Musings of a Mildly Misanthropic Technologist.

December 28, 2018 @10:37

I like metrics. I've been working lately to convert some aging parts of my monitoring and alerting infrastructure over to something slightly more modern (in this case Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf and collectd). As part of this project I'm looking broadly at my environment and trying to decide what else to monitor (and what I don't need to monitor anymore). One of the things that came up was website performance.

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December 21, 2018 @09:28

MRTG... If you have read my previous post about monitoring my ADS-B receiver it probably won't come as a surprise that the impetus for this whole project has been to deprecate MRTG from my environment. MRTG was a fine enough tool when it was basically all we had (though I had rolled a few iterations of a replacement for personal projects over the years) but these days it is woefully dated. The biggest issues lie in the data gathering engine. Even a moderately sized environment is asking for trouble, dropped polls, and stuck perl processes. MRTG also fails to provide any information beyond the aggregated traffic statistics.

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November 29, 2018 @10:57

asdb-feeder in August 2014 I have been running a FlightAware / FlightRadar24 ADS-B feeder for almost 4 years now. It is an older Raspberry Pi B with a RTL-SDR stick running dump1090 at its core. These days it is mounted in my garage with the antenna on the roof. When I built it I stuffed a Honeywell HIH6130 temperature and humidity sensor in the enclosure. At the time it was mounted on a fence in my back yard so it would be in full sun for much of the day so I hooked it up to Icinga to alert me if it ever got too hot or too wet inside.

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March 24, 2018 @16:41

I mentioned offhandedly at the end of my post on how Docker and Flask are helping me sleep at night a potential use case for an iOS share extension. I finally started working on that idea.

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February 06, 2018 @12:56

The Background

Right out of the gate I'll admit that my implementation is a bit naive, but it is if nothing else an example of what can be accomplished with a little bit of work. In general my microcontroller development workflow has been tied to a particular system largely using the vendor supplied tools like MPLAB X or Atmel Studio. This is usually OK as I need to have physical access to either the prototype or production hardware for testing and verification. From a high level it generally looks like this:

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January 10, 2018 @10:37

YouTube Dead Job Running I don't want to start out by bitching about yet another crappy Internet thing, but I think I have to. YouTube Red is this play from YouTube to try to get into the paid streaming business and one of the 'features' they tout is the ability to play videos in the background on mobile devices... something that totally worked before JUST FINE before.

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December 16, 2017 @12:32

Oldweb.Today I don't remember where I ran across oldweb.today but I thought it was a pretty rad idea. I was able to find an old version of my website there and enjoy it in a browser similar to what I would have been running back then...

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Original: October 14, 2017 @00:23
Edited: October 18, 2017 @14:03

I have been meaning to play around with containers for a while but for the life of me have not found a real reason to. I feel like without a real use case, any attempt I'd make to learn anything useful would be a huge waste of time. There are a bunch of neat toys out there, from running random ASCII art commands to a crazy script that 'emulates' some of the insane Hollywood style computer screens, as well as base images for all manner of application stacks and frameworks, but all of those are easily installable using your favorite package manager.

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