General computing update - week 34, 2020.

 Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID array. However I was eventually able to add it back into the array and it has worked properly ever since. The first disk has been added to the existing array which is currently a three disk mirror. As soon as mdadm has synced this disk completely, I can then remove one of the existing disks off the array and then take it out of the computer, as I need backup disks right now. As noted at previous article the disk array will be the same size as current. I am expecting to buy the second disk in about another month and install it in the same way so that when it is also installed, the old disks can be removed completely, and all without actually copying any files. Last time when I did an installation I manually copied the files, but that was mainly because I doubled the disks from 1 TB to 2 TB; this time I will be staying at 2 TB.

Another techical task I have been working on around the house is erecting a TV aerial on the outside of the house. This has meant installing a cable duct and two faceplates between the inside wall and the underside of the soffit to take the aerial cable. That was the hard part as running the cable through the duct was very simple as was putting the aerial itself up. The TV itself is wall mounted and the cable comes through directly behind it. As I am in a prime reception area, the aerial does not need actual line of sight to the transmitter – there is actually another house in the direct line, but the signal is so strong that there is enough signal to get a good picture on every channel.

A few weeks ago I had some problems with a new package-based version of Qgis that would crash every time I tried to run it, on more than one computer. I had to install a flatpak-based version of Qgis, although I could have also run it in a virtual machine. The project developers built a new release after several weeks and it started working again, as did the next edition. Due to the disruption, I have implemented an extra precaution of testing every new release on a VM before installing it onto a working computer.

Google has again heaped glory all over themselves by implementing an arbitrary and dictatorial change to the Youtube platform. As of last week, they stopped making it possible for Youtube to send out notification emails whenever a new video is uploaded or streamed onto a channel. This has left a lot of people, including me, very annoyed by the decision. It is similar to the nonsense of the new Blogger user interface that is badly broken and which has forced me to copy and paste all my posts from another editor like LibreOffice. As I am doing right now with this post. Contrast that with the approach taken by Wordpress.com with a new editor system introduced a few months back; it was pushed through, but they did a lot of consultation with their users. In this case, Google has just announced the changes, but if there are any issues, it’s a one way conversation filing a problem report, just like the way you cannot actually have a conversation with Facebook about bugs or problems on their platform most of the time.

Integromat as an alternative to IFTTT

For the last few years I have made a lot of use of IFTTT for automated web integration between my blogs and Facebook pages. IFTTT is quite good for this and I still use it to this day, with multiple IFTTT accounts as each account can only work with one Facebook page at a time, for example. One issue with IFTTT is that it doesn't have its own Facebook Groups action to post to a Group. Instead you have to use Buffer to do the actual posting. The key issue with Buffer is the free edition only allows you to post to one group. Even if you set up multiple Buffer accounts, only one Facebook connection is allowed between them, so in effect you can only use one Buffer account at a time unless you are prepared to pay the huge sum of $15 per month for multi account support.

I did some digging around and discovered Integromat, which is a complete alternative to IFTTT/Buffer combination. It is set up the same sort of way as IFTTT but incorporates its own Facebook Groups action. It looks it can do most of what IFTTT and Buffer together can do. One thing that is different is it doesn't allow in the free edition for you to schedule posting times - I have Buffer set up to post at two hour intervals so it can take a queue of posts and spread them out with one post every two hours. 

So that looks like a good alternative as the Buffer deliberate cripple to gouge you for $150 a year for their services has stopped me from being able to use Buffer with a second Wordpress blog that has a Facebook group receiving its posts and that means I actually have a backlog of posts that I need to catch up on for that group.

Setting a custom content width on Blogger's Simple template

Most of my Blogger blogs use the Simple template; I haven't got much time or inclination to scroll through masses of templates and experiment.

You can use the theme designer or you can directly edit the HTML to change some settings.

On some of my blogs I have directly edited the HTML to set a custom width of 1900 pixels so as to use the full width of my 1920x1080 screen. I prefer this width because I like to make my images 1600 pixels wide for display on the blog. 

In the Simple blog template HTML edit this section from line 583-586:

    <b:template-skin>
      <b:variable default='960px' name='content.width' type='length' value='1900px'/>
      <b:variable default='0' name='main.column.left.width' type='length' value='330px'/>
      <b:variable default='310px' name='main.column.right.width' type='length' value='0px'/>

The line you are changing is name='content.width' and as you can see I have put in 1900px which I can only set to somewhat less if I use the theme designer interface.

NZ Rail Maps is the first blog to use this wide layout. Some of the other blogs will be adjusted as necessary.

Changing text font sizes on Blogger's "Simple" template

As you may have noticed most of my blogs use the "Simple" template (this one currently uses "Picture Window"). With various upgrades to Google's blogger posting system over the years we can set some of the text sizes without having to directly hack the template's HTML code.

One of the changes I have been making recently to some of my blogs is to change the body text in a post to a different font and size. Unfortunately while it is possible to set these indirectly there is no direct way of setting the size.

The font of the post body is affected by the setting in the Template Designer called Page Text which sets a font for the whole of the page, and a base font size. This size does not directly set the size of the text in the post body.

Once you have set the above setting then customise the template HTML to adjust the body text size. The full section you are looking for is as below:

/* Posts
----------------------------------------------- */
h2.date-header {
  font: $(date.header.font);
}
.date-header span {
  background-color: $(date.header.background.color);
  color: $(date.header.color);
  padding: $(date.header.padding);
  letter-spacing: $(date.header.letterspacing);
  margin: $(date.header.margin);
}
.main-inner {
  padding-top: $(main.padding.top);
  padding-bottom: $(main.padding.bottom);
}
.main-inner .column-center-inner {
  padding: 0 $(main.padding);
}
.main-inner .column-center-inner .section {
  margin: 0 $(main.section.margin);
}
.post {
  margin: 0 0 $(post.margin.bottom) 0;
}
h3.post-title, .comments h4 {
  font: $(post.title.font);
  margin: .75em 0 0;
}
.post-body {
  font-size: 120%;
  line-height: 1.4;
  position: relative;
}

I have bolded the part that is important. This is line 389 of the template at the time of writing. In the line font-size: 120%  change that number to whatever suits you. This will step up or down the body text size in the post.