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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

331–340 of 365 posts

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#331
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I’m not so convinced that the relationship is direct - Usage is going up and power efficiency is also going up, but I’m not convinced the two are necessarily linked. I spend roughly the same amount of time at the computer as I did 20 years ago, but my old desktop PC and CRT monitor was certainly not as power efficient as my (bigger) current monitor and Mac mini.

"I spend roughly the same amount of time..." the paradox works if you define usage as energy consumption, not time spent. 20 years ago, you were not streaming 1080p videos or downloading 50 GB video games. Even kids do that on a regular basis now and a bigger share of the population worldwide has access to similar services

No, but I was torrenting those movies to my seedbox which was on 24/7.

IMO I don’t think usage scales to power consumption - this sounds like correlation vs causation to me. It sounds like use has also increased while efficiency has increased, not one because of the other (ie I would personally still be streaming the same number of movies if my AppleTV used twice the power, and if they release a new version that doubles the energy efficiency that won’t cause me to watch more)

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#332
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is...

> A website that goes off-line in evening could be an interesting option for a local online publication with low anticipated traffic after midnight. However, since Low-tech Magazine’s readership is almost equally divided between Europe and the USA this is not an attractive option. If the website goes down every night, our American readers could only access it during the morning.

What about putting a mirror on each continent, and adjusting DNS to pick the one that has solar power at the moment? It could even work at higher levels of granularity.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be interesting to know what you actually are doing! Thoughts and Prayers, etc

Oh, actually, just browsing to kill time while watching the open browser window at the side refresh on the NHS booking site hoping it will work long enough to give me a booster jab appointment. It alternates between "you are in a queue ten minutes to go" and "our site is overloaded please try later" for about two hours now. Everyone else between the ages of 18-50 in the UK is basically doing the same thing, hammering…

Ah, I thought you were working on the NHS IT systems!

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#334
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar deja vu because just few days ago I posted a comment asking similar tech: > Other than raspberry pi, does anyone know of an even lower powered board which can run a very simply web server (only needs to return a single html file)? I have an idea for a fun hobby project where I want to connect my echo bike (for cardio) to the board which charges it everyday and returns an html with how much I charged i…

I ran a webserver of sorts on an STM32F767, a python one of all things. 200mA looks like about par for the course, ethernet and all.

What's the supply voltage? Do you have a breakdown of which parts of the board consume how much? I feel like one should be able to use way less than that, but there are plenty of ways to waste power on a board that isn't designed to be battery powered.

One project I've been thinking about recently (if I only I could find the time..) is to build a tiny server around a microcontroller coupled to a small NiMH pack (just standard AA/AAA rechargeable cells) and a small solar panel, running by the (not particularly well lit) window of my home office.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#335

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?

How about Tailwind?

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#336
I really like the concept of this website, a clutter free website that running on a solar-powered server. The UI also makes me enjoy browsing and reading page after page on this website. I don't even need Firefox's reader view, something I almost certainly use whenever I read a blog/news site. Granted, that something must be sacrificed by selecting a solar-powered server, like uptime and they seem to be deliberately not using a full colored images, maybe to save the processing power of their server. But, IMO, it doesn't diminish the enjoyment of reading the website. Good job !!

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of competition is due to regulatory capture. Local governments often disallow competition in the ISP space.

And the regulations are captured by the companies who much prefer no competition. So we’re screwed by BOTH the corporations and the government. We need new laws, and smaller companies.

> We need new laws

We need fewer laws.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why technology is brilliant. It allows us to do much much more with the same resources. We should want more technological innovation. But that's not what happens in practice. There is this paradox, the name of which I forget, which says that the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we is it in absolute terms. We never really freed up any leisure time when we introduced household appliances or when p…

"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It is interesting they consider it a paradox. When the demand curves show it. As making something more efficient moves the supply curve around (and moves where MR=MC is). Or in econ 250 class speak 'shift the supply curve right'. I think the 'paradox' comes in where they do not consider there is more demand on the other side of lower prices? Not all goods goto infinity on cost vs demand curve. But some sure act like it.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#340

*located in Barcelona* I hugely admire this website and the tech/philosophy behind it. So much so that I decided to build one myself. But here's the problem: I live in Yorkshire (UK) where good weather usually means a thinner layer of cloud cover. I tried, I really did, but I'm not about to move to Spain :) Long may this project continue (while I dream of more sun).

It is very gray today, maybe we should do wind power up ere'
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