
A solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-Tech Magazine - hemmert
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html
======
jws
The author is concerned about the embodied energy cost of a larger battery, so
has a smallish battery which only lasts about a day.

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.

~~~
tunnuz
Thanks for sharing, do you have any pointers for someone who would like to
know more about building a renewable energy rig?

------
Panino
Inspiring! The page looks great and it brings me back to the 1990s web (in a
good way).

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/
    

Then when you're done, check for html errors with

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

~~~
gwbas1c
> 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

The web site is a mirror of a conventionally-hosted web site:
[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/)

I see a lot of links to
[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/) on hacker
news, and there's always a link in the corner of the screen to the solar
server.

~~~
NicoJuicy
\+ as a magazine, downtime gives an SEO penalty.

------
themodelplumber
> Only one weight (regular) of a font is used, demonstrating that content
> hierarchy can be communicated without loading multiple typefaces and
> weights.

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; }

~~~
massivecali
A great graphic design tip for simple websites is stop using additional files.
If you can't do it with a single HTML file, you're adding unnecessary
complexity.

~~~
Pfhreak
Any food beyond soylent is just unnecessary complexity. Any books beyond
reference manuals are just unnecessary complexity. Any interior colors on your
walls other than white is just unnecessary complexity. Any music beyond Bach
is just unnecessary complexity...

Maybe people enjoy aesthetics other than minimalist? Maybe some people enjoy
complex things?

~~~
mattkrause
Bach is, quite literally, famous for being baroque, not minimalist.

------
lucb1e
Regarding image compression: [https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-
howto.html#imag...](https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-
howto.html#image-compression)

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.

~~~
Wildgoose
Just a query - what about the power-saving on the users machines from easier
decompression?

~~~
mistercow
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but JPEG seems to be significantly
easier to decompress than PNG. Probably mostly due to hardware being optimized
for it, but it might also have to do with the way the encoding works.
Decompressing JPEGs mostly relies on doing some relatively fixed operations on
localized 8x8 tiles, while PNG uses DEFLATE with a window size of up to 32KB.

------
mistercow
I'm confused by the choice of image format. Why use dithered grayscale PNGs
for these photos when a full color JPEG at the same bit rate looks a hundred
times better. Are they just sacrificing quality for the sake of a low tech
aesthetic, without regard for actual efficiency?

~~~
cantankerous
The image aesthetic is emulating the appearance of a dot-matrix printer. It's
just a low-tech motif to go with the publication.

~~~
mistercow
That would be all well and good, but the page specifically claims that using
dithered images lowers energy use.

~~~
moron4hire
They may have ran metrics on decoding processing time neé energy usage

~~~
mistercow
I doubt it. The only study I could find on energy usage in image decoding was
this

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7168333](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7168333)

which found JPEG decoding to be much less energy intensive than PNG decoding,
mostly because it's faster. Note that that's not just a function of file size,
as lower quality JPEGs actually took more energy to decode.

Which all makes a lot of sense when you consider how much work has gone into
optimizing frequency domain based compression and decompression.

------
uxp100
There was a comment section with a lot of discussion of this, but it doesn't
appear in the "past" link.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075143)

------
darkmighty
Just for reference, their normally-powered website is also available: (I
prefer despite the solar novelty)

[https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/)

And likewise contains some amazing content.

~~~
vcavallo
Whoa the redesign is beautiful compared to this!

~~~
platz
In contrast to the forcing function of mobile and special constraints, the
additional freedom provided by UX on desktop is simply filled up with sidebars
and ads.

Designers just don't know what to do with the extra space.

Reading any news article at a browser width of greater than 720px is a
disaster. We've forgotten how to design for the desktop.

------
rarecoil
There's a more technical version of the original Low Tech article
available[1]. I've been tracking this project for a while and found it really
inspiring.

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](https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html)

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

------
whatshisface
> _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._

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.

~~~
benj111
"paper processing that no longer happens"

I wish. I've yet to see an actual paperless office. And paperless bills have
just been replaced by the marketing they send you instead.

Unless you're talking about newspapers, you may have a point there.

