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We are now Solar Powered

andrewjvpowell.com

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#31
post #16

> But you can never get around 600~ms pings and limited data allowance ... I'm not sure how that sentence is meant to be parsed, but the NBN Sky Muster Plus packages include unlimited downlink traffic (for everything except streaming video), though of course you're always stuck with satellite latency at ~ 600ms to domestic services ... at least until Starlink saves us all. Though the Starlink phased arrays apparently…

That IS true about Skymuster Plus. It wasn't true when I first set up this mobile/solar internet solution and back then I had to save every gigabyte; admittedly I forgot to mention that in the article. Still, yeah, not much can be done about the ping. I do have hope for Starlink.

Fairy nuff. I only discovered the SMP plans about 8 months ago, but evidently they've been around since ~ 2019-08. Not hugely well advertised to existing customers, unfortunately.

I'm barely hitting 1GB / month of metered content (but doing 300-600gb of unmetered) which is a huge improvement over the similar-priced satellite plans from SkyMesh for 70/70 (peak & off peak) plans, which involved regular usage checks and much fretting over bandwidth utilisation.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#32

A webpage, hosted on a Raspberry Pie, still reachable after mentioned on HN #4. Quite impressive, why do we need CDN again?

My own blog - running on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi 3b+ was also hugged by HN, but it didn't even sweat. [0]

[0]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po...

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#33
Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor.

The refridgerator literally has directly observable physical effects on the world - chilled wine! - and yet it uses less power than a device doing symbolic operations all day.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#34

Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor. The refridgerator literally has…

Your computer heats air, which is a observable physical effect, though an unintended one ;)

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#35

Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor. The refridgerator literally has…

If you don't need all of the speed, I'd recommend disabling power boost. My i9 laptop averages ~10-15W with it disabled, compared to the ~20W my fridge uses. Even when maxed out CPU it's only ~40W, compared to ~100W with power boost enabled. That's more than double the power despite only being a modest speed increase!

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#36

Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor. The refridgerator literally has…

I'm notionally on-grid, but DTE's reliability this summer has been so poor, I've had a lot of time on generator and battery to contemplate such things.

Sooooo, this is is one reason I'm trying to move all the crap I host on my Synology, to a Ras Pi with an SSD, so I can shut down the spinning-rust most of the time. If I don't need to bother with a BackUPS because everything I care about runs off an 18650 for several hours, that means I can keep sleeping when the generator runs out of fuel and just restart it whenever my lazy bones want to roll out of bed.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#37
post #34

Not directly related to solar-powered-servers, but rather power-involved-in-computing ... I have a solar powered van (not the engine, alas), and it has been amazing to understand how a day of my kind of computing (edit/compile/debug cycle with C++) uses more power than the 12VDC refridgerator in the van. The computer is a small custom built direct-to-12VDC miniITX with an i5 processor. The refridgerator literally has…

Your computer heats air, which is a observable physical effect, though an unintended one ;)

In winter it could be an intended effect.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#38
post #2

What caught my attention the most was the usage of 1-bit images. Clever restrain of resource usage, and interesting in its own right.

It reminded me of the images on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com For example https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/dithers/Garthsnaid_-_SLV_H...

This photo kind of looks like a halftone printing scan to me. In case that it actually isn't, maybe that was just the intention.

Re: We are now Solar Powered

#39

> Indeed, as mentioned earlier, these common internet ports are blocked off at ISP level, so no amount of port forwarding in the router will expose our little web server to the internet. I'd try to work around that limitation using tor: https://golb.hplar.ch/2019/01/expose-server-tor.html Clients will have to use tor too, but it could be used to complement instead of replacing the current solution.

You could do that, but it would add a lot of latency, and I thought that's what the author was trying to avoid.
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