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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

121–130 of 365 posts

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#121
post #83
post #39

Small technical nit: I love the dithered images and the retro feel, but their CSS should specify `image-rendering: pixelated` to make sure browsers don't interpolate the pixels.

Whoa, TIL. It actually makes quite a big difference. Nevertheless I don't actually think being pixelated is much of a stylistic choice. Here [1] they explain how they use dithering to minimise their bandwidth and computational costs. [1] - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low...

Except dithering is not great for modern compression algorithms, making the endeavour mostly performative.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#122
post #25

> This was caused by a software upgrade of the Linux kernel, which increased the average power use of the server from 1.19 to 1.49 watts I wonder what change in the linux kernel caused the increased load. Someone out there is responsible for this crime!

This is an area where Apple is way ahead of everyone else. A code change that increases power usage 25% wouldn’t make it past CI at Apple.

[citation needed]

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#123
post #74

Semi-related —- does anyone have recommendations for where to find small hobbyist solar panels and/or kits to experiment with for small devices like a Pi? Also curious about how a setup like this compares with using a traditional electricity source in terms of cost per hr of running the site off of solar with batteries. What is the break even point against utility costs over there(if there is one)? And are there any…

Unless you don't have the space there's no reason to go smaller than a 100W panel. You can find them used for $50 or less. For smaller panels the cost per watt goes up enough that it ends up costing the same for less output.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#124

> This connection is a 100mbit consumer fiber connection with a static IP-adress. Yikes! And me here in Palo Alto, in the middle of the silicon Valley, cannot get any fiber because of AT&T.

It's not because of AT&T, it's because of government regulation.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

For the user's benefit, or for the dev's?

Or the advertises/whatever assholes profit of “engagement”?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#126

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…

Yeah not like the requirements have changed at all........

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

I don't want my browser to be loading entire JS frameworks and trackers and whatever other crap just to read a bunch of text. That's absolutely nonsensical

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#128

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…

You're not alone in feeling this way

https://handmade.network/manifesto

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#129

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…

We waste so many resources customizing each response to time and observer and it’s just nuts. Most people aren’t going to notice if a calculation is being debounced, amortizing it over hundreds of seconds or requests. Instant gratification is the most expensive thing by far. And debouncing has such a profound effect similar to load shedding for traffic bursts, it really should be front and center in the literature.

When I was young I worked on a project that was so inefficient that I was professionally embarrassed to have my name associated with it. So I moved heaven and earth to fix it. Gave myself an RSI before I learned to better automate some transformations.

Today I’m also working on another, lesser embarrassment, but I’m not working weekends and holidays on it anymore. I’m not a hero surrounded by villains, I’m an observant person drowning in a sea of apathetic faces.

The amount of hardware we have per user request should have gotten someone fired. Most of the people responsible are gone, but one is still here complecting anything that isn’t nailed down, and few others know enough to realize that the reason they don’t feel confident in the code is because someone intentionally made it that way, and you should not be looking up to those people. They are literally making you dumber.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of sites don't need to be dynamic though.

[citation needed] Websites have become significantly more complex in the last two decades.

Let’s look at Twitter for a real-world example. The core concept of it hasn’t changed, it still just has to display a blurb of a few hundred characters at most. Back in the day this was achieved by server-side-rendered HTML and a simple form POST. I don’t have the numbers for the page back then but I’d estimate it at 100KB - nowadays it’s a multi-megabyte-sized pile of shit that often fails at its primary purpose of displaying a block of text with a stupid “something went wrong” message or endless spinner.

The “new” Reddit is also a good example. Even ignoring all the user-hostile functionality changes, the actual experience is still slower and less reliable.

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