2023-02-05

Grafana Monitoring

Grafana monitoring and more importantly alerting!

So the first docker containers I fired up on my new Raspbery Pi 4 with 8 GB of RAM when I received it back in July of 2022 were Telegraf, Influx, and Grafana to monitor the new little doggy. And I got a really pretty dashboard working and then kinda forgot about it:

Until this week when I realized that I had a process pegged at 100% since way back in december:

So the first thing to do was to figure out what was pegging the CPU which turned out to be a nightly log rotation that went bad. Unfortunately can’t put too many details because I did not take any notes while investigating and solving, only can comment that it had created thousands of files and every time it tried to run hung. Trying to clean up the files was really fun as doing an rm with a wildcard even gave me and error that there were too many files. Google to the rescue and I got that under control but realized that having a really pretty dashboard did nothing if I did not setup up alerting when things were abnormal.

2022-12-22

A new word of the day

This morning listening to Today Explained hosted by the amazing Sean Rameswaram I learned a new word! Not any word, but the Merriam-Webster word of year for 2022: gaslighting. This is a true indicator that I really don’t follow regular American news feeds as it appears that this word was reintroduced back in 2016 in a teen vogue article and has been gaining utilization year after year since, and this year was the most searched word on Merriam-Webster’s site.

2022-12-08

Wireguard

A “Personal Virtual Private Network” (PVPN)

I don’t quite remember if it was the first time I had configured a VPN terminator (probably had already done some PPTP work) but I distinctly remember my first brush with IPSec. It must have been around 1998 or 1999. Can’t remember the manufacture for sure, but suspect it was Cisco. That was when real paper manuals were included, and boy was that a case where RTFM was required. And the reason I remember this, is because how incredibly confusing, prone to misconfiguration, and all around not really fun it was. Fast forward to a weekend in early july 2022 when I discovered Wireguard a completely new take on VPNs that make it simple and lightening fast.

2022-11-20

Blog Analytics

Let’s get some metrics!

So before even publishing my new hexo blog on the real internet I thought that a first requirement was to get some analytics in place so I can see utilization. I figure and suspect that the whole injecting javascript and calling home tends to freak people out and is probably pretty prone to a cat a mouse game of evasion (therefore more ops time to keep it working) therefore I have opted for log analytics. I will achieve this using a docker “on-premise” instance of Matomo (formally Piwik).

2022-11-19

Welcome back to 1994

Let's rock like it was 1994 and make a blog!

2020-08-21

Pi Arcade

Disclaimer: I uploaded this to the blog in January 2025 but I have set the publish date to 21/08/2020 which is when I finished building the first version of the Pi Arcade. This post was taken from my Synology Note Station page pretty much word for word but there are also updates after the 21/08/2020 date, and I imagine in the future there will be new updates as well.
Read on for context and the build process!

2020-08-03

Summer Moment of Zen 2020

Today I had my summer moment of Zen:

This year I ventured into Asturias to a really cool cove that I discovered last summer in Tapia de Casariego:

and as I had hoped, it provided and amazing tide differential:

Once again I targeted a big tide moment, this year was not a double whammy like last year but it was still a big tide:

In the end I was capturing for 6 hours 10 minutes and 2 seconds:

Which gave a lot of time to:

spoke with some pilgrims
picked up trash on the beach
had a cool beverage
had lunch
started reading Rise and fall of D.O.D.O.
watched a fisherman
watched some people kyaak

Here is the rig used:

And then combined all the pictures into a video: mencoder -idx -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o 2020_zen.avi -mf fps=24 mf://@list.txt

Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).

2019-08-03

Summer Moment of Zen 2019

For the last 3 years I have been celebrating what has now become an annual summer ritual: finding some cool spot, timing my arrival with the changing of a tide, setting up my camera rig, and spending 5 - 6 hours contemplating a bit of everything while my camera takes a picture of the changing tide every 5 seconds. This ritual I have baptized as my summer moment of zen (all credit of the “Moment of Zen” concept goes to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show).

This summer I coincided my excursion with a perigean spring tide.

Oh what is a perigean spring tide you ask? It is when a spring tide (nothing to do with the season but when there is a FULL moon or NEW moon) coincides with the moon closest to the earth in its orbit (perigee). Let me draw you a picture:

On august 3rd the moon was only 603,305 KM from the earth and coincided with an almost new moon causing a gravitational double whammy, bulging tides to higher and lower levels than are normally witnessed (a tidal differential of nearly 4 meters):