~~~
icebraining
I haven't touched an office paper since I signed my contract. The fully
paperless office may be a myth, but there's still plenty of paper processing
that no longer happens.

As for the marketing, you can refuse that use of your data, at least if you
live under the aegis of the GDPR.

------
zepearl
Battery, weather and panel status:

[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html)

~~~
hanniabu
What I find interesting about this is that I need to read either entirely in
the yellow or entirely in the blue part. For some reason I can't read where
the divide is.

~~~
zepearl
I think that you're kind of right - I feel that some part of my brain treats
the 2 colors as 2 different chapters.

------
marvindanig
> Why does it go off-line?

> 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...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API)

------
mitchtbaum
> DESIGN SOFTWARE: The website is built with Pelican, a static site generator.
> We have released the source code for ‘solar’, the Pelican theme we developed
> here.

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.

------
Pmop
Low power and very pleasing to read. The Web could be a nicer place if more
websites followed this design.

I personally found the "email to comment" charming.

------
msla
This is a low-tech website:

[https://yarchive.net/](https://yarchive.net/)

It's also more readable than whatever this is.

------
MagicPropmaker
It may have a low footprint, but there’s a lot of high-tech involved to make a
solar powered website work.

~~~
fock
I think the whole website is about appreciating what works with less
ressources (and might ultimately be much simpler). And to achieve this, you
don't necessarily, have to do away with tech (like most people scared by the
idea of less growth typically assume and then start BS about: do you want to
go back to hunting..). I profoundly dislike the idea of using brute-force
subsampling for saving on data though (especially for diagrams) - if you have
information to convey, do it clear and so that it lasts, otherwise skip it.

------
platz
I've always wanted to make very low power micros to do simple sensor/comms
things in fully autonomous remote locations, but I don't know how to make the
solar requirement economical, compared with the cost of the micro.

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

~~~
icebraining
Search for "solar panel usb", you can find 2W models for <$5, or 10W for ~$12.
Add a powerbank and you're set.

~~~
jononor
You even get cheap powerbanks with solar integrated.

------
eggy
I would like to do something like this with ESP8266 chips in a distributed
solar-powered website. It you snag free WiFi you lose the power-hungry router,
but only put it off on the local Starbucks-other-shop-with-free-WiFi.

------
todd3834
Pretty cool, seeing the battery status is pretty cool. I wouldn't do this but
seeing the battery status tempts me to come up with ways to run it down faster
just to test it out. Anyone else think the same thought?

~~~
tyingq
There's a CPU load average and some other stats here:
[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html)

Running the Qualsys SSL server test against the site does appear to raise the
15 minute load average several points, though it's hard to say if it's just it
being on HN doing that by itself.

I assume it would have to be pretty cloudy to affect the charge level.

------
noonespecial
This is a cool, geeky project and I'm not trying to bust on it or be snarky,
but I have to wonder how many continuos watts of power draw it would add to
the world to just host the site on an AWS EC2 nano?

~~~
oceanplexian
I think it's kind of pointless.

Humanity uses more kWh -equivalent of energy in 1 seconds of an airline flight
than everyone who ever has, or ever will use viewing this website. Shit, just
takeoff is something like an equivalent 90 MW or so worth of electricity:
[https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-
many-...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-
kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne)

I think society would be better served by engineers learning and working on
new technologies to extract and use energy, instead of pushing bits around on
a website. Why not get a degree in Nuclear Engineering, or Oil and Gas
Engineering? It would certainly benefit society more than this.

------
mathgladiator
This is super awesome, and this is the kind of thing that makes me long for an
early retirement where I can tweak how I live.

------
wurst_case
Cool. I read a few articles. Definitely bookmarking and returning for more.

------
qbaqbaqba
Could it benefit from using something like IPFS?

------
iknowordidthat
That sure is using a lot of recent modern, low power tech to “question the
belief in technological progress”.

