Mini'app'les

the Minnesota Apple Computer Users' Group, Inc.

Mini’app’les Meeting, Tuesday Dec. 16 at 7:00 p.m., Q&A at 6:30 p.m.

by Tim Drenk

The next Mini’app’les meeting is Tuesday, December 16th, the third Tuesday of the month, at the Hackfactory (3119 E. 26th Street Minneapolis, MN 55406). At 6:30 p.m., members of the board and other knowledgable people will be available if you have specific questions you would like answered. We will do our best to address your question and help you troubleshoot the issue.

At 7:00 p.m., we will first take a brief look at some of the news and happenings over the past month. We will then look at some best practices for setting up email accounts and some tips for troubleshooting email accounts when things don’t seem to be working right. While we are on best practices, we will also look at some of the recent changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

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Where’s your Recovery Key to your AppleID with two-factor authentication?

by Tim Drenk

If you have enabled two-factor authentication for your Apple ID (and you really should if you haven’t), you were given a Recovery Key. It was 14 characters, all capital letters, and probably something you didn’t think much about. You need to find it right now and save it in a safe location such as 1Password or, if it’s on paper, somewhere not near your computer. If someone tries to get into your account and locks it, the only way for you to get back in is to use that Recovery Key. You read that correctly, the only way to get back into your account is to enter your Recovery Key. You can read the experience of Owen Williams at TNW who thought he had lost his recovery key after someone tried to get into his Apple account.

If everything is ok with your AppleID, you can login and generate a new Recovery key. You can go to Apple’s site, https://appleid.apple.com, go to “Manage your Apple ID” and after entering your ID, password, and code, you can select “Replace your Recovery Key” which will generate a new code for you.

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Other services use similar Recovery Keys as well, such as GMail, and you will want to make sure you have those Recovery Keys as well.

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Two OS X 10.10 Yosemite issues and fixes

by Tim Drenk

After upgrading my MacBook Pro to 10.10 (and then to 10.10.1), I experienced 2 problems.

First, when I used certain programs, the save dialog box would continually get bigger. So each time I saved something in Safari or BBEdit, the dialog box would get longer by a line of text or so until the bottom was off the screen. I use Default Folder so at first I thought it was a problem with that, but after completely uninstalling it, the problem remained. I figured out some workarounds, like making sure I made the dialog box smaller after a few saves, but I couldn’t resolve it. Jon Gotow, the developer behind Default Folder figured out the problem. He found that Apple changed the file dialogs so that the title bar is now considered to be part of the window—and changed the math everywhere except in save sheets. Yesterday, Gotow released a beta version of Default Folder that fixes the problem. It is a beta release but I haven’t had any problems with it. If you are affected by this bug and don’t use Default Folder, you could use Default Folder’s 30 day trial and maybe Apple will fix this in 10.10.2.

sheetbug-small

 

My second problem was I was no longer able to connect to the VPN service, PrivateInternatAccess.com. I could connect using PIA’s own VPN app, but I couldn’t use built-in app for L2TP VPN. I figured out that my static IP that I set for my local network broke the VPN app, both for wireless and wired connections. I was able to change the setting to “DHCP with manual address” and the built-in VPN worked. Hopefully, this will be another issue that 10.10.2 fixes. I’m sure this affects a pretty limited number of people, but it was very annoying.

 

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Bring back the old window zoom button in Yosemite

by Pete Bockenhauer

Yosemite changed the default behavior of the window zoom button (green circle) to bring the window full screen instead of resizing (zooming) to the content. You can of course hold down the option key on your keyboard when clicking the button to toggle between full screen and zoom.  However, if you want to change the green button to always zoom again and not have to hold down option, you can accomplish this with a free app called BetterTouchTool.

Once you have BetterTouchTool installed, go into Preferences and configure a new trigger.

  1. Make sure Global is highlighted in the left sidebar.
  2. Click the Configure New Trigger button.
  3. From the Trigger  drop down select Leftclick Green Window Button
  4. From the Predefined Action drop down select Zoom Window Below Cursor (this can be found under the Window Interaction section).

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From now on the green button will zoom to the content instead of going full screen.

Prior to Yosemite, I had been using RightZoom to have the green button maximize the window to the full area of the screen similar to how the maximize button in Microsoft Windows works.  As of now, RightZoom is not compatible with Yosemite. So instead I can setup BetterTouchTool to do the same thing. Instead of selecting Zoom Window Below Cursor, select Maximize Window.

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I also setup another trigger for Rightclick Green Window Button to Restore Old Window Size.

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And just in case I ever do want to go into full screen mode, I setup a third trigger for Leftclick Green Window Button plus the option key and select Enter Fullscreen.

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BetterTouchTool has many other features besides these, definitely worth checking out.

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Mini’app’les Meeting, TONIGHT, Tuesday Oct. 21 at 7:00 p.m., Q&A at 6:30 p.m.

by Tim Drenk

The next Mini’app’les meeting is tonight, October 21st, the third Tuesday of the month, at the Hackfactory (3119 E. 26th Street Minneapolis, MN 55406). At 6:30 p.m., members of the board and other knowledgable people will be available if you have specific questions you would like answered. We will do our best to address your question and help you troubleshoot the issue.

At 7:00 p.m., we will look at OS X 10.10, Yosemite, and iOS 8.1. We will talk about the upgrade process and why you should or shouldn’t upgrade. We will look at some tips and tricks for using both of the new systems and how to manage some of its quirks like how to stop (or enable) your other devices from ringing when you get a phone call on your iPhone. 

We look forward to seeing you there.

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