johnnycarlos

Category: Blog

  • Installing Ubuntu Server on a Dell OptiPlex Micro

    The OptiPlex Micro family (3050, 7050, 7080, etc.) requires a couple of BIOS tweaks before it’ll boot from a USB drive. BIOS Settings Press power and spam the F12 button to enter BIOS. Select Change Boot Mode Settings and make sure of the following: Save and exit. Then spam F12 again on reboot. Select your…

  • The VPS Was Already Full

    The short version: I set out to add an OpenTTD dedicated server to the same 1GB Linode that runs this blog. The blog is containerized WordPress behind an Apache reverse proxy. I never installed the game. Instead I spent an afternoon learning exactly how full a “full” VPS is, why the obvious memory-reclaim move did…

  • Containerizing My Corner of the Internet

    I’ve been self-hosting my blog on a Linode VPS for a while now. Bare metal WordPress, Apache, and MySQL. It worked. It was fine. But I’d been hearing about containers for years and decided it was time to stop nodding along and figure it out. Honestly what turned me off the most about it was…

  • Containerizing My WordPress Blog: Part 2 – Exporting the Live Site

    These are my notes, to help remind me what I did…. The goal Get everything out of the live WordPress install and into a staging directory that Docker can work with. Nothing here touches the live site. It’s all copies. Create the project directory Get the config files in place I had docker-compose.yml, env.example, and…

  • The Case of the /index.php/ That Wouldn’t Leave

    For longer than I’d like to admit, every URL on this blog wore a little badge of shame: /index.php/ wedged right into the middle of it. Not /2026/06/the-post/ like a civilized website, but /index.php/2026/06/the-post/, as if the server wanted everyone to know exactly which file was doing the work back there. It also meant my…

  • Adding Google Analytics from a Hotel Room

    These are my notes to remind future me how I did this because it was a bit unconventional. I found myself stuck in a hotel room for a few days with a laptop that could not connect to the server of my blog. There’s a few projects I’ve been meaning to get around to. One…

  • Containerizing my WordPress Blog

    I’ve decided it’s finally time to learn containerization and am going to start with this blog. I’m running Ubuntu 24.04 and will be installing from the offical Docker repo since it’s the latest release. The Ubuntu repo often lags behind the official release. Step 1 – Check if ca-certificates are installed. In order to download…

  • Chrome Looked at my Video and Said Nothing

    Chrome Looked at my Video and Said Nothing

    This was driving me nuts. When I upload videos recorded from my Pixel phone onto my WordPress blog, they would not render on the post page. Here’s how I found the problem and how I fixed it. The problem is the codec. An mp4 file is just a wrapper. What matters is what’s inside it.…

  • Some Mistakes I Made Trying to Automate Backups of My WordPress Blog

    I’m giving myself some side projects to keep my skills sharp. Well, I’m going to apply for a supervisor position soon and I’m worried about losing my technical skills so I’m giving myself fun tech projects at home. One I’ve been thinking about lately is backing up my blog. I wanted a cronjob script to…

  • Upgrading Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 While Running a Live WordPress Site

    I was today years old when I realized that my hosting service (Linode) allows for one snapshot. This finally gave me the impetus to upgrade Ubuntu since I’m comforted knowing there’s a one button rollback. First thing I did was update all my WordPress plugins. Then I ran the following sequence: Everything worked fine except…