Last week I mentioned I was having to update the firmware of a newly purchased NAS drive – a Western Digital My Cloud 8TB EX2 Ultra and that I discovered it was out of manufacturer’s warranty by more than 18 months. Well, I did start the Time Machine backup and it successfully backed up the first 300 GB or so, about 60%, when after more than 24 hours I had to stop the backup because I needed to travel to London. I’m hoping when I return it will just pick up from where it left off, but I won’t know this for more than a week.

I was in correspondence with Western Digital over two points, the first being the warranty, no extension will be provided you need to speak to your retailer. Well, I have contacted them, and I am still waiting for a reply. I purchased through the Amazon Marketplace, it never occurred to me that buying electronic goods had the risk that they might not have any manufacturer’s warranty. A lesson learned, which I am passing on to you.

The second point was to try and find out whether I could backup remotely. The answer came back that I could not. This isn’t a problem I just hoped as it was accessible over the web that it was possible.

I’ve been playing with the Sensei Flashcard block to create a quiz of 10 questions where you can flip the flashcard to reveal the answer. I did get stuck with one row of three flashcards unable to accept an extra paragraph block, and a second attempt of another row of three where I did manage to add a second paragraph block but where I could not get it to display full width. Eventually I contacted the Happiness Engineers on the full width issue, and they resolved it in a few minutes by using a Group block instead of a Row block. When I heard how the issue was resolved, it sounded familiar and I think I may have come across a similar problem when I was first experimenting with Full Site Editing, resolved by using the Group block.

I wanted an extra paragraph block to display an image in the top right corner of each flashcard to indicate the degree of difficulty of each question. Our graduates who are new to Maximo are not used to getting 5 out of 10, but then some questions have been pitched at the intermediate and the advanced level, so it is unlikely they would score much better and the point is I wanted to convey the level of difficulty of each question so that they did not beat themselves up for getting questions wrong.

I chose a rosette symbol that I could colour, chose seven rosettes loosely based on Judo belt colours from Red (1) to Black (7) and placed the number in the centre of the rosette. When I took a screenshot of each image it had a white background which didn’t look quite right on a flashcard where I was using a gradient colour – ocean. I took a screenshot of an empty flashcard and then one at a time positioned the coloured rosette over the same place so that I could have a set of images with an ocean-coloured background – it worked quite well. You can see the first finished quiz here – Maximo Secrets Quiz. When you flip the card, it has an orange gradient background.

It isn’t perfect. For some reason, the rosette on the 10th flashcard does not show. I’ve tried recreating the flashcard without luck. I’ve swapped the 9th and 10th flashcards by moving the columns, only to find that the inline image for question 9 now does not show. I wondered whether it was because it was the last image on the post, so I added an additional paragraph block to the bottom of the post with another rosette image at the very end, which shows perfectly happily, but the 10th flashcard is still missing its image. I’m waiting to contact a Happiness Engineer through the Support Chat as it will be easier to explain the issue rather than using email.

I wanted to make access to the quiz difficult, because I am likely to use the same questions in a Sensei lesson. I decided to add a Links section to the bottom of the post that has the associated podcast episode and transcript. What I forgot was that for the few people that subscribe to my website, they receive an email message when I post something. One person contacted me to say that he couldn’t read the question because of an overly large rosette, this was an earlier version of the quiz when I was still testing. I’ll have to remember next time that when I post something to check what it looks like on a laptop, tablet, and phone, to set it Private instead of leaving it as Public.

On Sunday I called the Happiness Engineers again to see what the cause of the missing rosette on the 10th flashcard might be. After a couple of reboots and clearing the cache history from three different browsers and disabling all plugins it seemed to be associated with an enabled lazy load of images. As soon as you turn the toggle for ‘Enable Lazy Loading for images’ off the rosette appeared. The setting will be found in the Jetpack – Settings – Performance options. It seems a bit of an extreme thing to do, turn off lazy loading, so I’ll have to investigate this a bit more when I can find the time.

I did record the 23rd YouTube video, the one I’ve been working on for a few weeks, but I ran out of time during the editing and next week I am giving training to ten people new to Maximo and I know I won’t have any time finish it.

I spent the week preparing for the training. The aim was to use the new IBM training for the latest version of Maximo and in the end, I thought I had better watch them myself so that there were no surprises, it was a good job I did because the quality of the four courses were variable. There was one course, where the spoken word was by a lady robot (I hope it wasn’t a real person) and after a while I found the voice so annoying that I muted the voice and used captions. Fortunately for this course I have my own videos, but they are not designed for people who are completely new to Maximo. For another course I thought we might be able to get through this especially if I cut out the repetitive parts and those parts which were too advanced for beginners. The other two courses were much better quality, but again you needed to choose which parts to use for beginners. It looks as if next week I’ll be flying by the seat of my pants. What I did realise was that the videos I’ve created are not too bad, in comparison.

I doubt I will achieve much next week as I am conducting a training course, and no doubt I won’t have the energy to do anything in the evenings and Saturday I’ll still be feeling wiped out. So, there is little point setting any objectives, I’ll just be lucky to complete this weekly journal.