PDFs remain a common way to share documents because they preserve formatting across devices and platforms. Sometimes, however, you end up with several separate PDFs that would be easier to handle as a single file. Perhaps you’re sending a client multiple contracts or keeping all your scanned bills in one place. Whatever the reason, combining PDFs is simple once you know which tools to use. Adobe Acrobat offers the most direct approach, but there are plenty of free alternatives to consider as well.

How to combine PDFs with Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat has long been the default solution for editing and managing PDFs. If you already use the desktop app, you can merge files without relying on any third-party tools. Start by opening Acrobat and selecting the Tools tab. From there, choose Combine Files. You’ll see an option to add your documents. Usefully, this doesn’t limit you to just PDFs either. Word files, Excel sheets and image formats are all supported, too. 

Once the files appear in the workspace, you can rearrange them by dragging them into the order you want. If there are pages you don’t need, they can be removed before finalizing. Acrobat also gives you the option to turn off automatic bookmarks if you prefer a cleaner output. When everything looks correct, click Combine and the program will generate a single PDF that you can save anywhere on your device.

If you don’t have the desktop version, Adobe also provides a free online tool. The web-based version works in any modern browser. You simply go to Adobe’s merge tool page and drag your PDFs into the upload window. The interface lets you change the order before confirming. Once you click Merge, the combined document is processed and offered as a download. 

The service supports up to 100 individual files or 1,500 total pages, which is more than enough for most everyday needs.

Consider free alternatives online

If you prefer not to use Adobe or are working with smaller projects, several free services handle PDF merging in a browser. I Love PDF is one of the more popular choices. Using I Love PDF is nice and simple too: you upload your documents, arrange them as needed and download the finished file. 

However, there are limits to keep in mind: I Love PDF’s free tier allows up to 25 files or 100 MB per merge, but it remains a quick option when you don’t want to install extra software.

Sejda is another widely recommended tool. It works similarly, but places an emphasis on security and deletes files after processing. You can upload multiple PDFs, make changes such as reordering or removing pages and then merge them into one file. The free version of Sejda comes with task limits, but for occasional use, it covers the basics well.

Foxit also offers its own online merge service that requires little more than adding files, clicking merge and downloading the result. These web-based solutions are fast and convenient, though they are best suited to smaller, non-sensitive projects, given the need to upload documents to a server.

Desktop programs beyond Adobe

For those who prefer keeping documents offline, open source and freeware options are available. PDFsam Basic is a long-standing desktop application that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Unlike online tools, everything happens locally, which is good if you have concerns about privacy. 

After installing the program, you open the Merge module, select your files and choose whether to include features such as bookmarks or a table of contents. Once you’re satisfied with the settings, the program merges the documents into a single file stored directly on your computer.

Windows users can also turn to PDF24 Creator. It adds a virtual printer and a toolbox with options for editing. Within the toolbox, you select Merge Files and then arrange them in the preview window. After confirming, the program saves the combined PDF to your system.

Both PDFsam and PDF24 are free, lightweight and reliable, making them strong alternatives if you need an offline solution without subscribing to Adobe Acrobat.

How to combine PDF files on macOS using Preview

If you’re on a Mac, be aware that you don’t necessarily need third-party software. Apple’s Preview app, which comes pre-installed on macOS, has a built-in way to combine PDFs.

Open one of your files in Preview, then enable the thumbnail sidebar from the View menu. With the sidebar visible, you can drag another PDF directly into it, dropping the new document either before or after the existing pages. Once the arrangement looks correct, choose Export as PDF from the File menu to create the combined version. It’s a simple solution that requires no downloads and works well for basic needs.

Choosing the right method

The best option depends on how often you work with PDFs and whether privacy is a concern. Adobe Acrobat provides the most features and the smoothest workflow, but it requires a subscription for desktop use. The free online version is fine for occasional merging, especially if you want something quick and easy.

Services like I Love PDF, Sejda and Foxit offer comparable convenience, though file size limits may restrict larger projects. Desktop tools such as PDFsam Basic and PDF24 Creator are better suited for anyone who wants to keep files local and avoid upload restrictions. Mac users benefit from the built-in Preview app, which covers the basics without requiring extra software.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/how-to-combine-pdf-files-120046452.html?src=rss

Last week’s Apple event meant we were in for a barrage of reviews this week. We spent lots of time putting the iPhone 17 family, including the new iPhone Air, through its paces. We also tested the AirPods Pro 3 and Apple Watch Series 11 that were unveiled just over a week ago. In non-Apple reviews, there’s in-depth analysis of a premium Chromebook and the latest Tamagotchi device. Read on to catch up on everything you might’ve missed over the last few weeks. 

