We ran across a very creative use of Pingdom monitoring the other day. Most people use Pingdom to monitor the status of websites and servers, but Eric Nagel uses our monitoring service to keep track of the temperature in his outdoor hot tub (complete with rubber ducky).

How does he do it? He uses a wireless temperature sensor (seen bottom right in the picture below) that he checks the status of via his own server. A small script generates an online status page that contains either “OK” or “Too cold.” This status page is monitored with Pingdom, so Eric will get an alert via SMS if his hot tub is too cold.

Photo by Eric Nagel. (Thanks, Eric!)

Nifty, isn’t it? To see exactly how he set things up, head over to Eric’s blog.

It’s official. You can monitor ANYTHING with Pingdom.

(If you’re using the Pingdom monitoring service in unusual ways, don’t hesitate to let us know. We love this kind of stuff! Who knows, we may even write a blog post about it…)

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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