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A solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-Tech Magazine

235 points by hemmert 8y ago

todd3834 8y ago
Pretty cool, seeing the battery status is pretty cool. I wouldn't do this but seeing the battery status tempts me to come up with ways to run it down faster just to test it out. Anyone else think the same thought?
- tyingq 8y ago
  There's a CPU load average and some other stats here: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html Running the Qualsys SSL server test against the site does appear to raise the 15 minute load average several points, though it's hard to say if it's just it being on HN doing that by itself. I assume it would have to be pretty cloudy to affect the charge level.
platz 8y ago
I've always wanted to make very low power micros to do simple sensor/comms things in fully autonomous remote locations, but I don't know how to make the solar requirement economical, compared with the cost of the micro. Is there a _cheap_ way to add solar to very low power boards?
- tyingq 8y ago
  AliExpress has lots of cheap panels and 5V solar controllers. I suppose the trick is finding one with a credible 3rd party review/how-to.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Search for "solar panel usb", you can find 2W models for <$5, or 10W for ~$12. Add a powerbank and you're set.
  - jononor 8y ago
    You even get cheap powerbanks with solar integrated.
whatshisface 8y ago
>We were told that the Internet would “dematerialise” society and decrease energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a large and rapidly growing consumer of energy itself. According to the latest estimates, the entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production, with data traffic doubling roughly every two years. That's not a complete statement unless you also include the energy use associated with the paper processing that no longer happens, along with controlling for the massive increase in the number of people with access to computation. If all communication that presently happens over the internet was to be redirected to other forms energy use would probably not change that much, after all the telecoms put it all on the same backbone anyways.
- benj111 8y ago
  "paper processing that no longer happens" I wish. I've yet to see an actual paperless office. And paperless bills have just been replaced by the marketing they send you instead. Unless you're talking about newspapers, you may have a point there.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I haven't touched an office paper since I signed my contract. The fully paperless office may be a myth, but there's still plenty of paper processing that no longer happens. As for the marketing, you can refuse that use of your data, at least if you live under the aegis of the GDPR.
jws 8y ago
The author is concerned about the embodied energy cost of a larger battery, so has a smallish battery which only lasts about a day. For my small solar powered installations I generally use a lead acid battery with a zero embodied energy cost. When I pull a starter battery out of a vehicle, instead of immediately recycling it I use it as a storage battery for one of my remote solar installations, sometimes adding it in parallel to an existing one. They can then perform for years as a bad, but useful, low current storage battery. Eventually something horrific¹ happens or a cell goes completely² and I recycle the battery. So the lead and the sulphur spend a few years longer between reincarnations as batteries, but the embodied energy is zero for my use. ␄ ¹ A camera/weather sensor station went offline after an unusually strong storm from the south. I suspect there was unprecedented wave erosion and dropped it off the embankment. When the site becomes accessible again I'll probably find it in a heap at the shoreline with ruined batteries from freezing. (Sometimes I lose the sulphur, but there is a world sulphur glut so I don't feel too bad.) Other causes of demise are failed solar chargers or stuck on loads, usually from wiring failures. (darned rodents) ² I'd like to make a lead acid charge controller which can detect a shorted cell and just call it a 10V battery instead of a loss, that would extend their lives. There is DC/DC conversion already happening at charge and discharge, so it shouldn't hurt efficiency significantly.
- tunnuz 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing, do you have any pointers for someone who would like to know more about building a renewable energy rig?
lucb1e 8y ago
Regarding image compression: https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#image-compression https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#imag... The original is 160KB. When I save it in GIMP, the re-encoding (at 90% quality be default) brings me to a baseline value of 164KB. If I turn the quality down to 50%, it appears to be almost identical but is only 72KB, less than half the size. Turning it down further until I can only barely make out more detail than in the dithered image (for example, I can see that the operator on the bottom left is looking at something, whereas in the dithered image I originally thought her face was a headphone and she was facing away from the camera), and at 7% the limit is finally reached. At 6%, the quality is no longer better than the dithered image. So at 7%, what's the size? 20.9KB, much less than the dithered image that is claimed to be 36.5KB. I'm not sure why I double checked, but I did. You know what? The dithered image is not 36.5KB as the article claims, but a 76KB PNG. Which is impressive because with PNG, I can't get it below 140KB in GIMP. JPG and GIF also can't reduce it beyond 76KB. Their PNG encoder is much better than GIMP's, but I don't know where the 36.5KB claim comes from. What I do know is that JPG can get it to 72KB with virtually no quality loss, or 21KB at a quality still slightly higher than the dithered version. All you have to do is change the quality setting, an option available in almost every editor (no fancy tools or skills needed). Dithering seems to be just chosen for its 1950s look, not for actual power saving.
- mistercow 8y ago
