Year Archives: 2020

We recently received a comment from a reader regarding the difficulty he had printing articles from the Rocket Yard blog. Well, it wasn’t difficult in the sense that hitting ⌘P was too much work. The problem was that there were all sorts of extraneous unwanted junky-things that would print right along with what he really wanted – the content. Ads, menus, backgrounds, and footers are but a few of the offending items that get in the way of a good, clean read. Not only can they make for a messy read later on, but they are also ink-hogs. And nobody likes ink-hogs.

To use Siri, Apple’s “personal digital assistant,” on your Mac, you can click on the icon in the upper right corner of your screen to activate it. But wouldn’t it be nice if, like on an iPhone and Apple Watch, you could simply say “Hey, Siri” to fire it up? You can, though it takes a few steps.

So far in this series on spam control, we've covered the basics of what spam is and why it's bad, then followed up with methods of reducing spam text messages. Today we're going to dive into how to block spam email (or at least try to reduce the quantities of spam) using your iOS (iPhone or iPod touch) and iPadOS devices. The series concludes next week with an article on spam control for macOS. Ready? Grab your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, and let's get to work.

macOS Quick Look is a wonderful feature. Introduced on June 11, 2007, along with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Quick Look can preview files such as Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Microsoft Office, PDFs, HTML, QuickTime readable media, plain text, and RTF text documents, and RAW camera images.

In my previous Pro Audio series article, I shared with you some of my favorite chorus effect plugins. In this post, I’ll list some popular distortion plugins. As always, I encourage you to explore the stock distortion plugins included with your DAW, because you may find that they achieve the sound you're looking for (and it won't cost you a penny more). For example, Avid's Lo-Fi is included in Pro Tools and you've probably heard that on a number of top 40 records, great free plugin.