About the solar powered website (2022) | Hacker News Reader

About the solar powered website (2022)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

53 pointsthunderbong20 comments

This is one of my favorite websites of all time.

Their pace of publishing is slow, but I'm okay with it, I only visit the website a few times a year.

It's a nice change from all those websites that try to publish as much as they can so that they get tons of clicks everyday.

Mine too and same here, I catch up a couple of times per year spontaneously.

I love solutions that are "human sized" and not dependent on a global scale civilization. Humanity would be in so much better shape if we learned to be content with a little less, a little simpler. Not always (necessarily) simpler from our personal perspective (ordering a fancy gadget from China on Amazon is "simple"), but holistically (taking into account the whole manufacturing and supply chain and its externallities).

Same, what a cool piece of the Internet. I have nothing but love for it.

I don't see anything (non-archived) about direct bicycle power, for the grain grinder and the blender and sawing wood and stuff. I will look in the archive. (Answers: page 9 on the paginated website.)

This site was my inspiration to build my own solar-powered blog. I love how rigorous they are about it.

My own blog runs on a Pi4 and as I had a HN frontpage hit, that Pi held up perfectly (static site on gigabit fiber).

I went through so many iterations. Starting with a 60W solar panel, a €20 solar controller and a few 12 volt 7Ah batteries and a Pi 3. Now on 2 x 370W panels, multiple Victron MPPTs and 2.8 kWh LiFePo4, also running my computer and monitors.

That's really cool! I always wanted to have a solar powered desktop, never got around to it unfortunately.

while dithering looks nice, the images could be optimized further with tools like zopflipng, and could be better quality if different choices were made (eg adding more levels of color which still will compress better, or using other image formats)

That may be true, but I don’t think it matters that much in this context, because the actual implementation isn’t the point. It’s more about the idea behind it.

yeah its also an aesthetic choice. You SEE that they made the images use less data/power.

In 2024, even the fact that the website goes down periodically, assuming it does, is now itself an art performance. Solar and battery tech is perfectly capable of keeping it up all the time without an excessive expenditure of resources. I could rig something that could do it out of what I've got lying around the house and I'm nowhere near crazy into solar, it's just some stuff I keep for emergency backup.

> I could rig something that could do it out of what I've got lying around the house

Can’t wait to see it!

I don't think it's a huge shock that 400W of solar panels and a 2000Wh LiPo battery could keep an RPi running indefinitely. With just trivial tuning on the RPi we're looking at a week or two just to drain the battery. The RPi's consumption and the self-discharge rate are not too dissimilar.

I think I have the gear to set up the solar panels into a controller that offers a USB output without the 2000Wh battery, and could set it up into a far more reasonable USB power bank, though I'm not sure I have one that can be charged at the same time as it discharges. It's still a day minimum for an RPi to discharge one of those with a touch of tuning, and far less than a day to recharge them.

There was a Linux update that increased their power usage by about 25%, which put them over the daily power budget ; uptime dropped to 80% after that.

Really appreciate the idea of the website.

My own observation about online information, it exploded with blogs in the early 00's by adding 'opinions and life experience' to 'facts' and a lower barrier of entry with Wordpress, and nowadays exponentially with AI just pumping out all manner of anything.

Though perhaps the value was always there, alongside occasional new content and new opinions.

The site should be constantly in dark mode. Some monitors will use the same amount of energy regardless of which color is displayed, but other monitors use less energy for darker colors(eg OLED)

>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.

Good ol' hypercapitalism sponsoring the Jevons paradox. You love to see it.

"Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress"

I wonder what reversal of technological progress made it possible to run a web server on a tiny computer that only uses 2.5 watts of power, and how that "small, off-grid solar PV system" was built out of low-tech components.

Those are technical _developments_ to be sure, but _progress_ implies movement toward a goal. As I understand it, what's being questioned isn't the development of new and innovative technology, but whether what is often done with these technologies and labeled "progress" is actually deserving of that name.

Who says anything about reversal? It's not using the latest and greatest tech, but some kind of minimum required to do the job of delivering those articles to a wide audience.

I was unable to find any reference to reversing progress. Was the article edited or something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com