  What I find really frustrating about this is that the whole premise is supposed to be about how using older technology can be more environmentally friendly, yet they used a newer codec that simply wasn't appropriate to the task they threw at it to give the impression of "old" while wasting more resources. And to throw one final nail in the coffin, if they used a modern, but reasonably mature codec like VP8, they could have done even better on resource usage while retaining the same quality. If you want to build something to demonstrate that using older technology has advantages, that's fine. But you should make sure that you're actually demonstrating what you intended. And I'd pick something other than energy efficiency to target, because the last decade has seen a ton of technological progress improving energy efficiency because of its importance to mobile devices running on tiny batteries.
- 8y ago
MagicPropmaker 8y ago
It may have a low footprint, but there’s a lot of high-tech involved to make a solar powered website work.
- fock 8y ago
  I think the whole website is about appreciating what works with less ressources (and might ultimately be much simpler). And to achieve this, you don't necessarily, have to do away with tech (like most people scared by the idea of less growth typically assume and then start BS about: do you want to go back to hunting..). I profoundly dislike the idea of using brute-force subsampling for saving on data though (especially for diagrams) - if you have information to convey, do it clear and so that it lasts, otherwise skip it.
marvindanig 8y ago
> Why does it go off-line? > How often will it be off-line? > When is the best time to visit? I'd use a Service Worker [1] to go offline-first. Host and serve content that goes offline automatically unless you edit it too often. Anyway, interesting extreme project. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
zepearl 8y ago
Battery, weather and panel status: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html
- zepearl 8y ago
  It would be interesting to add as well "wind" (a "wind speed detector"?) and see how/when solar & wind are active over some timespan :)
  - vcavallo 8y ago
    I dunno, feels outside the scope of the point of the site (and the point of the solar meter on the site). There are already millions of weather stations all over the world.
    - chabes 8y ago
      I’m not the person you replied to, but I don’t think they want to monitor wind for weather-related reasons. I think they are referring to monitoring wind power generation as related to solar power generation, to see how the wind compensates for the lack of sun, at night or on cloudy/stormy days
      - zepearl 8y ago
        Right, that's what I meant - thx for expanding/explaining my post :)
- hanniabu 8y ago
  What I find interesting about this is that I need to read either entirely in the yellow or entirely in the blue part. For some reason I can't read where the divide is.
  - zepearl 8y ago
    I think that you're kind of right - I feel that some part of my brain treats the 2 colors as 2 different chapters.
uxp100 8y ago
There was a comment section with a lot of discussion of this, but it doesn't appear in the "past" link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143
darkmighty 8y ago
Just for reference, their normally-powered website is also available: (I prefer despite the solar novelty) https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ And likewise contains some amazing content.
- vcavallo 8y ago
  Whoa the redesign is beautiful compared to this!
  - platz 8y ago
    In contrast to the forcing function of mobile and special constraints, the additional freedom provided by UX on desktop is simply filled up with sidebars and ads. Designers just don't know what to do with the extra space. Reading any news article at a browser width of greater than 720px is a disaster. We've forgotten how to design for the desktop.
themodelplumber 8y ago
> Only one weight (regular) of a font is used, demonstrating that content hierarchy can be communicated without loading multiple typefaces and weights. This point has nothing to do with energy use (or very, very little) but is a really great graphic design tip for those looking to make a site more pleasant to browse. The other weight that's not being used in favor of regular is "bold". Instead of bolding, the font size attribute is changed to establish hierarchy. Faux small caps are also used. From the CSS: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { font-weight: normal; }
- massivecali 8y ago
  A great graphic design tip for simple websites is stop using additional files. If you can't do it with a single HTML file, you're adding unnecessary complexity.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    Any food beyond soylent is just unnecessary complexity. Any books beyond reference manuals are just unnecessary complexity. Any interior colors on your walls other than white is just unnecessary complexity. Any music beyond Bach is just unnecessary complexity... Maybe people enjoy aesthetics other than minimalist? Maybe some people enjoy complex things?
    - massivecali 8y ago
      The thread is about a solar powered site and energy use.
    - sh87 8y ago
      Poor overly generalized statement there. Point being importance of identifying and addressing complexity as a 'I want'... not a 'I need'. Accept it or abhorr it, first recognize it as a complexity.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      Soylent is way more complicated than potatoes.
noonespecial 8y ago
This is a cool, geeky project and I'm not trying to bust on it or be snarky, but I have to wonder how many continuos watts of power draw it would add to the world to just host the site on an AWS EC2 nano?
- alexhornbake 8y ago
  It’s a static site, so perhaps S3 (or any static cloud storage origin) and any CDN are a better comparison. What is the total power consumption of 1/nth of a large pool of cloud resources compared to the power draw of the router they are using in the office that is powered by the grid? Regardless, I must say I love the “offline is ok”, “slow computing” (ala slow food), “get off my lawn”, “sustainable beats schfnacy” attitude. Nice one!
- tyingq 8y ago
  At some level of popularity, it might use less power on a CDN, since you would avoid a lot of routers and links. The math on power savings for Netflix local ISP cached content might be interesting, even though that's not really the point.
- oceanplexian 8y ago
