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Comment by omgmajk | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of that blog/magazine who went fully solar and stopped thinking about uptime. What a time to be alive.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Which reminds me of a catastrophe movie, where all countries launched all their nukes, and earth became radioactively poisoned. A submarine survived, looking for signs of life, and they received sporadic messages like "the whales are fine" (which made sense to them since whales live under-water). They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending messages at every boot.

This would be an interesting watch, I tried searching but couldn't find it, can you share the name of the movie?

I think it's On the Beach, a remake of a 1950s movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219224/

Here's the original: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053137/

Brilliant book too! Well worth a read.

oh crap... now I had some sort of flashback from Fallout 4 (Yangtze) :)

Thanks guys for sharing the link of the movie.

> They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending messages at every boot.

In the original film [0] and book, the signal is caused by a soda-bottle being knocked by a window-blind against a Morse-code telegraph key.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)

Which sort of reminds me of SOMA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)

Which reminds me of the http://solarprotocol.net/ I stumbled up on earlier today. It' a network of solar powered servers and the content of the site is delivered by the peer with the most sunshine.

Next: a website that loads from punched cards!

Where to stop?

Surely a website that doesn’t exist but is left to the imagination of the reader

Is the final stop

I have one like that. It contains pictures of cats.

Pictures of Schroedinger cats, I presume?

Maybe.

Yes and no at the same time

I'm pretty sure that website exists.

https://www.zombo.com/

Happy to see it converted from the old flash applet.

> Surely a website that doesn’t exist but is left to the imagination of the reader

A startup looking for funding, full circle

That's what I just experienced. They should probably upgrade to a zip drive.

Punched tape (on loop) would be more suitable :)

An actual Turing machine maybe? I’m someone built one by now.

Some people even built one in Lego http://rubens.ens-lyon.fr/

Eniac or Babbage Difference Engine doing HTTP/2.0. I can't remember if both are Turing complete, so it's an exercise for the maker.

> Location: Barcelona

That is interesting as in winter and summer you will get a noticeable difference in availability. It varies between 9 and 15 hours of sun a day.

Now just span across multiple sun availability zones and ensure the local sun harvesting is redundant for a HA setup ^^

Unfortunately it is not fully solar - it is as far as it can go, but then it is connected to a home router connected to mains etc.

I do have a fully solar powered VPN gateway/LTE router/web server/Wi-Fi relay - in my case, it’s out of necessity, as I live in a deep valley, and the only way I could get internet access here was to stick a mast on top of a hill with an IP67 box of goodies and a solar panel and battery, and an LPDA and yagi antenna for LTE and 802.11n respectively. The web server isn’t public, but fulfils a few important functions for me.

Cool. Do you have a writeup of what you made and how?

Sounds like our local ham relay station. On the top of the mountain, solar and deep cycle batteries, and a radio relay. All housed in a cheap little shack.

I was last up there around '98 to help top off the batteries with water, but it's still running strong today.

this sounds really cool

Some more info:

https://gallatinhamradio.com/repeaters/BozemanAreaRepeaters.... <- The Bridger Ridge one the one I went to.

Some of those repeaters will let you patch into the phone system. It's slick stuff, but I haven't worked with it for a few decades now.

If you want to nitpick go all the way.

It's fully solar because a long time ago the sun got hot and the solar system got put together and that combination resulted in life and then later some sample of that life built a website with materials extracted from what the sun did to the original mess.

Nitpick++: A fair percentage of electricity in the world is powered by other stars, because Uranium didn’t come from our star.

Ah, coool. But it's still fair to say it's solar powered, right ? Just not our sun ?

Not really. The transuranics are believed to be mostly created during supernovas (core-collapse supernova nucleosynthesis) and neutron star mergers.

Those events are not particularly similar to our sun's normal solar radiation.

I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means). And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

Thanks for the explanation :).

> I think you are grasping at straws (although I'll be honest I don't know what that literally means).

Yup, I tried all I could ^^.

> And I think the word solar really only applies to our own sun.

So be it then. In scifi they always talked about sol-3 anyway and caspix-9, etc..

Nice! Next step: an Arduino website run from ambient RF energy harvesting. :))

This is amazing.

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