Nick Wynja, For the Sake of Becoming:

It’s about becoming. Becoming is cyclical and perpetual. When you think you’ve “arrived”, you’re only just at the beginning of a new place. In this cycle of becoming is where you have to give and take between the burden and the solace of creating great things. At times, you’ll be burdened by your desire to make something insanely great. That will lead you into a path of suffering and discouragement; a place of character building and of gaining understanding. In the other season of that cycle comes actualization and a freedom to create the great things you just struggled to find in yourself.

In August, the Mac Power Users podcast reached its 100th episode. They were joined by a number of listeners who shared their Mac workflows. The most useful thing were the academics featured in the episode.

They talked about a load of great tools, including my favourites Papers and Skim, and shared some great ways of using these more efficiently. If you are an academic and use a Mac (quite likely from my experience), then you should really check it out!

It turns out that from Tiger onwards, OSX ships with a Python script that does exactly what you need. The script is already executable, and Python is pre-installed on OS X, so all you need to do to run it is opening the Terminal and typing

"/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py" -o PATH/TO/YOUR/MERGED/FILE.pdf /PATH/TO/ORIGINAL/1.pdf /PATH/TO/ANOTHER/2.pdf /PATH/TO/A/WHOLE/DIR/*.pdf