  I think it's kind of pointless. Humanity uses more kWh -equivalent of energy in 1 seconds of an airline flight than everyone who ever has, or ever will use viewing this website. Shit, just takeoff is something like an equivalent 90 MW or so worth of electricity: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-... I think society would be better served by engineers learning and working on new technologies to extract and use energy, instead of pushing bits around on a website. Why not get a degree in Nuclear Engineering, or Oil and Gas Engineering? It would certainly benefit society more than this.
mistercow 8y ago
I'm confused by the choice of image format. Why use dithered grayscale PNGs for these photos when a full color JPEG at the same bit rate looks a hundred times better. Are they just sacrificing quality for the sake of a low tech aesthetic, without regard for actual efficiency?
- cantankerous 8y ago
  The image aesthetic is emulating the appearance of a dot-matrix printer. It's just a low-tech motif to go with the publication.
  - mistercow 8y ago
    That would be all well and good, but the page specifically claims that using dithered images lowers energy use.
    - moron4hire 8y ago
      They may have ran metrics on decoding processing time neé energy usage
      - mistercow 8y ago
        I doubt it. The only study I could find on energy usage in image decoding was this https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7168333 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7168333 which found JPEG decoding to be much less energy intensive than PNG decoding, mostly because it's faster. Note that that's not just a function of file size, as lower quality JPEGs actually took more energy to decode. Which all makes a lot of sense when you consider how much work has gone into optimizing frequency domain based compression and decompression.
- llao 8y ago
  It seems to be purely about aesthetics and ridicules other things said on the page. JPEG would not only be quicker to decompress but could also be much smaller for a similar "geeky" look.
wurst_case 8y ago
Cool. I read a few articles. Definitely bookmarking and returning for more.
Panino 8y ago
Inspiring! The page looks great and it brings me back to the 1990s web (in a good way). Although I gotta say, I think the criticism of 100% uptime is an ideological position, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. In this case having their website always up would give it wider reach, and presumably convince more people to reduce their energy usage, which is the goal. But I can appreciate those who practice what they preach. If the authors are here, you can further optimize your page. For images I was able to reduce image-weight by 494 bytes, using lossless optimization, with optipng. For the html, using zopfli to compress the page, I squeezed out another 3020 bytes. And although I didn't fix it up, the html code includes unnecessary remnants from pre-html5 like closing P tags, lots of end slashes, etc. I'd bet you could save a few KB (before compression) by removing it. In all these are over 3514 bytes you don't need to read from disk, cache, encrypt, and send over the network using your 1-2.5W webserver. For cryptography, you can save some cycles using ECDSA instead of RSA, and prioritizing aes-128-gcm over aes-256-gcm. And what about ChaCha? To me it seems logically inconsistent to spend extra cycles protecting this read-only low-energy site powered exclusively by solar. 128-bits are enough; in practice you only need to worry about side channels, not key length. Just as an aside, on the topic of webpage optimization, here are some of my favorite tools: zopfli, pngquant, optipng, jhead, cwebp. And here are some excellent resources: * https://webpagetest.org/ * https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com/ * https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ Then when you're done, check for html errors with * https://html5.validator.nu/ * https://validator.w3.org/
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  > Although I gotta say, I think the criticism of 100% uptime is an ideological position, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. In this case having their website always up The web site is a mirror of a conventionally-hosted web site: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ I see a lot of links to https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ on hacker news, and there's always a link in the corner of the screen to the solar server.
  - NicoJuicy 8y ago
    + as a magazine, downtime gives an SEO penalty.
iknowordidthat 8y ago
That sure is using a lot of recent modern, low power tech to “question the belief in technological progress”.
mathgladiator 8y ago
This is super awesome, and this is the kind of thing that makes me long for an early retirement where I can tweak how I live.
Pmop 8y ago
Low power and very pleasing to read. The Web could be a nicer place if more websites followed this design. I personally found the "email to comment" charming.
mitchtbaum 8y ago
> DESIGN SOFTWARE: The website is built with Pelican, a static site generator. We have released the source code for ‘solar’, the Pelican theme we developed here. Did they share the article sources too? I didn't see the article markdown/rest file in their lowtechmag github account. Also, it'd be cool to share a torrent of the sources for when people's access to github goes down. There's so much you can do when you have software like pelican installed, if you have a site's theme, content, and config files.
rarecoil 8y ago
There's a more technical version of the original Low Tech article available[1]. I've been tracking this project for a while and found it really inspiring. I've been starting to build my own systems based upon the Raspberry Pi 2/3 and the ODROID-C2, and currently use the ODROID as an ultra-low-power server. Most of my documentation and configuration so far has been in a private repo, but with this much interest I made it public[2] in hopes that others would be willing to issue PRs and work on it with me. If you're interested in this type of optimization definitely contact me, I'd love to work on this stuff more with environmentally-interested people. [1] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html [2] https://github.com/rarecoil/ecoserve https://github.com/rarecoil/ecoserve
msla 8y ago
This is a low-tech website: https://yarchive.net/ https://yarchive.net/ It's also more readable than whatever this is.
qbaqbaqba 8y ago
Could it benefit from using something like IPFS?
eggy 8y ago
I would like to do something like this with ESP8266 chips in a distributed solar-powered website. It you snag free WiFi you lose the power-hungry router, but only put it off on the local Starbucks-other-shop-with-free-WiFi.

