John August

Geek Alert

Getting Apple Pay to work on my M1 MacBook

Geek Alert, How-To

I love my 2020 MacBook Air and have had very few issues with it, except that I couldn’t get it to work with Apple Pay. Transactions would fail, and it wasn’t clear why. For months I just lived with it and used alternate ways of paying for things.

But man, I missed the convenience of Apple Pay, which worked fine on my much older machine. (This was my first Mac with Touch ID, which is relevant.)

Last night, while trying to buy two t-shirts at Cotton Bureau, I was determined to find a solution to my Apple Pay woes.

Checking the Wallet & Apple Pay pane in System Preferences showed my credit cards were there but disabled. It pointed me to this page at Apple:

If Apple Pay on your Mac is disabled because security settings were modified

Had my security settings been modified? No idea.

That page pointed me to this one:

About Startup Security Utility

It seemed that maybe I needed to boot into Recovery Mode and use the Startup Security Utility to set my Mac to a higher security threshold.

The article said you get to Recovery Mode by booting while holding down Command-R. But on the new M1 Macs, instead you hold down the power (Touch ID) button instead. This tripped me up for a few minutes.

In Recovery Mode, it was clear that all my system settings were fine.

Here’s what ultimately worked: Deleting the credit cards in Wallet & Apple Pay, then re-adding them. After that, transactions worked great.

My hunch is that the credit cards were imported when I set up this Mac but not properly authorized. Apple should change the language of the warnings or link to a better explanation.

In the meantime, hopefully this writeup has saved you some hassle.

Getting the Razer Tartarus Pro keyboard to work with macOS Catalina and beyond

Geek Alert, How-To, Tools

As I’ve written before, I use this weird keyboard which has helped greatly with my carpal tunnel issues.

While this odd keyboard is great for normal typing, certain key combinations are unwieldy. So for the past decade I’ve used an external gaming keypad to the left of my keyboard with custom macros set up for some common commands:

  • Select All
  • Undo
  • Copy
  • Cut
  • Paste
  • Paste and Match Style
  • Pasteboard History (which is part of Better Touch Tool)

When my beloved Logitech keypad crapped out, I switched to the well-reviewed Razer Tartarus Pro. It’s nicely built! Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer drivers for the current macOS.

After a lot of googling, I’ve cobbled together a solution. So in the interest of sharing what I’ve learned — and remembering how I got this to work in the first place — let me walk through the steps.

Note that this doesn’t do half of what a proper driver could accomplish, particularly for gaming. So please, Razer, make one! But if you want to use a gaming pad like the Tartarus Pro for keyboard shortcuts, this does the trick.

How to make the Tartarus Pro work on macOS Catalina

It’s important to understand that macOS sees the Tartarus Pro as a plain old keyboard. So if you plug it in and hit the 08 key, you’ll see it type a ‘w’.

Luckily, there’s software that can recognize that and do something useful instead.

Better Touch Tool is best known for getting random mice and trackpads to work, but it does a nice job on keyboards as well. (I’m using the 3.5 Alpha version.)

better touch tool setup

Let’s look at the Select All shortcut. You’ll notice the “Assigned Action” is ⌘A. Now direct your attention to the righthand sidebar. That’s where all the real work happens.

1) For the moment, ignore the “Click here to record a shortcut” section. We’ll come back to that.

2) You want the shortcut Enabled, so check the box.

3) You should put a note in this field for clarity.

4) The HUD overlay is surprisingly helpful. It shows what’s happening, like that you just hit “copy.” I find the Title text to be too large, so I use the Subtitle instead.

HUD display shows Copy

5) For Trigger Conditions, you want to choose “Works on keyboards with the same type as used for recording.” Yes, this is a ridiculously long label.

6) You want it to Trigger on Key Down.

7) You don’t want it to repeat.

You’ll do these steps for each key on the gaming keypad you want to remap. Here’s my setup.

keyboard photo

I also set key 20, the spacebar, to Undo.

In theory, you’re done! For a few weeks, this worked great. And then it started having issues. When encountering password fields, my normal keyboard would start triggering keyboard shortcuts. I had to restart Better Touch Tool multiple times per day.

Basically, the app kept getting my normal weird keyboard confused with my special weird gaming keypad. I needed to call in the big guns.

Enter Karabiner

I’d long heard of Karabiner Elements, a public domain app that can remap any key and do really impressive things. But it’s intimidating as hell.

