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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

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Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#171
post #62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger. Seems kind of small if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? I've got a 500 gallon propane tank for domestic use (stove, waterheater, fireplace) and another 500 gallon tank for my generator. The internet says a 500 gallon tank at 80% full (max…

> Seems kind of small it's not uncommon to have .. 210kg LPG bulk cylinders .. and larger. Nearly five standard 45kg household tanks is the smallest capacity fixed installation bulk tank supplied by one local gas company. The option to rent larger tanks on a long term contract exists. > if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? Many rural locations here have regular deliveries .. the milk gets picked up ever…

750kg (500 gal) is the smallest you can get around here.

A house backup generator uses something like 3kg of propane per hour idle, so that tank will keep your fridge on for ~ 10 days. Our area (outskirts of Silicon Valley) saw 20-30 day power outages with essentially no sun that year. The weather is rapidly worsening due to climate change, but they are also hardening the infrastructure.

Now, with a battery + backup generator + wood stove, you only need to run the generator to charge the house batteries. Assume a duty cycle of a few hours of optimal efficiency generator per day, wood heating, and you can easily exceed the 30 day target. At that point the sun should be out, at least here in California, or at least the roads will be open enough to let the propane supply chain adapt to the demand.

For the EV route, buy a truck or SUV with vehicle to home support, and a house battery that can charge off the vehicle. The truck has 2-4x a house battery in it. This plan assumes there’s a fast charger in town (ideally near the grocery store), and it’s under ~ 100 miles round trip.

Edit: I’ll add local pricing: A used >= 100 kwh ev is about $30K. The generator + permits + tank is > $20k.

With the ev route, you also get a nice car.

I didn’t price out generator + 2000 gallons of propane storage. It’d guess it’s about $30k.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#172
post #40

One way to get to this is to start with almost-'94 HTML: Some Topic Some Topic Information goes here. Information goes here. Information goes here. Then add a little non-'94 CSS styling. If you decide to add an off-the-shelf wad of CSS, like Pico.css, consider hosting it alongside your HTML (rather than turning it into another third-party dependency and CDN cross-site surveillance tracker). Minified, and single-reque…

HTML5 boilerplate: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/src/inde...

Now that's a template I haven't seen in a long time! Thanks for the fun trip down memory lane that "started it all".

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#173

Some things you don't know people need until you're directly affected. For me, it was an injury related light sensitivity that made me realise dark mode isn't just a frivolous addition for looks

May I interest you in my doctorsensei.com/how-to-get-off-the-internet.html page?

tl;dr Use dark mode and set f.lux (or the equivalent) to Cave Painting. Helped me out a lot

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#174
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.

We could use markdown.

It's a crying shame that a browser can't fetch a plain vanilla goodstuff.md file and display it natively.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#175

Several news sites offer text only versions. https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://wttr.in/ More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.

I view every website as text-only

I can reformat the text any way I like

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#176
post #97

Giving weather fenomenons a human name is the silliest thing humanity have invented.

On the contrary, it helps underscore a storm's significance and allow for memetic spreading of information around the storm. You obviously didn't grow up in a hurricane-prone area.

Likewise, we've always liked to "name things". My personal desktop is named "Foundation" (first built PC) and my car is named "Big Boi" (first adult purchase). Generic names are fine for operational equipment, but no one wants to refer to natural disasters as "HURR-2026-EC02". That's why COVID is "COVID" instead of "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2".

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#177
There is a movement supporting small websites. The links below may inspire those interested in text or small websites.

https://no-html.club/

https://no-js.club/

https://nocss.club/

https://1kb.club/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231208000921/https://10kbclub....

https://250kb.club/

https://512kb.club/

https://1mb.club/

I find that the sites designed around being small are usually nice to read since the effort is put in the content not the layout.

Additionally a lot of great sites can be found through something like https://wiby.me/ or different protocols like gopher or gemini.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#178

Interesting. For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2]. In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpos…

I mean I regularly read the news and I didn’t know CNN has a lite version

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#179

I now use a text only CLI utility to read the BBC news. It is (for me) a greatly improved experience.[1] 1. https://github.com/hako/bbcli

This is a really cool tool! And, not to diminish the work put into this tool...but at a glance at the code, it appears to be a specific RSS reader for the BBC (see: https://github.com/hako/bbcli/blob/709c6417c8dc4ffd4f7d5f5b4...)...so if i'm correct, why not simply use a cli-based RSS reader....so can review other sources beyond BBC? Again, not trying to diminsh the goodness here...But that, a more general tool might be just as good, and a bit more flexible, eh? :-)

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#180
Yeah, you don't get one. The purpose of modern web development is to make sure the developer is intellectually satisfied in over-engineering something that should be relatively simple, justifying their pet projects. If any useful work gets done, that's a side-effect and most of times an accident. (Just try to use StateFarm's website as a great example).
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