235 points by hemmert 8y ago

Pretty cool, seeing the battery status is pretty cool. I wouldn't do this but seeing the battery status tempts me to come up with ways to run it down faster just to test it out. Anyone else think the same thought?

tyingq 8y ago
There's a CPU load average and some other stats here: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html Running the Qualsys SSL server test against the site does appear to raise the 15 minute load average several points, though it's hard to say if it's just it being on HN doing that by itself. I assume it would have to be pretty cloudy to affect the charge level.

platz 8y ago

I've always wanted to make very low power micros to do simple sensor/comms things in fully autonomous remote locations, but I don't know how to make the solar requirement economical, compared with the cost of the micro. Is there a _cheap_ way to add solar to very low power boards?

tyingq 8y ago
AliExpress has lots of cheap panels and 5V solar controllers. I suppose the trick is finding one with a credible 3rd party review/how-to.
icebraining 8y ago
Search for "solar panel usb", you can find 2W models for <$5, or 10W for ~$12. Add a powerbank and you're set.
- jononor 8y ago
  You even get cheap powerbanks with solar integrated.

whatshisface 8y ago

>We were told that the Internet would “dematerialise” society and decrease energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a large and rapidly growing consumer of energy itself. According to the latest estimates, the entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production, with data traffic doubling roughly every two years. That's not a complete statement unless you also include the energy use associated with the paper processing that no longer happens, along with controlling for the massive increase in the number of people with access to computation. If all communication that presently happens over the internet was to be redirected to other forms energy use would probably not change that much, after all the telecoms put it all on the same backbone anyways.

benj111 8y ago
"paper processing that no longer happens" I wish. I've yet to see an actual paperless office. And paperless bills have just been replaced by the marketing they send you instead. Unless you're talking about newspapers, you may have a point there.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I haven't touched an office paper since I signed my contract. The fully paperless office may be a myth, but there's still plenty of paper processing that no longer happens. As for the marketing, you can refuse that use of your data, at least if you live under the aegis of the GDPR.

