If you read my first blog, you would know that I used to host this website on an HTC U Play that I am treating as a server. However, I won't be talking about it in this blog. Instead, I will be writing about a new endeavor that I underwent recently. It took me many hours and, spoilers alert, it ultimately failed. However, I satisfied my curiosity (for now) and I plan to have another go at it in the future since I still find it interesting.
Recently, my mom finally decided to give up on her Huawei Y9. It was getting slow, its speaker isn't working properly anymore, and its battery started to resemble a pillow. After backing up her stuff and setting up her new phone, I decided to take that old phone or else it will probably be thrown in a random drawer and everyone will forget about it. I wanted it to be my test subject for something that I have wanted to try for quite some time. Since its battery was bad and I didn't want to buy a new battery for it, I wanted to try to run it without a battery. That will also affirm its role as a "server" of some kind since it will be plugged into the wall 24/7. From past experience with the HTC U Play, I knew that modern phones wouldn't work without a battery and the Huawei was no different. Luckily, I had a plan in mind.
The plan was simple. I just needed to trick the phone into believing that it still has a battery inside. Great Scott made a great video on the topic. I watched this video a long time ago and have wanted to try this since. Thus, I was excited to finally have a chance to do this. The first thing I did was disassemble the phone. It was harder than it should have been because I didn't have a heat gun. I also happened to almost kill the screen in the process. The screen developed what looked like bubbles and the brightness was inconsistent in some areas. Other than that, the phone was still fully functional so I considered it a success. After that, I removed the battery and carefully removed the battery management board from it. Finally, after many attempts, I soldered 2 wires to the board. All that was left was to connect it to the phone and give it an appropriate voltage. Unfortunately, I didn't have a bench power supply so I had to experiment with the components I had on hand until I got something working. Long story short, as you can see from the video below, I managed to get something working using a diode from an electronics kit that I bought years ago and almost never used.
If you remember the spoiler in the first paragraph, you might be confused as to why I said that this endeavor failed even though I got it working. Unfortunately, it only worked for a couple of days. In Great Scott's video, his phone kept losing charge even though it was powered by an external power source. It has to do with how the phone is estimating the battery percentage. I initially thought that I didn't have this problem since I ran a 3DMark stress test for hours with the battery percentage staying at 100%. Unfortunately, after a few days, a problem started showing. I had Termux and Syncthing set up on it and was accessing it through SSH. Sometimes I couldn't connect to it and it would be because the phone powered itself off. I thought that maybe one of my family members disconnected it by mistake so I didn't think much of it. However, it happened again and again. It kept happening and I kept procrastinating on investigating what is causing it. One day, I had to go power it on again only for it to shut off right after powering on. After powering on, the phone thinks that it has 1% battery remaining and powers off immediately. I checked the voltage and it was alright. I tried plugging it into a charger like what Great Scott did but that didn't work either. To my disappointment, it seemed that fixing this will need even more effort than I already put in this endeavor. After spending a total of about 6 hours and along with my lack of appropriate tools, I decided to give up on fixing it.
While this venture ended up being a failure, I wouldn't consider it a waste of time. I was able to learn new things and practice existing skills. I am still intrigued by this idea so I hope to have another try at it in the future.
In this article, I will be discussing why I decided to self host this website instead of using a web hosting service provider and why I wanted to make this blog in the first place.
Let me start with some background. For the past year, I have been very interested in self hosting. I have hosted many things on my laptop such as a website and an audio streaming service. I found it fun even though it was frustrating at times. Not only was it fun, but it also was very informative. I learned many new things but it was mostly related to linux. I also liked the idea of converting old devices into servers since hosting services for a limited number of users required little computing resources. This allows me to use devices for longer instead of throwing it away. The main disadvantage of self hosting for me was that I couldn't access my services outside my home network. Thankfully, Tailscale exists so I ended up using it to manage my devices and access my various services through it. Tailscale was, in part, why I ended up making this website.
A few weeks ago, I discovered that Tailscale has a feature called "Tailscale Funnel" which "lets you route traffic from the broader internet to a local service running on a device in your Tailscale network". With this, I can now make my services accessible to the internet. This was the perfect opportunity to reporpuse another old device I had. A while ago, I setup a minimal Alpine linux installation using Linux Deploy on my HTC U Play. This phone is almost 10 years old now and I couldn't come up with a use for it. I tried using it as a NAS but, due to reasons I don't fully understand, it was too slow. I also used it as a database server for my java application, but I didn't think that's enough. It is still sitting idle most of the time. Thus, when I found out about Tailscale Funnel, I wanted to turn it into a web server as well. After all, my website will barely have any visitors and it doesn't have a lot of content so the phone should handle that just fine. After all, why bother paying for a web hosting service when I have everything I need to host my website myself? While it is definitely more time consuming, I think it is worth it because of everything I learned and will learn in the future.
When I was a kid, I made a blog using blogspot but I abandoned it shortly after. I also hosted my own website multiple times on separate occasions but I abandoned them as well. I either lose interest in web development or I didn't have a good reason to make a website in the first place. However, things are different this time around. This website will be a way for me to learn about various things such as web development and self hosting. It is also a good way to share my ideas, projects, or things I have learned. This website can also act as my portfolio.
I am not sure how to conclude this. This is my first time writing a blog/article. I guess it is enough for me to say that I hope you got something useful out of reading this no matter how small.
UPDATE: A month after writing this, I switched to hosting on Cloudflare Pages.