Last week I had discovered that my Mac hadn’t been performing Time Machine backups since the beginning of October due to a fault in my Time Capsule. Having performed an emergency backup to an external hard drive I then purchased a Western Digital NAS drive, a My Cloud 8TB EX2 Ultra which duly arrived during the week.

I can’t say that I enjoy this tinkering around with IT kit, it just seems to consume inordinate amounts of time and adds unwanted stress to my weekend. But this was something that I had to setup, and I couldn’t really afford for it to stay sealed in its box like some other purchased items of late.

I plugged in and soon found out that I had something which was already out of date. I continued through to the application and found out that the firmware was not just a little out of date, but this required me to update to 2.42.115 first, then to the latest version 5.26.119. Before I set about this, I did start to see whether I could start a Time Machine backup and it did start OK and it was 2GB in when I stopped it to see whether I could address the firmware updates.

In the between time, I registered the device on Western Digital and soon afterwards I had an email with an account that I could setup. I don’t normally bother with this sort of thing, but I thought I ought to in this case. When I logged into the account the first thing that surprised me was that the device I had purchased less than a week ago was out of warranty back in July, when I looked closely, I found out it was July 2021, yep 18 months ago, and the items are still being peddled. Would it have been any different if I had purchased from the Western Digital store instead of Amazon Marketplace?

I tried the button to update the firmware, this didn’t work. On the Support site I found a way of downloading the two firmware updates that would be needed and found the place where you could do a local update of the firmware. Thirty minutes later after two reboots I was on the latest version. When logging back in there was a page to get the mobile app and with this downloaded and connected it looks like it is possible to connect your phone’s photos and videos so that they are saved to the NAS drive in a shared folder. I’ll have to try this out.

I could now log back into the console application which runs from a browser. I eventually found a way to restart the Time Machine backup and I could see that time machine was copying files and the NAS CPU was running at 100% with 50% of RAM used. A little bit of math on Time Machine shows that there is near 500GB of files to backup, it’s all those large video files. With just 2.7% complete after about an hour it looks to me as if it will take 36 hours at least, Time Machine still says Calculating time remaining… Let’s hope it finds a way of speeding up.

My verdict on the Western Digital NAS drive is a bit clouded (sorry for the pun), but it does seem to be working. The proof of the pudding will be if it does continue to backup, and if it does backups over the Internet then the effort to get it running would have been worthwhile. My laptop did recognise the NAS drive without any fiddling and the mobile app seems to recognise it as well. If the NAS drive had been shipped with recent firmware, perhaps it might have been a 15–20-minute job to get it going, but in my case, it consumed a good three hours and a bit of stress when I wondered whether I had been sold a pup (being swindled in case the phrase is unknown).

Mid-week I noticed that my website was now displaying its usual font rather than the default font that came with the theme, which I really do not like. I think this has been a significant issue effecting WordPress sites, but it was resolved reasonably quickly, a few weeks. If I were a business, I would be more concerned, and you would be able to protect yourself from these events by hosting it yourself and having backup systems so that you tested your updates first. That almost certainly requires employing someone and this is not something I will be contemplating, so you must accept that from time to time something won’t quite work the way you expect it to. I have had no reason to complain about WordPress.com support which I have found to be excellent.

I heard that I had retained my IBM Champion status for 2023 and that my colleague from our small company of less than 30 persons had also been awarded the status. This is quite significant kudos for us, and to put it in perspective I tried to find the other names from the Maximo world who would have been similarly rewarded, I reckoned on 22 persons across the globe. There are about 1000 IBM Champions per year across all products.

I don’t know whether there was a connection to this, but MaximoSecrets.com stats were having a good week this week; they did last week but I forgot to mention it. I’ve only once been over 7000 views and once over 2200 visitors in a week, but I broke this for visitors last week and I am feeling optimistic that targets for both visitors and views will be broken this week. When I looked up my targets for the year that I wrote down on New Year’s Day I had set myself a target of exceeding 1300 views/day thirty times, I achieved it three times this week. I set myself the target of exceeding 7000 views/week on three occasions, hopefully one of those has occurred already in week 3 of 2023.

I made no progress on the glossary this week. In fact, I seemed to make little progress across the board. I did record the next YouTube video, the difficult one that I had been working on for a couple of weeks and I should be able to publish it next week.

I did some experimenting with the Flashcard block from Sensei for a set of quiz questions and answers that I can expose in a linked post to the Podcast post. I concluded that I really ought to publish the quizzes but do it in a way that is less likely to be found, so that I can reuse the questions in the Lessons if I get around to creating these. I’m thinking the Sensei courses will not be created until next year at least, and while I work on various elements of this, I shouldn’t be leaving it all in draft form, I ought to publish but in a way that will be harder to discover.

The experiment with the Flashcard block had three flashcards in a row inside three columns. Each flashcard has a Paragraph block (Question) and a List block (Multiple Choice), but everything was centre justified which made the multiple-choice element look awful. There was no ability to set the List block to be Left aligned as you would normally have if the List block didn’t exist inside of the Flashcard block. I duly raised my first case with Sensei support, received some custom CSS code that worked and raised three enhancement requests one to have the alignment added and two others that I think would help the use of the Flashcard block to better support quiz questions. To raise an enhancement request you need a GitHub account.

Next step will be to play with the formatting of the Flashcard block, I want to include here something to indicate the question difficulty and was thinking of using the judo belt colours. I’ll also need to find a way of making sure the Glossary terms do not appear, as this looks as if you should select a particular answer. These quizzes are just questions and answers, not a quiz where someone would receive a mark.

I won’t make a lot of progress over the next couple of weeks. Next week I am preparing for a mini-bootcamp which I will conduct the week after. There will be 10 persons, most of them recent graduates who are starting out on their Maximo learning journey, four from our company and the remainder from two other IBM Business Partners from the Netherlands and Belgium. The content we aim to cover will be four modules of Maximo three of which I have articles I am using with the YouTube videos and podcast episodes. The modules would be where I would start to create Sensei lessons. After 25+ years I know these areas intimately, but I will learn something from the week about the approach to take with someone who knows nothing about Maximo. This will be useful because I could easily pitch a beginner’s course to be too difficult.

What objectives for next week then, week 56?

• Prepare for the training course the following week. I think the agenda for the course would be a similar agenda for a one-week beginners’ course in Sensei, so something I should be able to reuse.
• Publish the next YouTube video. I’m determined that the next YouTube video after this will use the Lavalier microphone and PowerDirector 365.
• Convert the first quiz to one using the Flashcard block.
• Complete the sixth quiz

I doubt I’ll make any further progress with the Glossary or the “How To” video titles, but you never know I might surprise myself, I just heard that my wife will be out for several evenings this week.

I did crack both website targets, 7180 views and 2209 visitors, and with a bit of luck my 800th YouTube subscriber will appear tonight, and it is my birthday today, I’m now 65.