Here’s what I wanted Karabiner to do: remap the keys of the Tartarus Pro to seldom-used keystrokes so I could then set those as triggers for Better Touch Tool.

Looking through their user forums, I couldn’t find any perfect matches for this use case, but luckily @bradcurtis had built a set of custom mappings (a “complex modification” in Karabiner speak) for a similar purpose.

Installing them is odd. Here’s how you do it.

  1. Install Karabiner-Elements. You’ll have to give it a ton of permissions in System Preferences.

  2. In Karabiner-Elements Preferences, choose Complex Modications and then Add Rule.

  3. On the next screen, choose “Import More Rules from the internet.”

  4. Either search for “Tartarus” or follow this link

  5. Choose the Import button. It’ll ask you whether you want to open the link in Karabiner-Elements. You do.

  6. Click the button to “Enable All”

Karabiner setup

If you have the Tartarus v2 like @bradcurtis, you’re done! All of the keys should be mapped to new, less-common keystrokes. But if you have the Tartarus Pro like I do, you need to modify the settings you just imported to change the product ID. This is where it gets frustratingly user-hostile, because it requires you to modify a JSON file in an external editor.

  1. Navigate to ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json — the easiest way to do this is by choosing Go > Go to Folder… in the Finder.

  2. Open this file in a plain text editor (I use TextMate).

  3. Find and replace 555 (the product ID for the v2) with 580 (the product ID for the Pro).1

  4. Save this file and restart Karabiner-Elements.

After doing this, and mapping these new keystrokes to Better Touch Tool, I’m back up to full speed.2

Again, almost no one on Earth will never need or want to do any of this. But if you’re the one person who needs this solution, I hope it helps. Please pay it forward by documenting something you’ve discovered.

  1. If you’re looking for a different product ID, open the Event Viewer in Karabiner-Elements and choose Devices. ↩
  2. I added one additonal modification, converting key 20 (which is coded as “spacebar”) to Left_Shift-Left_Option-s. ↩

A DM’s guide to Roll20

Geek Alert, Software, Tools

Since the start of the pandemic, our regular D&D game — which has always been in person — has shifted to online. We use Zoom to chat, and Roll20 to simulate the tabletop.

I’m comfortable using Roll20 as a player, but when it came time to begin planning my own campaign as a DM, I was stumped. The interface is wildly confusing, and the built-in tutorials aren’t up to the task.

Craig offered to walk me through the process of setting up and running a game. We recorded the whole thing, which is now available as five videos.

If you’re considering DMing a game in Roll20, I strongly suggest you start here. Craig’s a good teacher.

Let’s make a Fountain block for WordPress

Geek Alert, Projects, Scrippets, Software

Way back in 2008, I announced a plugin for WordPress that made it easy to insert short bits of screenplay-like material into a blog post.

EXT. HOUSE -- DAY

Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.

Shaking his head...

MAX

I thought we talked about this, Frank.

FRANK

(drunk)

I was born naked and I’m not changing now.

I called these chunks “scrippets.” This plain-text format ultimately became Fountain, which in turn became the basis of Highland and other screenwriting apps.1

The Scrippets plugin still works — you can install it today — but WordPress has moved on to the concept of “blocks.” These are discrete elements of a post that can do specific things. You can find blocks for code syntax, tables, and even poetry verse.

There should be one for Fountain.

If you’re a WordPress coder who’d like to tackle this project, here are some thoughts to get you started.

  1. Visit Fountain.io/developer and the GitHub for implementations of the parser.
  2. While I’d love to support the whole Fountain spec, I’m not convinced title pages and headers/footers make sense for this use case.
  3. Notes and synopses are super useful. We’ll want to style them so they’re visually distinct.
  4. Forced elements are very important. Blog posts often center on weird edge cases, and international users may need to force character names like @黄.
  5. Ultimately, it’ll be best if there’s one “official” Fountain block plugin, but if multiple people decide to tackle it, my team and I can help coordinate.
  6. This would be presumably be GPL licensed. This is for the good of the internet, not any one company or person.

So if you feel like giving it a shot, go for it! You certainly don’t need our permission.

If you have something you’d like us to see, or a question we can answer, write ask@johnaugust.com

  1. One of the coders who put together the WordPress plugin was Nima Yousefi, who has now coded nearly everything we’ve made. ↩