Apple iPhone Air

Apple replaced the iPhone 16 Plus with the ultra-thin iPhone Air, but the new phone is more than just a gimmick. As senior reviews writer Sam Rutherford observed, the company opted for sleekness with a purpose, and it did so without sacrificing too much battery life. “While Apple might not want to say so just yet, I’m willing to bet that this device will also be the template for an upcoming foldable iPhone,” he concluded. 

Apple iPhone 17

We’ve become bored with Apple’s tickle-down scheme for the regular iPhone over the years. The company has repeatedly opted to bring features from the Pro line down to these devices. This time, it finally gave the iPhone 17 a 120Hz display, and you won’t have to wait for the best camera updates. “Even if you’re coming from the iPhone 16, you’ll reap the benefits of the overhauled display and improved cameras,” I wrote. “I don’t say any of that lightly as I’m not a person who recommends getting a new phone every year.”

Apple iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max

The Pro and Pro Max versions of the iPhone have always held a camera advantage over the regular model, and that’s still true. But the main differences now also include better thermal management, an aluminum unibody case and an optional 6.9-inch display. “This year’s iPhone lineup is forcing me to re-think the idea of a Pro phone,” managing editor Cherlynn Low said. “Is it one that looks and feels expensive or is it one that’s slightly more durable and maybe doesn’t appear as stylish?”

Apple AirPods Pro 3

If Apple had only improved both the active noise cancellation (ANC) and sound performance of the AirPods Pro 3, it would’ve been a decent upgrade. However, the company went well beyond that with the additions of Live Translation and heart-rate tracking. But the best part about this model is the strong possibility that the company isn’t done with it yet. “If recent history is any indication, the company will continue to add new features to this third-generation version,” I said. “I highly doubt that Apple is finished exploiting the power of the H2 chip, so it’s just getting started with what the AirPods Pro 3 can do.”

Apple Watch Series 11

The best smartwatch for iPhone owners keeps getting better. With upgrades to design, battery life, health monitoring and more, the Series 11 is a big refresh for the wearable device. However, it might not be the best option for most people. “With the Watch SE 3, you’ll still be able to access a wide range of health and fitness features like wrist temperature monitoring, sleep score, emergency SOS, fall and crash detection and more,” Cherlynn concluded. “It’s a compelling option at an appealing price.”

Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514

There’s some wide variance in performance among Chromebooks, but Acer’s Chromebook Plus Spin 514 offers power, longevity and utility. The main downside is you’ll have to pay a premium for it. “At $700, we’re pushing the top of what anyone should spend on a Chromebook,” deputy editor Nathan Ingraham wrote. “While the more powerful chip and long battery life will be worth it for some people, Acer itself is providing some strong competition with its standard Chromebook Plus 514 which came out this summer.”

Tamagotchi Paradise

If taking care of a virtual pet is more your speed these days, weekend editor Cheyenne McDonald spent some time tending to her digital flock. “All in all, Tamagotchi Paradise feels fuller than 2023’s Uni, especially as the latter existed at its launch before all the downloadable content started coming in,” she said. “There’s a lot of fun to be had with this one, so long as you’re open to a little (okay, a lot of) change.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-review-recap-iphone-17-lineup-airpods-pro-3-apple-watch-series-11-and-more-120014319.html?src=rss

Mickey Mouse’s first movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024.
Now one of America’s largest personal injury firms is suing Disney, reports the Associated Press, “in an effort to get a ruling that would allow it to use Steamboat Willie in advertisements…”
[The law firm said] it had reached out to Disney to make sure the entertainment company wouldn’t sue them if they used images from the animated film for their TV and online ads. Disney’s lawyers responded by saying they didn’t offer legal advice to third parties, according to the lawsuit. Morgan & Morgan said it was filing the lawsuit to get a decision because it otherwise feared being sued by Disney for trademark infringement if it used Steamboat Willie.
“Without waiver of any of its rights, Disney will not provide such advice in response to your letter,” Disney’s attorneys wrote in their letter (adding “Very truly yours…”). A local newscast showed a glimpse of the letter, along with a few seconds of the ad (which ends with Minnie Mouse pulling out a cellphone to call for a lawyer…)

Attorney John Morgan tells the newscast that Disney’s legal team “is playing cute, and so we’re just trying to get a yes or no answer.. They wrote us back a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that made no sense, didn’t answer the question. We tried it again, they didn’t answer the question…” (The newscast adds that the case isn’t expected to go to court for at least a year.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Meta finally unveiled its newest smart glasses, CEO Mark Zuckerberg “drew more snickers than applause,” wrote the New York Times. (Mashable points out a video call failing onstage followed by an unsuccessful recipe demonstration.)

Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth later explained the funny reason their demo didn’t work, reports TechCrunch, while answering questions on Instagram:

“When the chef said, ‘Hey, Meta, start Live AI,’ it started every single Ray-Ban Meta’s Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building,” Bosworth explained. “That obviously didn’t happen in rehearsal; we didn’t have as many things,” he said, referring to the number of glasses that were triggered… The second part of the failure had to do with how Meta had chosen to route the Live AI traffic to its development server to isolate it during the demo. But when it did so, it did this for everyone in the building on the access points, which included all the headsets. “So we DDoS’d ourselves, basically, with that demo,” Bosworth added… Meta’s dev server wasn’t set up to handle the flood of traffic from the other glasses in the building — Meta was only planning for it to handle the demos alone.

The issue with the failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, was the result of a new bug. The smart glasses’ display had gone to sleep at the exact moment the call came in, Bosworth said. When Zuckerberg woke the display back up, it didn’t show the answer notification to him. The CTO said this was a “race condition” bug… “We’ve never run into that bug before,” Bosworth noted. “That’s the first time we’d ever seen it. It’s fixed now, and that’s a terrible, terrible place for that bug to show up.” He stressed that, of course, Meta knows how to handle video calls, and the company was “bummed” about the bug showing up here… “It really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure,” he said.

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consumer advocacy nonprofit PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is now petitioning Microsoft to reconsider pulling support for Windows 10 in 2025, since “as many as 400 million perfectly good computers that can’t upgrade to Windows 11 will be thrown out.” In a petition addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the group warned the October 14 end of free support could cause “the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals.”

About 40% of PCs currently in use can’t upgrade to Windows 11, even if users want to… Less than a quarter of electronic waste is recycled, so most of those computers will end up in landfills.

Consumer Reports recently also urged Microsoft to not to “strand millions of customers.”. And now more groups are also pushing back, according to a post from the blog Windows: Central

The Restart Project co-developed the “End of 10” toolkit, which is designed to support Windows 10 users who can’t upgrade to Windows 11 after the operating system hits its end-of-support date.

They also note that a Paris-based company called Back Market plans to sell Windows 10 laptops refurbished with Ubuntu Linux or ChromeOS Flex. (“We refuse to watch hundreds of millions of perfectly good computers end up in the trash as e-waste,” explains their web site.) Back Market’s ad promises an “up-to-date, secure operating system — so instead of paying for a new computer you don’t need, you can help us give this one a brand new life.”

Right now Windows 10 holds 71.9% of Microsoft’s market share, with Windows 11 at 22.95%, according to figures from StatCounter cited by the blog Windows Central. And HP and Dell “recently indicated that half of the global PCs are still running Windows 10,” according to another Windows Central post…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The consumer advocacy nonprofit PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) is now petitioning Microsoft to reconsider pulling support for Windows 10 in 2025, since “as many as 400 million perfectly good computers that can’t upgrade to Windows 11 will be thrown out.” In a petition addressed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the group warned the October 14 end of free support could cause “the single biggest jump in junked computers ever, and make it impossible for Microsoft to hit their sustainability goals.”

About 40% of PCs currently in use can’t upgrade to Windows 11, even if users want to… Less than a quarter of electronic waste is recycled, so most of those computers will end up in landfills.

Consumer Reports recently also urged Microsoft to not to “strand millions of customers.”. And now more groups are also pushing back, according to a post from the blog Windows: Central

The Restart Project co-developed the “End of 10” toolkit, which is designed to support Windows 10 users who can’t upgrade to Windows 11 after the operating system hits its end-of-support date.

They also note that a Paris-based company called Back Market plans to sell Windows 10 laptops refurbished with Ubuntu Linux or ChromeOS Flex. (“We refuse to watch hundreds of millions of perfectly good computers end up in the trash as e-waste,” explains their web site.) Back Market’s ad promises an “up-to-date, secure operating system — so instead of paying for a new computer you don’t need, you can help us give this one a brand new life.”

Right now Windows 10 holds 71.9% of Microsoft’s market share, with Windows 11 at 22.95%, according to figures from StatCounter cited by the blog Windows Central. And HP and Dell “recently indicated that half of the global PCs are still running Windows 10,” according to another Windows Central post…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Washington Post:

A student taking an online quiz sees a button appear in their Chrome browser: “homework help.” Soon, Google’s artificial intelligence has read the question on-screen and suggests “choice B” as the answer. The temptation to cheat was suddenly just two clicks away Sept. 2, when Google quietly added a “homework help” button to Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. The button has been appearing automatically on the kinds of course websites used by the majority of American college students and many high-schoolers, too. Pressing it launches Google Lens, a service that reads what’s on the page and can provide an “AI Overview” answer to questions — including during tests.

