No matter what we do online there are companies trying to follow us, learn more about what we do, and build profiles. Some web sites contain more tracking code than actual content. On the web you can use ad blockers and search engines like DuckDuckGo or Startpage but there’s little you can do about apps on your iPhone or your Amazon Echo calling someone you don’t what them to talk to. (more)

Emoji. They’re the digital equivalent of the little doodles we’d draw when passing notes to each other. Built into macOS, you can call up the Emoji & Symbols palette while you’re typing. MacBooks with Touch Bar also have a dedicated key for emoji. For even quicker access to emojis there’s an neat menubar application: Rocket, by Matthew Palmer. (more)

Keyboard shortcuts (or hotkeys) are a great way to add a little efficiency to your computer use. CheatSheet is a great little utility from Media Atelier that shows a list of shortcuts for the active application when you press and hold the Command key down. (more)

Our world is full of extraordinarily beautiful places, many set aside and protected from development for people to enjoy nature undisturbed. While not the only country with beautiful national parks, the US, with its varied habitats over three million square miles (eight million square kilometers), has many of its own. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a resource for park information? (more)

DEVONthink does not have a system for automatically backing up everything. DEVONthink has a setting in its Preferences > Backup that controls how many internal metadata backups are done. These backups can be used in a troubleshooting situation by selecting Tools > Restore Backup. (more)

We have told the great people at Readdle that our mobile users love the combination of their Scanner Pro app and DEVONthink to Go. Scanner Pro lets you use your iPhone’s or iPad’s camera for quickly scanning paper documents wherever you are. It applies all sorts of magic to make the document look as good as possible and then lets you share the created PDF with other apps. (more)

When it comes to synchronizing on any network connection, the quality and strength of your network matters — and is often not as good as you imagine. Can you hit the maximum advertised speed? Yes, but probably not sustained over the hours and hours you use it. Wireless networks are convenient, but they’re also subject to poor signal strength, noise, and other factors that can limit your sync reliablility. (more)

Mailplane is a probably the best way to use Gmail on a Mac. Version 3.6.9 adds native support for DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office: Open a message in Mailplane and choose Edit > Save to DEVONthink to save the message as webarchive to DEVONthink. The document includes a link back to the original message in Gmail. You can also send downloaded attachments to your DEVONthink inbox. (more)

If you find yourself typing the same things over and over again, there is a way to give your fingers a break. Text expansion is a method of assigning abbreviations for things like often used phrases. For example, you may create an abbreviation like em1, which could fill in your email when typed. Or you may have boilerplate text for a business, like thank yous. You could use the abbreviation tfyo that could expand to “Thanks for your order!” … (more)

While we rely on our big powerhouse applications like DEVONthink, there are many smaller utilities we use for specialized purposes. However, this has lead to our menubars becoming increasingly crowded. Especially on a smaller screen, like a MacBook Air’s, this leads to the utilities’ icons being hidden from view. Enter Bartender. (more)