After many years of being on-call under my belt, I never thought I’d say I have a favorite alerting method. But that changed after watching one of Justin Garrison’s videos which had an excellent depiction of how Linux’s Out-of-Memory Killer works. I was no stranger to the OOM Killer visiting my Kubernetes clusters, so this gave me a dumb idea for a (perhaps) fun alerting mechanism: the OOM Bonker. ...
I live near a major airport, and I frequently hear aircraft flying over my house. I also have a curious preschooler, and I find myself answering questions like, “What’s that?” and “Where’s that plane going?” often. While a quick internet search could answer these questions, I wanted to see if I could answer them myself. With a Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive radio, and open source software, I can track aircraft as far as 200 miles from my house. Whether you’re answering relentless questions from your kids or are just curious about what’s in the sky above you, this is something you can try, too. ...