davideisinger.com

solar-lowtechmagazine-com-vj7kk5.txt (208072B)

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 [1]
 
 [2]LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
 
 [3]This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline
 
   • [4]English
   • [5]Français
   • [6]Deutsch
   • [7]Nederlands
   • [8]Español
   • [9]Italiano
   • [10]Português
   • [11]Polski
   • [12]العربية
   • [13]Tiếng Việt
   • [14]한국어
 
 Menu
 
   • [15] About
   • [16] Low-tech Solutions
   • [17] High-tech Problems
   • [18] Obsolete Technology
   • [19] Read the Magazine Off-line
   • [20] Archive
   • [21] Donate
   • [22] NTM
   • [23] [24]
 
 About the Solar Powered Website
 
 This website is solar-powered and self-hosted. It has been designed to
 radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
 
 Translations [25]fr [26]de [27]nl [28]es
 The solar powered server that runs this website.
 The solar powered server that runs this website.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 Last update: April 22, 2022
 
 Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress, and
 highlights the potential of past knowledge and technologies for designing a
 sustainable society. Because a web redesign was long overdue – and because we
 try to practice what we preach – we decided to build a low-tech website that
 meets our needs and abides by our principles.
 
 To reduce energy use, we opted for a back to basics web design, using a static
 site instead of a database driven content management system. We further apply
 default typefaces, dithered images, off-line reading options, and other tricks
 to lower energy use far below that of the average website. In addition, the low
 resource requirements and open design help to keep the blog accessible for
 visitors with older computers and/or less reliable Internet connections.
 
 Because it uses so little energy, this website can be run on a mini-computer
 with the processing power of a mobile phone. It needs 1 to 2.5 watts of power,
 which is supplied by a small, off-grid solar PV system on the balcony of the
 author’s home. Typical for off-the-grid renewable power systems, energy storage
 is limited. This means that the website will go off-line during longer periods
 of cloudy weather.
 
 [29]Why a low-tech website?
 
 [30]Why does it go off-line?
 
 [31]How often is it off-line?
 
 [32]When is the best time to visit?
 
 [33]How is the website designed?
 
 [34]Which hardware and software do you use?
 
 [35]What happens to the old website?
 
 [36]Who made this?
 
 [37]Can I help?
 
 [38]Comments
 
 [39]The solar powered website in the media
 
 Why a low-tech website?
 
 We were told that the Internet would [40]“dematerialise” society and decrease
 energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a large and rapidly
 growing consumer of energy itself. According to the latest estimates, the
 entire network already consumes [41]10% of global electricity production, with
 data traffic doubling roughly every two years.
 
 In order to offset the negative consequences associated with high energy
 consumption, renewable energy has been proposed as a means to lower emissions
 from powering data centers. For example, Greenpeace’s yearly [42]ClickClean
 report ranks major Internet companies based on their use of renewable power
 sources.
 
 However, running data centers on renewable power sources is not enough to
 address the growing energy use of the Internet. To start with, the Internet
 already uses three times more energy than all wind and solar power sources
 worldwide can provide. Furthermore, [43]manufacturing, and regularly replacing,
 renewable power plants also requires energy, meaning that if data traffic keeps
 growing, so will the use of fossil fuels.
 
 Finally, solar and wind power are not always available, which means that an
 Internet running on renewable power sources would require infrastructure for
 energy storage and/or transmission that is also [44]dependent on fossil fuels
 for its manufacture and replacement. Powering websites with renewable energy is
 not a bad idea. However, the trend towards growing energy use must also be
 addressed.
 
 Websites are getting “fatter”
 
 The growing energy use of the Internet is associated with two trends. First,
 content is becoming increasingly resource-intensive. This has a lot to do with
 the growing importance of video, but a similar trend can be observed among
 websites.
 
 The [45]size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the
 500,000 most popular websites) increased from 0.45 megabytes in 2010 to 1.7
 megabytes in June 2018. For mobile websites, the average “page weight” rose
 tenfold from 0.15 MB in 2011 to 1.6 MB in 2018. Using different measurement
 methods, other sources report average page sizes of up to 2.9 MB in 2018.
 
     The size of the average web page increased at least threefold from 2010 to
     2018.
 
 The growth in data traffic [46]surpasses the advances in energy efficiency (the
 energy required to transfer 1 megabyte of data over the Internet), resulting in
 more and more energy use.
 
 Over and above this, “heavier” or “larger” websites not only increase energy
 use in the network infrastructure, but they also shorten the lifetime of
 computers – larger websites require more powerful computers to access them.
 This means that more computers need to be manufactured, which is a [47]very
 energy-intensive process.
 
