TLDR I built android-analytics, a web analytics tracker running on my phone.

Say you run a blog, personal website, small-time business page or something of the sorts. Say you also want to keep an eye on how many visitors you’re getting.

The first thing that most people think at this point is “Google Analytics”. It mostly works and is free. Its also hosted by Google, which makes it very easy to start using. There aren’t many competitors that bring those points to the table, so Google Analytics usually wins by WO at this point.

I used to use Google Analytics to track this blog for those same reasons. But after finding out about Termux and writing this post about installing a web server on an Android phone, I started toying with the idea that I had this ARM-based, 2GB RAM, Linux-like device with Internet connectivity which must be more than enough for a simple webcounter-like application. After a few weeks of tinkering, here it is!

CC-BY Carlos Varela, https://www.flickr.com/photos/c32/7755470064

Do you have an old Android phone? Sure you do! There’s a mind-blowing amount of electronic waste of all kinds, and with the average person in developed countries discarding their phones every couple of years, discarded smartphones are probably one of the most common forms of e-waste.

I had an old Motorola G5 Cedric gathering dust, so I decided to do something with it – it is now running a Puma web server with a simple Sinatra webapp.

Now, before going any further, you might be thinking: what is the real, practical use of all this? An old Android phone probably isn’t going to have a stellar performance, but neither do those t2.nanos, honestly. I’m yet to deploy any “real” code on an Android, but even the cheaper and older phones do commonly have quad-core or even octa-core CPUs, and at least 2GB RAM, so at least in theory a phone should be close – ballpark, at least – to the most modest cloud IaaS offers our there (t2.nano has 512MB for instance). Of course, a phone has an ARM processor while IaaS usually are x86; memory management is entirely different as well, but still – we’re talking ballpark estimates here.

Anyway, this is a short tutorial on how to repurpose an Android device as a web server – or any number of different things, really.

Ubuntu's power rate over time.

I’ve struggled with some kind of problem with Nvidia graphics cards on Linux since forever.

Most commonly, an external monitor wouldn’t work or the dedicated card would refuse to power off when it should.

The latter problem – a power-hogging discrete Nvidia card not turning off when it isn’t needed, specifically in Optimus-enabled laptops – has consistently haunted me throughout the years. At least in my experience, this problem is in that sweet spot of things that are definitively annoying and kind of inconvenient, but complicated enough not to be worth the several work-hours needed to definitively solve it.

We're all remote -- for now.

Communicating well with your co-workers and managers is supremely important to a software developer, and even more so for the remote one. With a lot more remote workers due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this topic became a lot more relevant.

I’ve seen people hint at this more than a few times over the years, but I didn’t really “get it” until I started working as a fully remote engineer. I also find it important to understand not only what we should be doing to achieve efficient communication, but also why we should be doing those things in those ways.

To me, the single most important thing to keep in mind is that people’s mental resources: time, attention span, etc, like yours, are limited.

Try searching for “free dynamic dns https”, “free domain with SSL” or anything similar. There won’t be a lot of meaningful results. Sure, some of the results are pretty close, like this guide on how to get free SSL certification from Cloudflare, or this one on setting up a free dynamic hostname with SSL, but they all assume you already own a domain. If you’re looking for a completely free domain that you can use for your personal web server that also has verified SSL, there are very few results.

But why was I even looking for this?

I’m working on a side project. It has a web server that communicates with a static web page hosted on Github Pages. There are a lot of ways of setting that up; in my particular case, I have a local (as in in my house) HTTP web server accepting traffic on a non-standard port (port 80 is blocked by my ISP for commercial reasons – this detail is of paramount importance, but more on that later). It is accessible through my external IP (which is dynamic), which can be mapped to a dynamic DNS domain.

I wanted to run a simple API on the web server and access it through static pages (like this blog) hosted on Github Pages (which has a verified SSL certificate). I asked the Internet if it is possible to call from a SSL-verified page (in JavaScript) a different server that does not have a verified SSL certificate (that is, my aforementioned webapp running in my home server). It isn’t, so the conclusion was that I needed somehow to get a verified SSL certificate for my dynamic DNS domain.

Having no idea whether this was possible, I started to research.