General – Technical Musings

General

Enhancements to DIY iGoogle start page

by Neil.B.Ennis January 30, 2015 No Comments Shortlink

I’ve upgraded the DIY “iGoogle” start page.

You can see the latest version here: http://nbe.me/demo
The previous version is here: http://nbe.me/olddemov2
The previous previous version is here: http://nbe.me/olddemo
You can download the source for the page here: http://nbe.me/demo/d.zip

The major enhancement is that you can now embed html into the page – which makes it easy to add Youtube videos, or iFrame widgets.

To add embed code, click on Setup and add a new widget with a type of “html”. In the “data uri” field, paste your embed code. For example, to add a youtube video, you’d paste this code into the “data uri” field:

<iframe width="320" height=auto src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DPP1INgPtSs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Make sure you keep the width of any iframes to 320 pixels or less, otherwise the layout of the screen won’t look too good.

Also – if you’re trying out the demo page, you might want to press Ctrl-F5 to clear your browser cache, so the new version gets loaded.

General, ObSrv

ObSrv: No Longer For Sale

by Neil.B.Ennis February 24, 2014 No Comments Shortlink

Thank you for the emails of support and kind donations.

After a few minor changes and exchanges with Google I have managed to rectify the problem relating to inappropriate images on the detail pages.

Because of your kind support, and the resolution of issues with Google, I’ve changed my mind and decided not to sell ObSrv.

I plan to keep it running indefinitely.

If you have any issues, or need support, please leave a message or contact me at:
mail at neilennis dot com

If you’d like to donate to help keep the site running, I’ve added a couple of paypal buttons on the site.

General, Harrdware

DNS323 Formatting “stuck” at 94%

by Neil.B.Ennis December 5, 2013 No Comments Shortlink

The DLINK DNS323 is a network storage device that takes two SATA disk drives, plugs into your local network, and acts as a file server for media and documents.

We’ve had one for the last 5 years, and it has served us very well. It’s quick, reliable and easy to use.

We had two 1TB Western Digital “Caviar” drives installed.

Unfortunately, one of those drives failed last night. I replaced it with a Seagate “Baracuda” 2TB drive. We’re not running the DNS323 in a “RAID” configuration, so a different type of drive isn’t a problem.

When I booted up the unit with the new drive, the web interface told me it found the new drive, and was it ok to format it? It assured me my other drive would be ok.

I answered “Yes” and it started formatting the new drive, but it stopped when it got to 94%.

There are a whole lot of articles online about this problem, and people have come up with many and various issues to get around it like using a different browser, clearing out cookes, even formatting the drive on a separate machine.

There was a mcuh simpler solution, however.

A 2TB drive is pretty big. It takes a long time to format. It just so happens that on this device, most of the formatting happens when it gets to the 94% mark.

So the easiest solution to this problem is to WAIT.

Do nothing for an hour. Eventually it will finish formatting, and everything will be ok.

If you don’t like doing this, feel free to try a different browser, or bury your computer in peat for a couple of hours, or chant incantations for a while. I assure you whatever you do, if it takes longer than an hour, it will fix the problem.

Well…. it will appear to fix the problem.

Or – just wait. Let the thing finish formatting. Then everything will be ok.