Author: Emily Dolloff

  • Get more out of your trackpad

    For my office set up, I have an external monitor connected to my laptop and then use a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. This past week my original external trackpad finally called it quits. I rummaged through my desk and found my magic mouse. After a day I quickly remember why I loved my trackpad and preferred to keep the magic mouse in my drawer.

    I have never been a huge magic mouse fan, for years I used the Kensington expert mouse before switching to the trackpad. I simply find the trackpad more intuitive and versatile, I’m forever swiping in error on the mouse or double tapping when I should single tap. Don would say it’s user error, I disagree! None the less, here are some tips and perhaps new tricks for those thinking about or currently using a trackpad.

    Four Fingers on the TrackPad

    The four-fingers-down gestures are dramatic and an easy way to appreciate the power of trackpad gestures, so we’ll start with them. Say you have a lot of windows open, and you want to move them all aside quickly so you can open a file on the Desktop. Place your thumb and three fingers together on your trackpad and then spread them outward. Your windows scurry to the edges of the screen. To bring the windows back, reverse the gesture, pinching your fingers in toward your palm. If you haven’t moved windows aside, pinching your thumb and three-fingers together instead opens Launchpad, which shows icons for installed apps. Click an icon to open that app, or use the spreading four-fingered gesture to exit Launchpad.

    Three Fingers on the Trackpad

    Move three fingers horizontally on your trackpad and either nothing will happen, or you’ll switch to a different “desktop space.” This state of affairs is most easily seen by making an app full-screen, including the menu bar ( to put it back, hover the pointer at the very top of the screen and click the green button again )

    You can swipe left and right horizontally to switch in and out of the Safari space. As you make more apps full-screen, they’ll each create their own space. Have you tried to swipe vertically with three fingers? You can swipe up to enter the All Windows view of Mission Control, which shows all open windows as thumbnails, plus desktop spaces in the top bar. Click any thumbnail to switch to it, or jump to any space by clicking it. You can also click the plus button at the upper right or drag any window into the top bar to create a new space. To move a space’s apps back to the current space, hover over a space on the top bar and click the close button that appears. To exit All Windows view, swipe down with three fingers.

    Two Fingers on the Trackpad

    In Safari, swipe left on a page to go back in that tab’s page history or right to go forward. Also in Safari, tap two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in on the content. Another two-fingered tap zooms back out.

    Want to open your Notification Center quickly? Swipe left from off the right-hand edge of your trackpad. Swipe back to the right to close the Notification Center.

  • Have your passwords been hacked?

    Data breaches have become commonplace, with online thieves constantly breaking into corporate and government servers and making off with millions—or even hundreds of millions!—of email addresses, often along with other personal information like names, physical address, and passwords.

    It would be nice to think that all companies properly encrypt their password databases, but the sad reality is that many have poor data security practices. As a result, passwords gathered in a breach are often easily cracked, enabling the bad guys to log in to your accounts. That may not seem like a big deal—who cares if someone reads the local newspaper under your name? But since many people reuse passwords across multiple sites, once one password associated with an email address is known, attackers use automated software to test that combination against many other sites.

    This is why we keep beating the drum for password managers like 1Password and LastPass. They make it easy to create and enter a different random password for every Web site, which protects you in two ways.

    Because password managers can create passwords of any length, you don’t have to rely on short passwords that you can remember and type easily. The longer the password, the harder it is to crack. A password of 16–20 characters is generally considered safe; never use anything shorter than 13 characters.

    Even if one of your passwords was compromised, having a different password for every site ensures that the attackers can’t break into any of your other accounts.

    But password security hasn’t always been a big deal on the Internet, and many people reused passwords regularly in the past. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if any of your information was included in a data breach, so you’d know which passwords to change?

    A free service called Have I Been Pwned does just this (“pwned” is hacker-speak for “owned” or “dominated by”—it rhymes with “owned”). Run by Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned gathers the email addresses associated with data breaches and lets you search to see if your address was stolen in any of the archived data breaches. Even better, you can subscribe to have the service notify you if your address shows up in any future breaches.

    Needless to say, you’ll want to change your password on any site that has suffered a data breach, and if you reused that password on any other sites, give them new, unique passwords as well. That may seem like a daunting task, and we won’t pretend that it isn’t a fair amount of work, but both 1Password and LastPass offer features to help.

    In 1Password, look in the sidebar for Watchtower, which provides several lists, including accounts where the password may have been compromised in a known breach, passwords that are known to have been compromised, passwords that you reused across sites, and weak passwords.

    LastPass provide essentially the same information through its Security Challenge and rates your overall security in comparison with other LastPass users. It suggests a series of steps for improving your passwords; the only problem is that you need to restart the Security Challenge if you don’t have time to fix all the passwords at once.

    Regardless of which password manager you use, take some time to check for and update compromised, vulnerable, and weak passwords. Start with more important sites, and, as time permits, move on to accounts that don’t contain confidential information.