 Always online
 
 A second reason for growing Internet energy consumption is that we spend more
 and more time on-line. Before the arrival of portable computing devices and
 wireless network access, we were only connected to the network when we had
 access to a desktop computer in the office, at home, or in the library. We now
 live in a world in which no matter where we are, we are always on-line,
 including, at times, via more than one device simultaneously.
 
     Continuous network access doesn’t combine well with renewable energy
     sources such as wind and solar power, which are not always available.
 
 “Always-on” Internet access is accompanied by a cloud computing model –
 allowing more energy efficient user devices at the expense of increased energy
 use in data centers. Increasingly, activities that could perfectly happen
 off-line – such as writing a document, filling in a spreadsheet, or storing
 data – are now requiring continuous network access. This does not combine well
 with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, which are not
 always available.
 
 Addressing both issues
 
 Our new web design addresses both these issues. Thanks to a low-tech web
 design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of
 five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more
 attractive. Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in
 words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line
 during longer periods of cloudy weather.
 
 The 50W and 30W solar PV panels on the balcony. One is powering the website,
 the other is powering the lights in the living room. Image by Marie Verdeil.
 The 50W and 30W solar PV panels on the balcony. One is powering the website,
 the other is powering the lights in the living room. Image by Marie Verdeil.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 How is the website designed?
 
 The Internet is not an autonomous being. Its growing energy use is the [48]
 consequence of actual decisions made by software developers, web designers,
 marketing departments, publishers and internet users. With a lightweight,
 off-grid solar-powered website, we want to show that other decisions can be
 made.
 
     The average page size of this website is below 0.5 MB – roughly a sixth of
     the average page size of the original website
 
 With about 100 articles online, the average page weight on the solar powered
 website is now below 0.5 MB – roughly a fifth of the average page size of the
 previous design, and less than three times the average page size of the 500,000
 most popular blogs in June 2018. The page weight for each article on this
 website is shown in the lower left corner of the screen.
 
 Below are some of the design decisions we made to reduce energy use. We have
 published a [49]separate document that focuses on the front-end efforts, and
 one [50]that focuses on the back-end. We have also [51]released the source code
 for our website design.
 
 Static Site Generator
 
 One of the fundamental choices we made was to build a static website. Most of
 today’s websites use server side programming languages that generate the
 website on the fly by querying a database. This means that every time someone
 visits a web page, it is generated on demand.
 
 On the other hand, a static website is [52]generated once and exists as a
 simple set of documents on the server’s hard disc. It’s always there – not just
 when someone visits the page. Static websites are thus based on file storage
 whereas dynamic websites depend on recurrent computation. Static websites
 consequently require less processing power and thus less energy.
 
     A static website requires less processing power because it is not dependent
     on recurrent computation
 
 The choice for a static site enables the possibility of serving the site in an
 economic manner from our home office in Barcelona. Doing the same with a
 database-driven website would be nearly impossible, because it would require
 too much energy. It would also be a big security risk. Although a web server
 with a static site can be hacked, there are significantly less attack routes
 and the damage is more easily repaired.
 
 Dithered Images
 
 The main challenge was to reduce page size without making the website less
 attractive. Because images take up most of the bandwidth, it would be easy to
 obtain very small page sizes and lower energy use by eliminating images,
 reducing their number, or making them much smaller. However, visuals are an
 important part of Low-tech Magazine’s appeal, and the website would not be the
 same without them.
 
     By dithering, we can make images ten times less resource-intensive, even
     though they are displayed much larger than on the old website.
 
 Instead, we chose to apply an obsolete image compression technique called
 “dithering”. The number of colours in an image, combined with its file format
 and resolution, contributes to the size of an image. Thus, instead of using
 full-colour high-resolution images, we chose to convert all images to black and
 white, with four levels of grey in-between. These black-and-white images are
 then coloured according to the pertaining content category via the browser’s
 native image manipulation capacities.
 
 The solar powered server in its new housing, screwed against the wall in the
 living room. The battery is in front. The solar charge controller below the
 laptop powers the lights in the room. Image by Marie Verdeil.
 The solar powered server in its new housing, screwed against the wall in the
 living room. The battery is in front. The solar charge controller below the
 laptop powers the lights in the room. Image by Marie Verdeil.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 Compressed through this dithering plugin, images featured in the articles add
 much less load to the content: compared to the old website, the images are
 roughly ten times less resource-intensive.
 
 Default typeface / No logo
 
 All resources loaded, including typefaces and logos, are an additional request
 to the server, requiring storage space and energy use. Therefore, our new
 website does not load a custom typeface and removes the font-family
 declaration, meaning that visitors will see the default typeface of their
 browser. Only one weight (regular) of a font is used, demonstrating that
 content hierarchy can be communicated without loading multiple typefaces and
 weights.
 