jws 8y ago

The author is concerned about the embodied energy cost of a larger battery, so has a smallish battery which only lasts about a day. For my small solar powered installations I generally use a lead acid battery with a zero embodied energy cost. When I pull a starter battery out of a vehicle, instead of immediately recycling it I use it as a storage battery for one of my remote solar installations, sometimes adding it in parallel to an existing one. They can then perform for years as a bad, but useful, low current storage battery. Eventually something horrific¹ happens or a cell goes completely² and I recycle the battery. So the lead and the sulphur spend a few years longer between reincarnations as batteries, but the embodied energy is zero for my use. ␄ ¹ A camera/weather sensor station went offline after an unusually strong storm from the south. I suspect there was unprecedented wave erosion and dropped it off the embankment. When the site becomes accessible again I'll probably find it in a heap at the shoreline with ruined batteries from freezing. (Sometimes I lose the sulphur, but there is a world sulphur glut so I don't feel too bad.) Other causes of demise are failed solar chargers or stuck on loads, usually from wiring failures. (darned rodents) ² I'd like to make a lead acid charge controller which can detect a shorted cell and just call it a 10V battery instead of a loss, that would extend their lives. There is DC/DC conversion already happening at charge and discharge, so it shouldn't hurt efficiency significantly.

tunnuz 8y ago
Thanks for sharing, do you have any pointers for someone who would like to know more about building a renewable energy rig?

lucb1e 8y ago

Regarding image compression: https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#image-compression https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#imag... The original is 160KB. When I save it in GIMP, the re-encoding (at 90% quality be default) brings me to a baseline value of 164KB. If I turn the quality down to 50%, it appears to be almost identical but is only 72KB, less than half the size. Turning it down further until I can only barely make out more detail than in the dithered image (for example, I can see that the operator on the bottom left is looking at something, whereas in the dithered image I originally thought her face was a headphone and she was facing away from the camera), and at 7% the limit is finally reached. At 6%, the quality is no longer better than the dithered image. So at 7%, what's the size? 20.9KB, much less than the dithered image that is claimed to be 36.5KB. I'm not sure why I double checked, but I did. You know what? The dithered image is not 36.5KB as the article claims, but a 76KB PNG. Which is impressive because with PNG, I can't get it below 140KB in GIMP. JPG and GIF also can't reduce it beyond 76KB. Their PNG encoder is much better than GIMP's, but I don't know where the 36.5KB claim comes from. What I do know is that JPG can get it to 72KB with virtually no quality loss, or 21KB at a quality still slightly higher than the dithered version. All you have to do is change the quality setting, an option available in almost every editor (no fancy tools or skills needed). Dithering seems to be just chosen for its 1950s look, not for actual power saving.

mistercow 8y ago
What I find really frustrating about this is that the whole premise is supposed to be about how using older technology can be more environmentally friendly, yet they used a newer codec that simply wasn't appropriate to the task they threw at it to give the impression of "old" while wasting more resources. And to throw one final nail in the coffin, if they used a modern, but reasonably mature codec like VP8, they could have done even better on resource usage while retaining the same quality. If you want to build something to demonstrate that using older technology has advantages, that's fine. But you should make sure that you're actually demonstrating what you intended. And I'd pick something other than energy efficiency to target, because the last decade has seen a ton of technological progress improving energy efficiency because of its importance to mobile devices running on tiny batteries.
8y ago

MagicPropmaker 8y ago

It may have a low footprint, but there’s a lot of high-tech involved to make a solar powered website work.

fock 8y ago
I think the whole website is about appreciating what works with less ressources (and might ultimately be much simpler). And to achieve this, you don't necessarily, have to do away with tech (like most people scared by the idea of less growth typically assume and then start BS about: do you want to go back to hunting..). I profoundly dislike the idea of using brute-force subsampling for saving on data though (especially for diagrams) - if you have information to convey, do it clear and so that it lasts, otherwise skip it.