Educators I’ve spoken with are alarmed. Schools including Emory University, the University of Alabama, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of California at Berkeley have alerted faculty how the button appears in the URL box of course sites and their limited ability to control it.

Chrome’s cheating tool exemplifies Big Tech’s continuing gold rush approach to AI: launch first, consider consequences later and let society clean up the mess. “Google is undermining academic integrity by shoving AI in students’ faces during exams,” says Ian Linkletter, a librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology who first flagged the issue to me. “Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal.”
Several days after I contacted Google about the issue, the company told me it had temporarily paused the homework help button — but also didn’t commit to keeping it off. “Students have told us they value tools that help them learn and understand things visually, so we’re running tests offering an easier way to access Lens while browsing,” Google spokesman Craig Ewer said in a statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:

Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon — spending “above $300 million” — through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space.
Interlune, a company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and an Apollo astronaut, has faced skepticism about its mission to become the first entity to mine the moon (which is legal thanks to a 2015 law that grants U.S. space companies the rights to mine on celestial bodies). But advances in its harvesting technology and the materialization of commercial agreements are gradually making this undertaking sound less like science fiction. Bluefors is the third customer to sign up, with an order of up to 10,000 liters of Helium-3 annually for delivery between 2028 and 2037…

Helium-3 is lighter than the Helium-4 gas featured at birthday parties. It’s also much rarer on Earth. But moon rock samples from the Apollo days hint at its abundance there. Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). “It’s the only resource in the universe that’s priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth,” said Rob Meyerson [CEO of Interlune and former president of Blue Origin]…

[H]eat, even in small doses, can cause qubits to produce errors. That’s where Helium-3 comes in. Bluefors makes the cooling technology that allows the computer to operate — producing chandelier-type structures known as dilution refrigerators. Their fridges, used by quantum computer leader IBM, contain a mixture of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that pushes temperatures below 10 millikelvins (or minus-460 degrees Fahrenheit)… Existing quantum computers have been built with more than a thousand qubits, he said, but a commercial system or data center would need a million or more. That could require perhaps thousands of liters of Helium-3 per quantum computer. “They will need more Helium-3 than is available on planet Earth,” said Gary Lai [a co-founder and chief technology officer of Interlune, who was previously the chief architect at Blue Origin]. Most Helium-3 on Earth, he said, comes from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles, but between 22,000 and 30,000 liters are made each year…
“We estimate there’s more than a million metric tons of Helium-3 on the moon,” Meyerson said. “And it’s been accumulating there for 4 billion years.” Now, they just need to get it.
Interlune CEO Meyerson tells the post “It’s really all about establishing a resilient supply chain for this critical material” — adding that in the long-term he could also see Helium-3 being used for other purposes including fusion energy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A large U.S.-made bomb left over from World War II was discovered at a construction site, reports the Associated Press:

Police said the bomb was 1.5 meters (nearly 5 feet) in length and weighed about 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms). It was discovered by construction workers in Quarry Bay, a bustling residential and business district on the west side of Hong Kong island… [A police official] said that because of “the exceptionally high risks associated with its disposal,” approximately 1,900 households involving 6,000 individuals were “urged to evacuate swiftly.” The operation to deactivate the bomb began late Friday and lasted until around 11:30 a.m. Saturday. No one was injured in the operation.

Bombs left over from World War II are discovered from time to time in Hong Kong. The city was occupied by Japanese forces during the war, when it became a base for the Japanese military and shipping. The United States, along with other Allied forces, targeted Hong Kong in air raids to disrupt Japanese supply lines and infrastructure.

“Bombs from the war have triggered evacuations and emergency measures around the globe in recent months,” reports CBS News:

Earlier this month, a 500-pound bomb was discovered in Slovakia’s capital during construction work, prompting evacuations. In August, large parts of Dresden, Germany, were evacuated so experts could defuse an unexploded World War II bomb found during clearance work for a collapsed bridge. In June, over 20,000 people were evacuated from Cologne after three unexploded U.S. bombs from the war were found… In March, a World War II bomb was found near the tracks of Paris’ Gare du Nord station. In February, more than 170 bombs were found near a children’s playground in northern England. And in October 2024, a World War II bomb exploded at a Japanese airport.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.