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I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used

I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.

physicalecon 1mo ago
The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute. It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.
- thenthenthen 1mo ago
  It is an experiment, over the years various people have contributed “odd-looking” optimisations, its a great project!
  - schiffern 1mo ago
    More info: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h... https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process. https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.html https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.h... https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress
sunshinesnacks 1mo ago
I think the photos look like that to achieve a very small file size. The whole site is hosted and a small solar and battery powered server, so every MB matters.
- mrob 1mo ago
  For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.
  - sunshinesnacks 1mo ago
    Yeah, looks like you are correct. It seems it was maybe as much about style/design as it was compression: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar-powered-website/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar... https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ (Lots of comments at the bottom about image compression)
schiffern 1mo ago
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I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.

physicalecon 1mo ago

The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute. It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.

thenthenthen 1mo ago
It is an experiment, over the years various people have contributed “odd-looking” optimisations, its a great project!
- schiffern 1mo ago
  More info: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h... https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process. https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.html https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.h... https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/google/zopfli https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress

sunshinesnacks 1mo ago

I think the photos look like that to achieve a very small file size. The whole site is hosted and a small solar and battery powered server, so every MB matters.

mrob 1mo ago
For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.
- sunshinesnacks 1mo ago
  Yeah, looks like you are correct. It seems it was maybe as much about style/design as it was compression: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar-powered-website/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar... https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ (Lots of comments at the bottom about image compression)

schiffern 1mo ago

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