marvindanig 8y ago

> Why does it go off-line? > How often will it be off-line? > When is the best time to visit? I'd use a Service Worker [1] to go offline-first. Host and serve content that goes offline automatically unless you edit it too often. Anyway, interesting extreme project. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

zepearl 8y ago

Battery, weather and panel status: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html

zepearl 8y ago
It would be interesting to add as well "wind" (a "wind speed detector"?) and see how/when solar & wind are active over some timespan :)
- vcavallo 8y ago
  I dunno, feels outside the scope of the point of the site (and the point of the solar meter on the site). There are already millions of weather stations all over the world.
  - chabes 8y ago
    I’m not the person you replied to, but I don’t think they want to monitor wind for weather-related reasons. I think they are referring to monitoring wind power generation as related to solar power generation, to see how the wind compensates for the lack of sun, at night or on cloudy/stormy days
    - zepearl 8y ago
      Right, that's what I meant - thx for expanding/explaining my post :)
hanniabu 8y ago
What I find interesting about this is that I need to read either entirely in the yellow or entirely in the blue part. For some reason I can't read where the divide is.
- zepearl 8y ago
  I think that you're kind of right - I feel that some part of my brain treats the 2 colors as 2 different chapters.

uxp100 8y ago

There was a comment section with a lot of discussion of this, but it doesn't appear in the "past" link. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143

darkmighty 8y ago

Just for reference, their normally-powered website is also available: (I prefer despite the solar novelty) https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ And likewise contains some amazing content.

vcavallo 8y ago
Whoa the redesign is beautiful compared to this!
- platz 8y ago
  In contrast to the forcing function of mobile and special constraints, the additional freedom provided by UX on desktop is simply filled up with sidebars and ads. Designers just don't know what to do with the extra space. Reading any news article at a browser width of greater than 720px is a disaster. We've forgotten how to design for the desktop.

themodelplumber 8y ago

> Only one weight (regular) of a font is used, demonstrating that content hierarchy can be communicated without loading multiple typefaces and weights. This point has nothing to do with energy use (or very, very little) but is a really great graphic design tip for those looking to make a site more pleasant to browse. The other weight that's not being used in favor of regular is "bold". Instead of bolding, the font size attribute is changed to establish hierarchy. Faux small caps are also used. From the CSS: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { font-weight: normal; }

massivecali 8y ago
A great graphic design tip for simple websites is stop using additional files. If you can't do it with a single HTML file, you're adding unnecessary complexity.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Any food beyond soylent is just unnecessary complexity. Any books beyond reference manuals are just unnecessary complexity. Any interior colors on your walls other than white is just unnecessary complexity. Any music beyond Bach is just unnecessary complexity... Maybe people enjoy aesthetics other than minimalist? Maybe some people enjoy complex things?
  - massivecali 8y ago
    The thread is about a solar powered site and energy use.
  - sh87 8y ago
    Poor overly generalized statement there. Point being importance of identifying and addressing complexity as a 'I want'... not a 'I need'. Accept it or abhorr it, first recognize it as a complexity.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    Soylent is way more complicated than potatoes.

noonespecial 8y ago

This is a cool, geeky project and I'm not trying to bust on it or be snarky, but I have to wonder how many continuos watts of power draw it would add to the world to just host the site on an AWS EC2 nano?

alexhornbake 8y ago
It’s a static site, so perhaps S3 (or any static cloud storage origin) and any CDN are a better comparison. What is the total power consumption of 1/nth of a large pool of cloud resources compared to the power draw of the router they are using in the office that is powered by the grid? Regardless, I must say I love the “offline is ok”, “slow computing” (ala slow food), “get off my lawn”, “sustainable beats schfnacy” attitude. Nice one!
tyingq 8y ago
At some level of popularity, it might use less power on a CDN, since you would avoid a lot of routers and links. The math on power savings for Netflix local ISP cached content might be interesting, even though that's not really the point.
oceanplexian 8y ago
I think it's kind of pointless. Humanity uses more kWh -equivalent of energy in 1 seconds of an airline flight than everyone who ever has, or ever will use viewing this website. Shit, just takeoff is something like an equivalent 90 MW or so worth of electricity: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-... I think society would be better served by engineers learning and working on new technologies to extract and use energy, instead of pushing bits around on a website. Why not get a degree in Nuclear Engineering, or Oil and Gas Engineering? It would certainly benefit society more than this.

mistercow 8y ago

I'm confused by the choice of image format. Why use dithered grayscale PNGs for these photos when a full color JPEG at the same bit rate looks a hundred times better. Are they just sacrificing quality for the sake of a low tech aesthetic, without regard for actual efficiency?

