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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#41

Post by Beached »

marricks wrote: post #32
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#43

Post by tomcooks »

javajosh wrote: post #9

Ironic that the content is solely about the server itself. It's a bit like a blog about the libraries and tools used to make the blog.

ironic？ It's the literal raison d'être of the whole website.

It would be remotely similar to what you implied if the website was librariesandtoolstomakeblogs.com

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#44

Post by mro_name »

Beached wrote: post #41
marricks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.

Website Obesity crisis going on and on: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

Was here on HN several times, sadly still the case.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#45

Post by Cpoll »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #26
micromacrofoot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the web would probably be better off if it were

I think so, WordPress that isnt cached to a frozen state on the backend is kind of silly in my eyes, the only exception would be comments, but you could hack around that by using Disqus or something, voila.

> you could hack around that by using Disqus

But that's not actually solving the problem, it's just offloading it. Not to mention that you're selling your community to yet another tracking company, and jacking up user page load time.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#46

Post by louwrentius »

My own battery + solar powered blog [0] is 100% inspired by lowtechmagazine. I am based in The Netherlands and due to my sub optimal location, I have to cheat in the winter by recharging from mains about weekly. I still do get some sun, but nowhere nearly enough to get through the day, let alone the night.

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

And lead acid is also terrible for solar applications because no matter the capacity, recharging is very slow. Even solar could recharge the battery, the slow adsorption rate prevents it from doing so.

Lifepo or similar Chemistry is probably the better choice for a project like this.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#47

Post by simion314 »

marricks wrote: post #32
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

>and bloated with JS crap?

CSS animations too , especially the ones that use infinite.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#48

Post by digitallyfree »

brightball wrote: post #14
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

Fwiw, the top of HN isn’t all that stress. It mostly comes down to disk I/O and efficiency of the language. I’ve been at the top of HN for extended hours a couple of times on just a Heroku hobby dyno with no caching at all, but I had Cloudflare out front absorbing all the traffic that would have come from serving static assets.

I know people who host a static website on a home dsl connection with 5Mbps upload, using Cloudflare. The CDN literally does all the work.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#49

Post by berkes »

DietPi wrote: post #37
widdakay wrote: post #11

I think this also shows how inefficient modern website hosting is. The fact that this person was able to get a raspberry pi to host the #1 website on HN powered by a small 50 watt solar panel is very cool (meaning maybe 10w average power budget), but also shouldn't be as uncommon as it is today. To put this in perspective, a modern server uses 50-100 watts idle doing nothing, and many more under load. To handle the t…

It is not a Raspberry Pi, but an Olimex Olinuxino A20 Lime 2 and a 30W solar panel: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware But yes, web hosting, especially for small/mid traffic websites has become very cheap (in power consumption and in money), especially for static websites where CDNs can be used to serve assets and static content from edge caches. A full x86 server or PC is often total overkill and…

Did the author use a CDN? Because that's kindof cheating: you are just having another (free) service burning the electricity for you.

I assumed the solar server serves the sites directly, because of this. Maybe I was wrong.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#50

Post by mro_name »

Cpoll wrote: post #45
giancarlostoro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so, WordPress that isnt cached to a frozen state on the backend is kind of silly in my eyes, the only exception would be comments, but you could hack around that by using Disqus or something, voila.

> you could hack around that by using Disqus But that's not actually solving the problem, it's just offloading it. Not to mention that you're selling your community to yet another tracking company, and jacking up user page load time.

>> by Disqus or something

depends on what you want, the low end is incoming comments as emails and putting them semi-manually into an iframe on the unchanged static article page. Doing it myself at https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-making-of/ and sacrificed commenter speed.

Others may easily be more sophisticated than above brutalist solution. But still: comments in iframes align well with static sites IMO.

Edit: even better may be to phase in comments from HN or the fediverse or whatever you care about into an iframe. Be it copied or inline and re-styled.

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