Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 365 posts

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#161

Post by louwrentius »

pengaru wrote: post #70
louwrentius wrote: post #46

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 ap…

> 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…

I actually run quite a few of them in parallel, but that doesn't solve the problem:

As the other person stated: charging lead acid is time constrained. And that means that you can't fully charge the battery within the time period when you have sun.

Lead acid deteriorates quickly if left (partially) discharged. This is why lead acid works so well with cars (almost always fully charged at all times).

Depleted lead acid (50% charge) needs to be recharged within 24 or serious damage will occur, accumulating over time. A week of bad weather may thus be hard on battery longevity.

Some more info:

[x]: https://louwrentius.com/a-practical-understanding-of-lead-ac...

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#162

Post by Beefin »

callamdelaney wrote: post #156
messo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

encouraging innovation, dont be so negative

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#164

Post by mro_name »

throwaway11602 wrote: post #158
mro_name wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You won't be a sculptor if you avoid the chisel. If in rome, do as the romans do. If you want to swim, you'll get wet.

There is no design in/for the web without html+css, is there?

Edit: by removing 3rd parties from your project you remove a lot of overhead and current and future risk. But be warned: Maybe your company sells exactly that for a good margin and you ruin the business model.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#165

Post by LtdJorge »

MayeulC wrote: post #81
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point was that "ready and waiting" is valuable to the end customer, even if it only makes a different later when they are doing something. It's kind-of like how firemen are valuable even when they are not getting calls, because they are available for low latency response instead of busy doing something else. The idea that this is just wasted computation is therefore somewhat disingenuous.

Oh, but it could be improved. Linux can cold boot under 300ms (easier if you control the BIOS and can tune it for speed, like coreboot can), faster if resuming from RAM. That should allow you to perform load-balancing while powering off the extra capacity (using wake-on-lan). If load becomes too important for the SBC or close to capacity, wake the server, and perform a handover once it's up. You can either hold the p…

Modern CPUs go to lower power states super quickly and draw almost nothing. The thing is, if the server is running many VMs, there's no way it's going to a low power state, eveb if some are doing nothing (others will be). You also have 10 jet engines blowing air at the front, which probably is more than the CPU uses when both are idle.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#166

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

tazjin wrote: post #151
unclebucknasty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Then why do people talk about the "HN hug of death"?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#167

Post by lucb1e »

okareaman wrote: post #116

How would I even host a website at home? 20 years ago I knew how to get a fixed IP from my local ISP but I don't know how to do that anymore.

Give them a call? Or switch ISP if yours doesn't allow it. Otherwise you need a relay service, at which point you might as well host with them directly.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#168

Post by obblekk »

*Technically*, this is very cool, impressive, and generally an elegant work of art.

*Pragmatically*, I see 2 flaws in their thesis (as explained on the about page):

>> "The entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production with traffic doubling roughly every 2 years"

I think the implication is electricity consumption will also double roughly every 2 years, but Moore's law actually operates on approx. same timeline, so traffic can continue doubling at this rate without an increase in energy consumption. *This is why technology is brilliant.* It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation.

>> " These black-and-white images are then coloured according to the pertaining content category via the browser’s native image manipulation capacities"

This essentially shifts some of the burden of computation from the server (PNG compression) to the browser (dithering interpretation). This may save some energy, or it may increase energy as most personal computer processors are much less efficient than server processors, and don't benefit from energy savings from caching. I'm not sure where it nets out, but just solely focusing on reducing server compute time isn't necessarily a path toward sustainability if it shifts more computation to the client.

Very happy to hear if I've misinterpreted the thesis. Again, I commend the technical work itself.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#169

Post by cure »

driverdan wrote: post #124
java-man wrote: post #100

> 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.

Riiiiight.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with a complete lack of competition (cf. how in communities where Google Fiber showed up, the incumbents were suddenly quite capable of getting gigabit fiber to households, and for a price that was competitive with Google Fiber, and a fraction of the price they were charging for inferior service before Google Fiber's arrival).

I'm sure it also has nothing to do with the billions upon billions of subsidies AT&T and Verizon have received to build out broadband and make it available everywhere, which they pocketed and then didn't deliver on. Cf. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

If you really want to blame it on government, do it the right way: the government has not been keeping AT&T and the other giant telcos accountable for effectively stealing all those subsidies, and it has not enforced competition at the local level. Regulatory capture, and all that.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#170

Post by 41b696ef1113 »

MayeulC wrote: post #97

As another commenter pointed out, Lead-Acid batteries are terrible for this. They are fine for backup power supplies that you don't expect to actually use more than a couple of times a year, but discharging them too much will completely kill them, and even if you keep a margin and discharge them to only 30%, the number of cycles is quite limited (1500 to 3000 cycles quoted in [1] seems a bit optimistic, probably depe…

Technology Connections[0] did an episode where he talked through some of the science behind why lead acid batteries work poorly for the task. He used a marine deep cycle battery as a compromise solution.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4dUt1yK0g

Post reply on HN