Bitcoin Windows gadget which displays BTC and currency amounts

[Domchi]

I did add the value you recommended but the behavior didn't change.
I still get 100 api request per second after I apply the settings.

What I noticed it's only on my Windows 10 machine with "8gadgetpack" installed.
Maybe that's the reason for the strange behavior?

It's hard to say without more data what causes this, but after applying settings, gadget simply can't send that many requests. It will send only one request to a single API, unless you have configured to call a single API for multiple things.

How do you detect those 100 API requests, and which API server is spammed?

How many gadgets do you have open?

What settings are you using (especially URLs)?

[paduser]

Hi here are some answers to your questions.

• I use fiddler to detect and debug API requests.
• At the moment I have one instance of each gadget open. 1x Bitcoin, 1x Litecoin and 1x MyCoin

What data would help you to find the source of this issue?

[Domchi]

Hi here are some answers to your questions.

• I use fiddler to detect and debug API requests.
• At the moment I have one instance of each gadget open. 1x Bitcoin, 1x Litecoin and 1x MyCoin

What data would help you to find the source of this issue?

Can you try this? Clear Fiddler log. Open settings of a single gadget, say MyBitcoins. Apply settings - which should refresh all values in that gadget. How many requests do you get in Fiddler, to which servers? Is that in line with your settings?

[paduser]

Ok here are the results when I have open the litecoin gadget and edit the mycoin gadget:



Every API request is valid but it sends just 100 per second until I get blocked for to many requests.

[Domchi]

OK, I fixed it. Thanks for reporting it! Please visit http://domchi.cc/mybitcoins/ (or http://domchi.cc/mycoins/) to download the latest version.

[paduser]

OK, I fixed it. Thanks for reporting it! Please visit http://domchi.cc/mybitcoins/ (or http://domchi.cc/mycoins/) to download the latest version.

Yes, I can confirm it works now as intended on my machine. Do you mind telling me what caused the issue?

Thanks again for fixing.

[Domchi]

Yes, I can confirm it works now as intended on my machine. Do you mind telling me what caused the issue?

A bug in saving exchange data update interval, which was introduced in the latest version, which I inadvertently introduced after testing, while packaging gadget for release. Pretty lame actually.

[paduser]

Still thanks for telling and actually fixing it 

[movellan]

Thank you, sir. Worked nicely.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I must convert several machines to Windoze 10 (Ugh!). What is the best method/utility for running the gadget on 10? TIA.

[Domchi]

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I must convert several machines to Windoze 10 (Ugh!). What is the best method/utility for running the gadget on 10? TIA.

I'm probably not the best person to give advice as I'm still running Win7. Maybe the folks using the gadget on Win10 can chip in?

That said, it seems there are at least three alternatives nowadays:
https://windows.gadgethacks.com/how-to/bring-desktop-gadgets-windows-10-0163567/
https://gadgetsrevived.com/download-sidebar/

[paduser]

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I must convert several machines to Windoze 10 (Ugh!). What is the best method/utility for running the gadget on 10? TIA.

I'm probably not the best person to give advice as I'm still running Win7. Maybe the folks using the gadget on Win10 can chip in?

That said, it seems there are at least three alternatives nowadays:
https://windows.gadgethacks.com/how-to/bring-desktop-gadgets-windows-10-0163567/
https://gadgetsrevived.com/download-sidebar/

I personal use https://8gadgetpack.net/.
They still push updates and also they've updated the old gadget with new high dpi versions.

[movellan]

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I must convert several machines to Windoze 10 (Ugh!). What is the best method/utility for running the gadget on 10? TIA.

I'm probably not the best person to give advice as I'm still running Win7. Maybe the folks using the gadget on Win10 can chip in?

That said, it seems there are at least three alternatives nowadays:
https://windows.gadgethacks.com/how-to/bring-desktop-gadgets-windows-10-0163567/
https://gadgetsrevived.com/download-sidebar/

I personal use https://8gadgetpack.net/.
They still push updates and also they've updated the old gadget with new high dpi versions.

8gadgetpack works nicely. Thanks for the tip.

[tanzislam]

Awesome gadget, thanks!

Is the feature of listing multiple wallet addresses (separated by |) still working? I tried with v4.4 with 5 addresses. Sometimes it seems to retrieve the balance in only the first address instead of their sum, and other times it just displays "N/A".

(Looking at Settings.js lines 185-186, the blockchainAddr setting gets saved as the |-separated list of addresses. I could not find any corresponding logic in MyBitcoins.js to split this list of addresses by | and query them separately; lines 502-504 seem to query it directly with the |-concatenated list of addresses.)

EDIT: Looks like their API documentation (https://www.blockchain.info/api/q) says |-separated addresses should be supported, but it actually returns Invalid Bitcoin Address when I curl it.

EDIT EDIT: Whoa, apparently ,-separating the addresses works!

[Domchi]

Pretty much what you said, I have nothing more to add since you solved it.

Gadget doesn't parse |-separated list of addresses (apart from regex to clean it up a bit) and sends it directly to blockchain.info API. Which seems to have switched away to comma as separator instead of | even though documentation says otherwise.

I'm not quite sure what to do with that; I can change the text in settings to different separator but I'll leave it as is for now, since blockchain.info API change looks like a bug on their side and might revert back. I'll try to get in touch with them and report this, and suggest they accept both separators.

Thanks for info.

