A personal blog has long been something I wanted to have but never high enough on my list of things to do. Recently, I realised this may be a great medium to document my various projects, big or small, from time to time. It’ll probably also be great to document some of my hardware “hacking” steps and resources that may also help someone doing something similar.
I had previously played with Raspberry Pi’s in 2018 and had a go at running a Nginx server, but I had no idea what components a blog would have so nothing solid really came out of it. Still, with that experience, doing this wasn’t completely new.
I always fancy repurposing old, perfectly functional items into something else useful, especially electronics. I got this laptop from TradeMe (a local trading site), in a box(!) of old laptops. Turns out there’s still something decent-ish in them, and this laptop is one. It has an Intel Atom N450 processor (1C 2T) and a DDR2 RAM slot. No charger, no hard drive, but that’s no problem! Even the battery still holds charge (ACPI says it’s only 20% worn). It’s currently powered by a 12V adapter boosted to 19V through a DC/DC module, and I put in an old 80GB hard drive (from another old electronics collection off TradeMe) as the main drive. It was initially meant for testing only until I realised none of the other laptops were better… would definitely need to upgrade this in the future, but it’s good for now. I then installed Ubuntu Server 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
When running benchmarks using hardinfo, it still outperforms a Raspberry Pi 3 – I know, Pi’s aren’t known for performance, but this is like a Pi with a screen, a battery and a keyboard! For almost nothing too (it was $30 for the whole lot). When the screen is off, it draws just over 10W with little CPU load, so I see that as still fairly low-power.
The setup I have for the blog is LNMP – Linux (Ubuntu), Nginx, MySQL and PHP. For the start, I largely followed this blog by Nginx. I then added DDNS with no-ip and HTTPS with LetsEncrypt. I also installed fail2ban for brute-force protection. WordPress was completely new to me so a few weekends were spent when stuff didn’t work as expected. In the end, I learned heaps and it was all worth it!