Christmas is upon us, and like the geeks we are here at Pingdom, we couldn’t help but check out how our fellow geeks worldwide are handling their Christmas decorations. We found some very cool examples where people have put together über-geeky Christmas trees, wreaths and other decorations. And then of course there’s that Christmas tree network monitoring system…

Now embrace both your inner geek and your Christmas spirit, and keep scrolling down.

Christmas tree made entirely from old computer parts

Photo by Sunny Brook.

Got RAM?

Found at Mediatinker.

Best. Tree. Ever.

Photo by dragon caiman (Carlos).

The iTree

Photo by Metromorphosis.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and other things for your Xmas tree

Photo by Lei Shi.

Proof that Tux IS a star

Photo by Maya.

These lights are connected to a network monitoring system.

White lights = all ok. Red lights = network trouble.

Photo by Jonathan Gaynor.

Computer geek Xmas wreath

Photo by Yoshi.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 2

Photo by mcr25823 (Michael).

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 3

Photo by Bruce Hartman.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 4

From TeamDroid.

Going old-school: Punch-card wreath

Photo by Jerry Gilbert.

And let’s not forget DESSERT!

Gingerbread laptop

Found at Mediatinker.

Gingerbread motherboard

Found at Mediatinker.

What are you waiting for? There’s still time to add some computer hardware to your Christmas tree!

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Read more

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Read more

Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

Read more

Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

Read more