Giant Robot

Was looking for a way to help Jacqui produce a single PDF from several jpeg scans today. Turned out - as is often the case with a nice Linux desktop - the answer was right under our noses. We have a bunch of scans, named Scan-001.jpg, Scan-002.jpg thru Scan-009.jpg. We want an output PDF file that lets you download all dozen pages as one PDF.

How hard can that be? This hard - with ImageMagick:

convert -density 150 Scan*jpg Output.pdf

I have installed a few Debian Sarge (and 4.0) systems in the last week while building a web app for a customer, and they all came up with some (IMO) bad permissions in /dev/. In particular /dev/urandom, /dev/random, /dev/null and /dev/tty were being vexatious by persisting in being unwriteable for common users. This meant I got a few funky errors when trying to SSH as a Regular Guy, or use SSH, or do other 'normal' type things.