cantankerous 8y ago
The image aesthetic is emulating the appearance of a dot-matrix printer. It's just a low-tech motif to go with the publication.
- mistercow 8y ago
  That would be all well and good, but the page specifically claims that using dithered images lowers energy use.
  - moron4hire 8y ago
    They may have ran metrics on decoding processing time neé energy usage
    - mistercow 8y ago
      I doubt it. The only study I could find on energy usage in image decoding was this https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7168333 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7168333 which found JPEG decoding to be much less energy intensive than PNG decoding, mostly because it's faster. Note that that's not just a function of file size, as lower quality JPEGs actually took more energy to decode. Which all makes a lot of sense when you consider how much work has gone into optimizing frequency domain based compression and decompression.
llao 8y ago
It seems to be purely about aesthetics and ridicules other things said on the page. JPEG would not only be quicker to decompress but could also be much smaller for a similar "geeky" look.

wurst_case 8y ago

Cool. I read a few articles. Definitely bookmarking and returning for more.

Panino 8y ago

Inspiring! The page looks great and it brings me back to the 1990s web (in a good way). Although I gotta say, I think the criticism of 100% uptime is an ideological position, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. In this case having their website always up would give it wider reach, and presumably convince more people to reduce their energy usage, which is the goal. But I can appreciate those who practice what they preach. If the authors are here, you can further optimize your page. For images I was able to reduce image-weight by 494 bytes, using lossless optimization, with optipng. For the html, using zopfli to compress the page, I squeezed out another 3020 bytes. And although I didn't fix it up, the html code includes unnecessary remnants from pre-html5 like closing P tags, lots of end slashes, etc. I'd bet you could save a few KB (before compression) by removing it. In all these are over 3514 bytes you don't need to read from disk, cache, encrypt, and send over the network using your 1-2.5W webserver. For cryptography, you can save some cycles using ECDSA instead of RSA, and prioritizing aes-128-gcm over aes-256-gcm. And what about ChaCha? To me it seems logically inconsistent to spend extra cycles protecting this read-only low-energy site powered exclusively by solar. 128-bits are enough; in practice you only need to worry about side channels, not key length. Just as an aside, on the topic of webpage optimization, here are some of my favorite tools: zopfli, pngquant, optipng, jhead, cwebp. And here are some excellent resources: * https://webpagetest.org/ * https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com/ * https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ Then when you're done, check for html errors with * https://html5.validator.nu/ * https://validator.w3.org/

gwbas1c 8y ago
> Although I gotta say, I think the criticism of 100% uptime is an ideological position, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. In this case having their website always up The web site is a mirror of a conventionally-hosted web site: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ I see a lot of links to https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/ on hacker news, and there's always a link in the corner of the screen to the solar server.
- NicoJuicy 8y ago
  + as a magazine, downtime gives an SEO penalty.

iknowordidthat 8y ago

That sure is using a lot of recent modern, low power tech to “question the belief in technological progress”.

mathgladiator 8y ago

This is super awesome, and this is the kind of thing that makes me long for an early retirement where I can tweak how I live.

Pmop 8y ago

Low power and very pleasing to read. The Web could be a nicer place if more websites followed this design. I personally found the "email to comment" charming.

mitchtbaum 8y ago

> DESIGN SOFTWARE: The website is built with Pelican, a static site generator. We have released the source code for ‘solar’, the Pelican theme we developed here. Did they share the article sources too? I didn't see the article markdown/rest file in their lowtechmag github account. Also, it'd be cool to share a torrent of the sources for when people's access to github goes down. There's so much you can do when you have software like pelican installed, if you have a site's theme, content, and config files.

rarecoil 8y ago

There's a more technical version of the original Low Tech article available[1]. I've been tracking this project for a while and found it really inspiring. I've been starting to build my own systems based upon the Raspberry Pi 2/3 and the ODROID-C2, and currently use the ODROID as an ultra-low-power server. Most of my documentation and configuration so far has been in a private repo, but with this much interest I made it public[2] in hopes that others would be willing to issue PRs and work on it with me. If you're interested in this type of optimization definitely contact me, I'd love to work on this stuff more with environmentally-interested people. [1] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html [2] https://github.com/rarecoil/ecoserve https://github.com/rarecoil/ecoserve

msla 8y ago

This is a low-tech website: https://yarchive.net/ https://yarchive.net/ It's also more readable than whatever this is.

qbaqbaqba 8y ago

Could it benefit from using something like IPFS?

eggy 8y ago

I would like to do something like this with ESP8266 chips in a distributed solar-powered website. It you snag free WiFi you lose the power-hungry router, but only put it off on the local Starbucks-other-shop-with-free-WiFi.