Maybe you scan all your receipts and bills, and toss the paper into the recycling bin. Congratulations! You’re paperless. You’re also out of luck when it comes to actually finding any of those scans when you need them. You’ll be stuck flipping through stacks of PDFs as if they were stacks of paper.

Unless you get your Mac to automatically run OCR on those scans, making their text searchable. And then maybe you could have you Mac file them for you too, just like computers were supposed to do for us all along.

Sound good? Then check out this neat tutorial from Mac Power Users’ Katie Floyd, which uses Applescript, PDFPen and Hazel to do it all for you.

Microsoft didn’t just announced a new CEO today. They also announced that they were buying a $15 million stake in popular mobile check-in app Foursquare. But to what end?

Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free

Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.

The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution happen in real time.

It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén

The History Channel has gotten a little weird over the past few years.

It used to be all about World War II and the Industrial Revolution, but ever since around 2008 or so, something has been creeping in. Something decidedly un-historic. Now, we flip over to History to learn about UFOs, prophecies, and pseudoscience. So it makes sense that the channel would release a fake documentary about a War of the Worlds-style conflict that took place instead of World War I.

The Great Martian War is an endless runner that shares its name with that program, and it places you in the middle of the conflict as a scout trying to deliver intel to Paris on foot. You’ll run, jump, and slide to avoid obstacles and massive alien walkers.

And you’ll die. You’ll die a lot.

Facebook Paper is a pretty great panacea to the social network’s usually crummy iPhone apps, but unfortunately, it’s only available in the United States, leaving those overseas out-of-luck. But because Paper is a free app, you can download it pretty easily even in other countries. Here’s how.

I’m a terrible DJ (unless you count success by the number of people you can force off the dance floor with one track, in which case I’m a total mix master), but I’ve worked with enough DJs to know the tricks of the tracks. And one of those tricks is the old left-it-at-home routine.

When somebody requests a song you don’t want to play, you say “Excellent song! I love that one.” Then you pause and say “I think I left it at home.”

Now, Djs will have no excuse, becasue the new Pacemaker app will let you spin and mix tunes from Spotify’s huge gazillion-song library.

Today, Facebook released an incredible new app called Paper that is a total reimagining of what Facebook on a mobile device means. As I wrote over on Fast Co. Design, it’s the opening sentence in Facebook’s next 10-year plan that puts mobile first.

It’s a great app, but there’s just one problem: the name. There’s another widely known drawing app called Paper by developers FiftyThree Inc. FiftyThree’s not happy about their name being lifted. Facebook’s response? Basically, “tough noogies.”

North Korea is a bizarre place, in which DPRK dictatorship denies its population any interaction with the West, even as the government’s elite drinks Cristal with Dennis Rodman. In such a regime, you might not be surprised to know that there’s not a lot of Mac users.

However, the North Korean government has released its own operating system, and the latest version looks decidedly familiar. It’s basically a Linux distro skinned to look like OS X!

iHud — Utilities — Free

You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.

But iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.

I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.

iHud – Anders Sperling

After rumors swirled that it’s going after Flipboard, Facebook has made its new storytelling/reader app, Paper, available on the App Store starting today.

Paper allows you to explore and share stories with friends the same way you’ve always been doing on Facebook, except the app also brings in news curation on topics of interest, and it features an immersive new design with less distractions and more natural navigation movements.

Whether the app will actually kill Flipboard remains to be seen, but after playing with it a bit this morning there is one app it’s certain to kill, the original Facebook app.

Here are the release notes: