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Comment by 85392_school | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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