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

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.

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/

  * https://html5.validator.nu/
  * https://validator.w3.org/

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; }

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

And likewise contains some amazing content.

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

[2] https://github.com/rarecoil/ecoserve

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.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html

> 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_Wor...

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.

I personally found the "email to comment" charming.

https://yarchive.net/

It's also more readable than whatever this is.

Is there a _cheap_ way to add solar to very low power boards?