[enerdude]

Thanks for this useful gadget.
I recently got a 4k monitor and are running 4k (3840x2160) and now the gadget seem to not scale properly (edges are cut off - see picture : https://i.imgur.com/YmtWiZD.png).

Would it be possible to add a size option to the settings of the gadget like some other gadgets already have?

Thanks in advance.

[Domchi]

I recently got a 4k monitor and are running 4k (3840x2160) and now the gadget seem to not scale properly (edges are cut off - see picture : ).

Would it be possible to add a size option to the settings of the gadget like some other gadgets already have?

Which DPI setting are you using? Right-click on desktop, choose "Screen resolution," and "Make text and other items larger or smaller" - are you using one of the two non-default values here?

[enerdude]

It is set to 175% which is a comfortable size for me. Windows recommended setting is 150%.  Does not seem to matter if I choose 100%, 125%, 150% or 175%, gadget is still cut off.
Except for my windows scaling size of 175%, I also do seperate sizes for my other gadgets to achieve a comfortable, readable size within the 4k resolution:
Top process monitor, System monitor II and Ping monitor is set to 250% within the settings of the gadgets themselves.  Network meter gadget is set to 150% to achieve same size as the other 3 gadgets mentioned, not sure why it is not also 250%

Screenshot of my sidebar:
https://i.imgur.com/wxQhgLR.png

[Domchi]

It is set to 175% which is a comfortable size for me. Windows recommended setting is 150%.  Does not seem to matter if I choose 100%, 125%, 150% or 175%, gadget is still cut off.
Except for my windows scaling size of 175%, I also do seperate sizes for my other gadgets to achieve a comfortable, readable size within the 4k resolution:
Top process monitor, System monitor II and Ping monitor is set to 250% within the settings of the gadgets themselves.  Network meter gadget is set to 150% to achieve same size as the other 3 gadgets mentioned, not sure why it is not also 250%

I'll see what can be done over the weekend. There are several issues though, not the least being the quality of the background image...

[Domchi]

It is set to 175% which is a comfortable size for me. Windows recommended setting is 150%.  Does not seem to matter if I choose 100%, 125%, 150% or 175%, gadget is still cut off.
Except for my windows scaling size of 175%, I also do seperate sizes for my other gadgets to achieve a comfortable, readable size within the 4k resolution:
Top process monitor, System monitor II and Ping monitor is set to 250% within the settings of the gadgets themselves.  Network meter gadget is set to 150% to achieve same size as the other 3 gadgets mentioned, not sure why it is not also 250%

I'll see what can be done over the weekend. There are several issues though, not the least being the quality of the background image...

I'm not quite sure what to do with this, the whole issue is related to various IE incompatibilities. For me, in Win10 and with 8GadgetPack, gadget scales OK. It might be that you just need to update something, probably IE or whatever 8GadgetPack uses to actually run gadgets.

I was able to reproduce an issue in an unpatched Win7 though. Here's a fix that will unbreak it, although it won't scale it. Go to the following folder:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\MyBitcoins.gadget\css\

...and first backup MyBitcoins.css and then open it in editor other than Notepad that won't display it in a single line (Notepad++ will do fine). Then, search for "pt"; there are 4 places where font sizes are defined and you can change it according to the following table:

100%	10pt	8.5pt	11.5pt
125%	8pt	6.8pt	5.2pt
150%	6.6pt	5.7pt	7.7pt
175%	5.7pt	4.8pt	6.6pt

When you change this, reboot to see the difference. (Just toggling "Show desktop gadgets" off and on might apply changes, but sometimes only reboot works.)

If the white background is still broken and bothers you, you can delete div.valueBackground section as well.

[enerdude]

It is set to 175% which is a comfortable size for me. Windows recommended setting is 150%.  Does not seem to matter if I choose 100%, 125%, 150% or 175%, gadget is still cut off.
Except for my windows scaling size of 175%, I also do seperate sizes for my other gadgets to achieve a comfortable, readable size within the 4k resolution:
Top process monitor, System monitor II and Ping monitor is set to 250% within the settings of the gadgets themselves.  Network meter gadget is set to 150% to achieve same size as the other 3 gadgets mentioned, not sure why it is not also 250%

I'll see what can be done over the weekend. There are several issues though, not the least being the quality of the background image...

I'm not quite sure what to do with this, the whole issue is related to various IE incompatibilities. For me, in Win10 and with 8GadgetPack, gadget scales OK. It might be that you just need to update something, probably IE or whatever 8GadgetPack uses to actually run gadgets.

I was able to reproduce an issue in an unpatched Win7 though. Here's a fix that will unbreak it, although it won't scale it. Go to the following folder:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\MyBitcoins.gadget\css\

...and first backup MyBitcoins.css and then open it in editor other than Notepad that won't display it in a single line (Notepad++ will do fine). Then, search for "pt"; there are 4 places where font sizes are defined and you can change it according to the following table:

100%	10pt	8.5pt	11.5pt
125%	8pt	6.8pt	5.2pt
150%	6.6pt	5.7pt	7.7pt
175%	5.7pt	4.8pt	6.6pt

When you change this, reboot to see the difference. (Just toggling "Show desktop gadgets" off and on might apply changes, but sometimes only reboot works.)

If the white background is still broken and bothers you, you can delete div.valueBackground section as well.

Thanks this sorted the problem of the text not fitting and the cutting off problem, so it is now readable but the scale just too small.  I applied your "pt" settings for 175%
Size of bitcoin gadget relative to my other:
https://i.imgur.com/LfZZi91.png