Adding stamp to PDF documents
Recently I ran into a website that wanted me to upload several documents but it asked me to write my ID on each page of those documents in order to “make processing faster.” I’m not going to debate the intelligence of this system (given especially the fact that the during the upload I am already logged into the system, so the backend ostensibly knows the ID of the person uploading a document), but there was no chance I would “make processing faster” by…
- Printing all documents (some spanning several dozens of pages).
- Writing an ID on top of each freakin’ page.
- Scanning those pages back.
- shredding all those newly printed pages.
Why? Not only it is stupid, it insults my intelligence! Most importantly, I am lazy.
So the challenge is to create such an ID on each page programmatically, which is actually not that hard in Linux.
Managing e-statements for fun and profit
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 5 years, you should have noticed the imminent extinction of paper statements from most of the consumer services. Whether we like it or not, e-bills are the way of the future.
One problem with e-bills is that they still need to be stored – preferably, in a way that makes them easy to find. One also cannot rely on the service owners to archive old bills, as they rarely keep them for longer than 1 year.