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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to be contrary, but if your site is largely static and you're fronting it with Cloudfare, then you're essentially saying Cloudfare can handle load. Not much revelation there, right?

Cloudflare really doesn't make much of a difference for HN. The last front page traffic I saw (~a week ago?) was still at most a handful of QPS. Any nginx instance with default configuration serving static files from any modern computer should be able to handle that (given that your link is big enough).

Now if you reach the top of a large subreddit, or have a viral tweet with a link to you, that's a different order of magnitude. HN is just not that large.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#152
post #72

This is a fascinating site beyond the power indicator. For example, a recent article discusses low-tech solar panels: > ... To start with, ever since the 1950s, solar panels have been unfit for recycling, resulting in a waste stream that ends up in landfills. This waste stream will grow significantly during the coming years. Solar panels are discarded only after at least 25 to 30 years, and most have been installed o…

How is PV unfit for recycling? It’s pure silicon, with something like Boron on it. Losslessly recycling might be challenge, but you could definitely reuse all the Silicon and remake another panel. Which toxic elements do you mean? What’s the fire hazard?

While solar cells might be almost pure silicon, the panels themselves use a lot more materials to work. For example, 2% of all global copper production was just for panels 2018. The frames and the cells both use aluminum (the actual most abundant material overall). Silver, the most expensive component, has been pushed from about 400mg per panel in 2007 to about 100mg per panel today.[0]

Each solar panel contains about 14mg of lead which means around 4.4k tons were used in the production of solar panels in 2018.[1] This is much smaller than, say batteries (which solar panels drive a huge demand for), but is still significant considering lead has been found to leak into the environment from solar panels even from regular rainfall.[2]

In 2017, a study found that as much as 62% of the cadmium from cadmium telluride models were leached out at room temperature depending mostly on acidity of the solutions.[3]

"Even only one day of leaching of two module pieces in 1 day of acid rain and neutral solution is sufficient to exceed the World Health Organization (WHO) drinking water limit: for Cd the threshold limit is 3 µg=L.33) Even under alkaline conditions (pH 11), it takes only three days to exceed this limit. After nearly one year, the Cd concentration cCd in acidic solutions is almost 20000 µg=L (62%)" [4]

[0] https://www.freeingenergy.com/do-we-have-enough-materials-to... [1] https://www.freeingenergy.com/are-solar-panels-really-full-o... [2] https://www.zmescience.com/science/solar-panels-lead-plants-... [3] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.7567/JJAP.56.08MD02/me... [4] https://sci-hub.se/https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.756...

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full blown framework l…

What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?

Bootstrap is unfashionable?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#155
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This doesn't make sense to me. Surely you can reach a sufficient rate by adding more lead-acid cells in parallel? You're kind of forced to do this anyways since they don't like being discharged below 50% of their act…

You want to top off lead acid with constant voltage to prevent gucking. It is time bound not power bound. https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-403-charging-lead-a...

This is exactly the problem.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#156
post #107
post #42

ICANN should make a .solar extension with the caveat that you have to provide evidence yearly that all IPs mapped by the domain were running on solar power

That ... is actually an awesome idea! The condition for getting a domain name should be to have a public consumption and battery status page.

Which anybody could fake - literally pointless tld. What business could benefit from this?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#157

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 see a fair amount of stories here where the endpoint appears to be a VPS, sometimes fronted by a CDN. It's hard to say exactly how efficient that is, since configurations vary, but it's likely pretty good. Sure, there's hungry servers under there, but the multi-tenancy spreads that out.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full blown framework l…

do you know the matrix movie quote "but there is no spoon" – maybe the framework you look for is vanilla CSS. Write sensible markup to hold your content (almost no divs), CSS it and be good. Sounds that feasible?

> ... vanilla CSS... Sounds that feasible?

Vanilla CSS is the other end of the spectrum, but the problem is there is apparently nothing between hand-crafted CSS and a full front-end framework. People, like me, who are not good at design will choose the convenience of the latter over going through the tedium of the former, even if we don't really want to.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#159

> 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.

AT&T offers fiber on the other side of the road. How is this government regulation?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guilty of this, and I feel bad for it. I am not a front end developer, but I have built a few web sites for various projects here and there. I certainly don't NEED to use a front-end framework, but I don't want have to spend a ton of time crafting CSS rules and figuing out how many divs to nest. To get something done quickly, my choices pretty much boil down to plain, unstyled, pages, or a full blown framework l…

What's your opinion about bootstrap? Unfashionable I get it, but doesn't it serve the purpose?

It's been a long time since I looked at Bootstrap. I don't remember it being anywhere near as easy to create a nice-looking page with it as it is with Vuetify.
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