101–110 of 188 posts
Wonder if they've considered a gravity battery? As an additional benefit it'd let someone local "recharge" the battery manually rather than being 100% tied to the Sun.
I imagine huge weights hanging off the balcony of a Barcelona apartment :)
I am going to guess they are getting a massive surge of traffic about now and yet the site still renders in a fraction of the time it takes most "modern" web apps or even just static content sites - this is how it should be.
Could save an easy 80kB by cutting out Jquery. All it does is the little weather widget, and could be easily written in standard js.
Forecast: today Partly cloudy in the morning and breezy until afternoon. / tomorrow Partly cloudy until afternoon. / day after tomorrow Clear throughout the day.
For that, they pulled in JQuery and made a XMLHTTP request.
And then, at the end, there's one line of useless info - a weather forecast for their server location. Forecast: today Partly cloudy in the morning and breezy until afternoon. / tomorrow Partly cloudy until afternoon. / day after tomorrow Clear throughout the day. For that, they pulled in JQuery and made a XMLHTTP request.
Small sub-cultures, like this one, do experiments all the time in their little corner of the web. Some of the cultures die after a while, and some grow into something else, something bigger, something that starts to percolate on the mainstream surface, albeit possibly only tangental to how it started. I'm not sure I'd predict this movement will grow into something that reaches mainstream tech, but let's say I'm wrong…
"Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system."
IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general.
It's far-fetched, but I can imagine it becoming mainstream if mesh networking becomes popular, or if the Internet were to become a widely self-hosted platform (e.g. people had their own "clouds" running in their homes). In such situations, 100% uptime would no longer be an expectation, so the perceived cost of using an off-the-grid system would be reduced.
Small sub-cultures, like this one, do experiments all the time in their little corner of the web. Some of the cultures die after a while, and some grow into something else, something bigger, something that starts to percolate on the mainstream surface, albeit possibly only tangental to how it started. I'm not sure I'd predict this movement will grow into something that reaches mainstream tech, but let's say I'm wrong…
And then, at the end, there's one line of useless info - a weather forecast for their server location. Forecast: today Partly cloudy in the morning and breezy until afternoon. / tomorrow Partly cloudy until afternoon. / day after tomorrow Clear throughout the day. For that, they pulled in JQuery and made a XMLHTTP request.
If their intent is to lower energy consumption of their server alone, offloading this weather check is the correct choice. But surely requesting+caching that info on their end (by perhaps rebuilding the static site every hour with an updated forecast) would be overall more efficient than having X number of clients request the data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember from over a decade ago there was an annual contest to make the best web page that would fit into 5KB - yes, 5000 bytes. There were many impressive entries. I'd really hoped it would catch on. Sadly, that lightweight concept is now so forgotten that I can't even find it in a quick search. (perhaps someone else can find a pointer?)
https://the5k.org/about.php :)
Seems I'd misremembered it as being more recent than in was, last one in 2002. They apparently 'grew' to 10K, and that site is now 404 also.
At this point, 50K would be a welcome respite from the mountains of cruft that download with every click...
Small sub-cultures, like this one, do experiments all the time in their little corner of the web. Some of the cultures die after a while, and some grow into something else, something bigger, something that starts to percolate on the mainstream surface, albeit possibly only tangental to how it started. I'm not sure I'd predict this movement will grow into something that reaches mainstream tech, but let's say I'm wrong…
You could hook up a raspberry pi to a solar system, weatherproof it, then deploy it in the wild. Add a wireless "router" of some sort, and then you have a mobile broadcasting station.
Imagine a world where such systems are very cheap to build. Also -- imagine that they could be "networked" if they are in range. Finally, imagine hobbyists building out that network for fun. Maybe in neighborhoods, public parks, etc.
Imagine the technology greatly improves and gets even cheaper. These are plastered everywhere, by everyone. They can transmit and receive data very quickly, over reasonably far distances.
Maybe it becomes an off-grid anarchist internet. :)