First, start a new flight, and select your aircraft.
Then select your airport where you want to practice landing and click the Customize button:

Click the RUNWAY toggle, choose your runway and select how far out you want to be positioned. Let’s say 3nm.
A blue arrow will appear on the chosen runway, showing your incoming direction.

Click Confirm, and then Start Flight.
As soon as X-Plane loads, immediately press pause   and you will be positioned 3nm from the runway on the glideslope:

Grab the Yoke/Stick,
adjust any necessary settings (like flaps, throttle, mixture etc)
and unpause 

Fly your approach.

To pop-up the 2D panel of the G530 and G430 is easy – just click it. But closing it again can require a few keystrokes and is a little confusing since it is in an X-Plane-style window and not a more familiar window.
However, you can easily close it by moving the mouse cursor up to the LEFT-hand top corner of the pop-up and a small red dot will appear:

Clicking this red dot immediately dismisses the 2D window.
More traditionally, if you click the upper RIGHT-hand corner you can transform this pop-up into a more conventional window.

Alternatively, you can also close the 2D window by clicking on the 3D panel of the G530 and G430 a second time.

Did you know that you can set the frequency of random failures? However, strangely, this setting is not found in the SETTINGS section. Instead, the MTBF [Mean Time Between Failures] is found as an option in the Flight pull-down Menu:

The failures option is also found next to the Weight, Balance & Fuel button in the initial flight customization screen:

When you click this menu option, in addition to being able to specify a particular failure, you are also able to set the time between random failures by entering an overall failure rate. However, this is deceptive since it means that any device will fail within the specified number of hours – BUT… Since there are currently 584 systems that can potentially fail, the specified time will have to be divided by the number of systems. So, if you expect some system to fail at least every 10000 hours (a reasonable supposition), you need to understand that statistically, you will get a failure of some random item every 17 hours.

Now that’s all very well, but there’s a “gotcha”. The problem comes when you quit X-Plane and start a new flight sometime later. X-Plane REMEMBERS that you have set the MTBF. You, on the other hand, may have forgotten that you enabled the checkbox and set the time interval!

Therefore, a good habit to get into before undertaking a long flight is to check this as part of your pre-flight routine.

In the …X-Plane 12\Output\logbooks folder there is a file called X-Plane Pilot.txt. This file contains a logbook of all your flights. While it is easy to view it from within X-Plane (File –> Open Logbook) it may not be so easy to visualize since all you see is text information arranged in columns and rows. For better visualization, there are two very useful apps that can use this file. Try them both out.

The first is the VSKYLABS Logbook visualizer. This free app (get it here) provides an global map overview of all the airports you have visited. A sleek and polished app. Thank you @VSKYLABS

You can also use the full power of Little Navmap (also free) by importing this file directly into Little Navmap where it will create the logbook file inside LNM. Using this panel you can quickly go to the airports you previously visited by simply clicking them. You can get Little Navmap here. Thank you @albar965

There is a thread on x-plane.org that has been going for many, many years – regularly every week – run by @Kumiankka . And yet, judging from the lack of discussions and comments on this huge forum as a whole, I suspect many forum users are actually quite unaware of it. The reason (I guess) is probably because the title suggests that it is an on-line flying/VATSIM sort of thread. This is definitely not the case.

Do yourself a favo(u)r and browse through this Fly-In forum, choose a flight that looks interesting and click on the discussion thread for that particular flight. There are literally hundreds of flights to choose from – the more recent flights are better illustrated and laid out than the earlier ones way back in 2004.
I guarantee this will open up a whole new world for those of you who have X-Plane set up and ticking nicely, and are now looking for inspiration about where to fly. Each flight contains a description as well as some comments and tips and often links to relevant freeware sceneries if you feel so inclined.