In episode 37 of Automators David and I got our enchanted brooms ready and went to town on maintaining and managing your Mac. We did our best to get out all the cobwebs and find a way to automate all of this, while there may not be a robot vacuum for your Mac, there are plenty of tools you can use to make the magic happen automatically - good whether it’s your system or one you end up managing because the owner relies on you to do it!

First up we tackled trash. I realised after the show that while we talked about how to use Hazel’s built in preference pane to manage the trash, I didn’t go into detail about how I do the more specific things that don’t show up there. The answer is (relatively) simple, I add the trash as a folder - this is easiest to do if you have something in the trash as you can drag that into the selector in Hazel. This lets me add all the usual Hazel rules, though I should also mention I’m doing it this way because that’s how I’ve done it for quite a while, rather than this being a good practice!

We also talked about Dropzone, there are a lot of actions available that you can just install in Dropzone, there’s an official actions page and a further action repository, I really need to look into deleting/moving files after I’ve done specific actions, but these are a great way to automate nonetheless.

I hope you enjoy this episode of Automators, it was great fun to put together!

Automators 37: Mac Maintenance, Management Magic</a

. Thanks to our sponsors for this week’s episode: ExpressVPN, Freshbooks, and Flatiron School.