     Visitors will see the default typeface of their browser, eliminating the
     need to load a custom typeface.
 
 We use a similar approach for the logo. In fact, Low-tech Magazine never had a
 real logo, just a banner image of a spear held as a low-tech weapon against
 prevailing high-tech claims. Instead of a designed logotype, which would
 require the production and distribution of custom typefaces and imagery,
 Low-tech Magazine’s new identity consists of a single typographic move: to use
 the left-facing arrow in place of the hypen in the blog’s name: LOW←TECH
 MAGAZINE. This pared-down identity drew inspiration from the past as well as
 the banner image of the previous design.
 
 Why does it go offline?
 
 Quite a few web hosting companies claim that their servers are running on
 renewable energy. However, even when they actually generate solar power
 on-site, and do not merely “offset” fossil fuel power use by planting trees or
 the like, their websites are always online.
 
 This means that either they have a giant battery storage system on-site (which
 makes their power system unsustainable), or that they are relying on grid power
 when there is a shortage of solar power (which means that they do not really
 run on 100% solar power).
 
     Keeping the server on-line no matter what simply requires too many
     batteries, which makes the system unsustainable and expensive.
 
 In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its
 own energy storage, and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy
 weather. Less than 100% reliability is [53]essential for the sustainability of
 an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel
 energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil
 fuel energy saved by the solar panels.
 
 Apart from sustainability (and costs), the author’s home has limited space for
 installing solar panels and batteries. Keeping the server on-line no matter
 what – the standard business model of webhosting companies – simply requires
 too many batteries.
 
 [solar-pane]
 View original image View dithered image
 The sizing of battery and solar panel is a compromise between uptime and
 sustainability. Illustration: Diego Marmolejo
 The sizing of battery and solar panel is a [54]compromise between uptime and
 sustainability. Illustration: [55]Diego Marmolejo
 View original image View dithered image
 
 How often is it offline?
 
 Over a period of roughly one year (351 days, from 12 December 2018 to 28
 November 2019) the server was up for 95.26% of the time. This means that we
 were offline for 399 hours (which corresponds to 16.64 days).
 
 These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. During the first ten months
 of this period, the server was online for 98.2% of the time. This means that it
 was offline for only 152 hours (6.4 days) – and this includes the winter
 months.
 
 However, uptime from 1 October to 30 November 2019 plummeted to 80.17%. This
 was caused by a software upgrade of the Linux kernel, which increased the
 average power use of the server from 1.19 to 1.49 watts, and consequently
 brought the website down for at least a few hours every night.
 
 Image: In October 2019, average power use suddenly increases and the site goes
 down every night.
 Image: In October 2019, average power use suddenly increases and the site goes
 down every night.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 The graph above, which shows the power use of the server from 15 July to 15
 November 2019, reveals the effect of the software upgrade. Power use is zero
 when the server is offline. Before the software upgrade, this happens only now
 and then, during longer periods of bad weather. From October onwards, it
 happens every night. The two peaks at the beginning of November show two
 intents to charge the battery with grid power, because we initially assumed the
 problem was caused by a deteriorating battery.
 
 All the data above refer to a set-up consisting of a 50W solar panel with an
 energy storage capacity that is equivalent to that of an 86.4 Wh lead-acid
 battery. In December 2019 and January 2020, we have been running the system on 
 [56]different sizes of solar panels and batteries. Based on these experiments,
 we decided to continue with a smaller (30W) solar panel and a larger (168 Wh)
 lead-acid battery. Since then, the uptime has been 100% (March to September
 2020), even though we have added a lot of content by making the website
 multilingual. This is due to the larger (brand new) battery but also to the
 better orientation of the smaller solar panel. The battery’s capacity will
 decline over time, so the higher storage capacity will make it last longer. If
 the uptime remains 100% through the winter 2020/2021, we will probably
 downgrade to a 20W solar panel.
 
 [57]Here’s a graphic representation of our uptime in 2020, related to the
 weather.
 
 When is the best time to visit?
 
 The accessibility of this website depends on the weather in Barcelona, Spain,
 where the solar-powered web server is located. Because it is solar powered, the
 website is most often online during the summer. To help visitors “plan” their
 visits to Low-tech Magazine, we provide them with several pointers.
 
 A battery meter provides crucial information because it may tell the visitor
 that the blog is about to go down – or that it’s “safe” to read it. The design
 features a background colour that indicates the capacity of the solar-charged
 battery that powers the website server. A decreasing height indicates that
 night has fallen or that the weather is bad.
 
     To help visitors “plan” their visits to Low-tech Magazine, we provide them
     with several pointers such as a battery meter and a weather forecast.
 
