paying attention to is the iCal Alarm template. Using it, you can create helpful workflows that are triggered at a particular time and date. Use Automator's iCal Alarm template to create helpful workflows that are triggered at a particular time and date. Here I've created a backup workflow that I'll set to run every day. For example, to automatically back up a Current Projects folder on your Desktop to another folder (one on another drive, for example), select the iCal Alarm template and then create a list of actions that includes Get Specific Finder Items, Get Folder Contents, and Copy Finder Items.
(Click Files & Folders to reveal these items in the Actions column.) Drag your Current Projects folder to the Get Specified Finder Items action so Automator understands that it’s the source folder. Leave Get Folder Contents as it is. And drag your destination folder, which we’ll call Backup, to the Copy Finder Items action.
If you click the Run button you’ll see that any items you’ve placed in the Current Projects folder are copied to the Backup folder. (If you want old files with the same name to be replaced by newer files, enable the Replacing Existing Files option in the Copy Finder Items action.) When you save the workflow you’ll be prompted to name it. Do so, click Save, and iCal will open, with the Backup event’s Edit window showing. Within this window you can create a repeating alarm—one that goes off once a day at 6 PM, for example—and copies the contents of the Current Projects folder to the Backup folder without you lifting a finger. Opt for an automatic slideshow Use Automator's Image Capture template to create a workflow that collects images from your camera and presents them in a slideshow for your review.Automator also includes an Image Capture plugin that lets you do cool things. For example, in iPhoto create an album (File - New Album) called Today’s Pictures.
Open Automator, create a new workflow, and in the template chooser select Image Capture Plugin. Click on the Photos item in the Library column and create a workflow that contains these steps: Review Photos, Import Files into iPhoto, Get Selected iPhoto Items, Play iPhoto Slideshow. In the Import Files into iPhoto action, choose your Today’s Pictures album as the destination for your pictures.
And in the Get Selected iPhoto Items, choose Albums from the Get Selected pop-up menu (this causes the action to be named Get Selected iPhoto Albums). Save your workflow (File - Save) with the name Review and Slideshow. Now connect a camera to your Mac (this can be your iPhone). Open Image Capture (in /Applications) and from the Import To popup menu at the bottom of the screen choose your Review and Slideshow workflow. Select some images and click the Import button. An Image Review window will appear that displays the first image along with—among other things—Reject and Approve buttons.
Click the appropriate button and continue to review your images. When you finish reviewing the images, iPhoto opens, adds the approved images to your Today’s Pictures album, and then displays a slideshow of the images you approved.
Pull text from PDFs If you’ve ever sought an easy way to extract text from PDF files, Automator provides a way. Create a new Automator workflow and in the templates sheet, choose Application. Create a workflow that contains these actions: Get Selected Finder Items (under Files & Folders in the Library column) and Extract PDF Text (under PDFs in the Library column). In the Extract PDF Text action, choose Rich Text as the output option, as the text will look better this way. Also, select an output destination—a folder you’ve called PDF Text, for example—from the Save Output To pop-up menu. Now save the Automator application to your Desktop. When you’re ready to convert a PDF file, just drag it on top of the Automator application you created.
In a short time, Automator will extract all the text from that document and place it in a new text document within the target folder. You’ll likely have to clean up the text as you’ll see odd characters and formatting.
In early December, President Trump, furious over news reports about a new round of subpoenas from the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, told advisers in no uncertain terms that Mr. Mueller’s investigation had to be shut down. The president’s anger was fueled by reports that the subpoenas were for obtaining information about his business dealings with Deutsche Bank, according to interviews with eight White House officials, people close to the president and others familiar with the episode. Trump, the subpoenas suggested that Mr.
Mueller had expanded the investigation in a way that crossed the “red line” he had set last year. In the hours that followed Mr.
Trump’s initial anger over the Deutsche Bank reports, his lawyers and advisers worked quickly to learn about the subpoenas, and ultimately were told by Mr. Mueller’s office that the reports were not accurate, leading the president to back down. Trump’s quick conclusion that the erroneous news reports warranted firing Mr. Mueller is also an insight into Mr. Trump’s state of mind about the special counsel.
Despite assurances from leading Republicans like Speaker Paul D. Ryan that the president has not thought about firing Mr. Mueller, the December episode was the second time Mr. Trump is now known to have considered taking that step. The other instance was in June, when the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, unless Mr.
Trump stopped trying to get him to fire Mr. The December episode, which has never been publicly reported, has new resonance following the disclosure on Monday that F.B.I. Agents had at the office and hotel room of Mr.
Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. In that action, the Justice Department seems to have walked directly up to — if not crossed — Mr. Trump’s red line by examining something that seems unrelated to Russia. Among the documents the agents sought were who said they had affairs with Mr.
Trump, and information related to the role of the publisher of The National Enquirer in silencing one of the women. After learning about the raid, the president again erupted in anger. He told reporters that federal authorities had “broke in to the office” and he called it “a disgraceful situation” and “a total witch hunt.” When Mr. Trump told Mr. McGahn in June to have Mr. Mueller fired, the president cited a series of conflict-of-interest issues that he insisted disqualified the special counsel from overseeing the investigation. Among the issues Mr.
Trump cited was a dispute Mr. Mueller had with Mr. Trump’s Washington-area golf course years earlier.
Trump told Mr. McGahn to tell Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general and Mr.
Mueller’s superior, that the time for Mr. Mueller to go had come.
McGahn believed those issues were not grounds for Mr. Mueller to be fired and refused to call the Justice Department.
Over the next couple of days, Mr. Trump pestered Mr. McGahn about the firing, but Mr. McGahn would not tell Mr. The badgering by the president got so bad that Mr. McGahn wrote a resignation letter and was prepared to quit.
It was only after Mr. McGahn made it known to senior White House officials that he was going to resign that Mr. Trump backed down. The articles that provoked Mr. Trump’s anger in December — which were published by Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters — said one of Mr.
Mueller’s subpoenas had targeted Mr. Trump’s and his family’s banking records at Deutsche Bank. Trump’s lawyers, who have studied Mr. Trump’s bank accounts, did not believe the articles were accurate because Mr. Trump did not have his money there. The lawyers were also able to learn that federal prosecutors in a different inquiry had issued a subpoena for entities connected to the family business of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
The news outlets later clarified the articles, saying that the subpoena to Deutsche Bank pertained to people affiliated with Mr. Trump, who was satisfied with the explanation and dropped his push to fire Mr. The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Acutely conscious of the threat Mr. Mueller’s investigation poses, Mr. Trump has openly discussed ways to shut it down.
Each time, he has been convinced by his lawyers and advisers that taking the step would only exacerbate his problems. In some cases, they have explained to Mr. Trump how anything that causes him to lose support from congressional Republicans could further imperil his presidency. Trump’s statements to his advisers have been significant enough to attract attention from Mr. Mueller himself.
Mueller’s investigators have interviewed current and former White House officials and have requested documents to understand whether these efforts show evidence the president is trying to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation, according to two people briefed on the matter. Trump’s frustrations have tended to flare up in response to developments in the news, especially accounts of appearances of witnesses, whom Mr. Trump feels were unfairly and aggressively approached by investigators. They include his former communications director, Hope Hicks, and his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
The venting has usually been dismissed by his advisers, many of whom insist they have come to see the statements less as direct orders than as simply how the president talks, and that he often does not follow up on his outbursts. One former adviser said that people had become conditioned to wait until Mr. Trump had raised an issue at least three times before acting on it. The president’s diatribes about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Mr.
Rosenstein and the existence of the special counsel have, for most of the White House aides, become a dependable part of the fabric of life working for this president.