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Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

100r.co

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Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#31
post #22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on almost any hardware or underlying tech stack you can scrounge together? The only thing they'd be really against is designing new hardware to run Uxn "natively," which would seem to push you exclusively to reuse what you have.

100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO. It's a good firs…

The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy.

Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#32
post #21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications. They can be repaired seemingly indefinit…

- gopher browser -> gopher://magical.fish as a portal - HN can be read at gopher://hngopher.com - irc -> bitlbee.org to chat with anyone, even IRC with TLS itself. Kirc will run on any potato. - a high end 486 it's needed to play MP3's. Either that or burn your favourites into CD's. - sc-im+gnuplot/emacs' ses+gnulot - srln+slrnpull - telescope/sacc can do gopher fine. gemini can be stalled. - sfeed+links to read news…

Yes 100%! Some other regular HTTP sites that run great on old hardware are:

* http://theoldnet.com/

* http://68k.news/

* http://weather.maniac.com/

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#34
post #31
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO. It's a good firs…

The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy. Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to…

You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM.

As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM.

(Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.)

What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the wreckage of the drone that killed your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips.

In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it.

In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers. That seems likely to remain true even after the PRC invades Taiwan in a few years.

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#35
post #26
post #25

This is a fascinating website which I look forward to exploring a bit more, along with the authors personal sites. Are there any other off-grid low-tech sites/projects/sites like this? I remember another interesting site that was being run off solar posted here on HN that went down when the batteries went out.

I believe you're thinking of Low Tech Magazine[1] 1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Yes that’s the one, thanks

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#36

Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument. https://100r.co/site/orca.html I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: https://www.youtube.com/…

Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a larger grid with representative images in place of single char glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward — you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfect sense when I wrote it takes just as many lookups to read later. This probably gets easier over time, but I still think it's a cool design opportunity.

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#37
Related:

Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131181 - Aug 2024 (488 comments)

Gimballed Stove - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733829 - March 2024 (12 comments)

Weathering Software Winter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654 - Jan 2023 (28 comments)

Internet in Paradise (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080305 - July 2022 (18 comments)

Artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410838 - May 2022 (1 comment)

Off the Grid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031472 - Jan 2022 (118 comments)

Busy Doing Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26760803 - April 2021 (6 comments)

Working Off-Grid Efficiently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723819 - Jan 2021 (142 comments)

North Pacific Logbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489257 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)

(I omitted threads about their software projects, even though those are super interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#38

Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument. https://100r.co/site/orca.html I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: https://www.youtube.com/…

Oh this is the same group behind ORCA? I should read up on them more if they have multiple projects like this

Re: Hundred Rabbits – Low-tech living while sailing the world

#40
post #20
post #4

Does anyone know if they're able to support themselves purely on donations via Patreon, etc., or if they need to do contract work, too?

I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in…

ahhh, thanks for that, that really identifies the elephant I've always felt lurking in the room every time I hear about these people.
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