 In addition to the battery level, other information about the website server is
 visible with a [58]statistics dashboard. This includes contextual information
 of the server’s location: time, current sky conditions, upcoming forecast, and
 the duration since the server last shut down due to insufficient power.
 
 To access Low-tech Magazine no matter the weather, we have [59]several offline
 reading options available. These include four printed volumes with a total of
 2,398 pages and 709 images.
 
 The Printed Website.
 The Printed Website.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 Which hardware and software do you use?
 
 We wrote three extra articles with more in-depth technical information:
 
   • [60]How to build a low-tech website: software and hardware, which focuses
     on the back-end.
   • [61]How to Build a Low-tech Website: Design Techniques and Process, which
     focuses on the front-end.
   • [62]How sustainable is a solar powered website?, which focuses on the
     sizing of the solar PV system and the optimal balance between uptime and
     sustainability.
 
 In addition, Roel Roscam Abbing wrote a conference paper about Low-tech
 Magazine’s solar powered website: [63]‘This is a solar-powered website, which
 means it sometimes goes offline’: a design inquiry into degrowth and ICT.”
 Workshop on Computing within Limits. 2021.
 
 SERVER: This website runs on an [64]Olimex A20 computer. It has 2 Ghz of
 processing power, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. The server draws 1 - 2.5
 watts of power.
 
 SERVER SOFTWARE: The webserver runs Armbian Stretch, a Debian based operating
 system built around the SUNXI kernel. We wrote [65]technical documentation for
 configuring the webserver.
 
 DESIGN SOFTWARE: The website is built with [66]Pelican, a static site
 generator. We have [67]released the source code for ‘solar’, the Pelican theme
 we developed here.
 
 INTERNET CONNECTION. The server is connected to a 100 MBps fibre internet
 connection. [68]Here’s how we configured the router. For now, the router is
 powered by grid electricity and requires 10 watts of power. We are
 investigating how to replace the energy-hungry router with a more efficient one
 that can be solar-powered, too.
 
 SOLAR PV SYSTEM. At the moment, the server runs on a 30W solar panel and a 168
 Wh lead-acid battery. However, we keep [69]experimenting with different setups.
 The PV installation is managed by a 10A solar charge controller.
 
 What happens to the old website?
 
 The solar powered Low-tech Magazine is a work in progress. For now, the
 grid-powered Low-tech Magazine remains on-line. Readers will be encouraged to
 visit the solar powered website if it is available. What happens later, is not
 yet clear. Our work on the website was interrupted by lockdowns and travel
 restrictions in early 2020. We hope to get together again in 2022 and finish
 the job.
 
 Who made this website?
 
 Idea: [70]Kris De Decker
 
 Web design and development: [71]Marie Otsuka, [72]Roel Roscam Abbing.
 
 Computer hardware: Roel Roscam Abbing
 
 Solar hardware: Kris De Decker
 
 Content production & translations: Kathy Vanhout
 
 The printed website: [73]Lauren Traugott-Campbell.
 
 Can I help?
 
 Yes, you can.
 
 On the one hand, we’re looking for ideas and feedback to further improve the
 website and reduce its energy use. We will document the project extensively so
 that others can build low-tech websites too. [74]Here are some specific
 technical questions that we have.
 
 To make a comment, please send an e-mail to solar (at) lowtechmagazine (dot)
 com. Comments will be published at the bottom of this page.
 
 On the other hand, we’re hoping for people to support this project with a
 financial contribution. Advertising services, which have maintained Low-tech
 Magazine since its start in 2007, are not compatible with our lightweight web
 design. Therefore, we are searching for other ways to finance the website:
 
  1. We offer [75]print-on-demand copies of the website. These publications
     allow you to read Low-tech Magazine on paper, on the beach, in the sun, or
     whenever and where ever you want.
  2. You can support us through [76]PayPal, [77]Patreon and [78]LiberaPay.
     Patrons get early access to new books, book promotions, special editions,
     and more.
 
 The solar powered website in the media
 
 “[79]How to build a solar powered website?”, Justine Paradis, Outside/In, New
 Hampshire Public Radio, 2022
 
 “[80]Can the Internet Survive Climate Change?”, Kevin Lozano, The New Republic,
 2019
 
 “[81]The future of web design is less, not more”, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan,
 Fastcompany, September 10, 2018.
 
 “[82]Imagining a Solar-Powered Internet: Kris De Decker Low<–Tech Magazine”,
 Jasio Stefanski, The Gradient, Walker Art Magazine, November 21, 2018.
 
 “[83]Interview: Marie Otsuka. Podcast, HTML.energy, December 2019
 
 “[84]How to Build a Low-Tech Website”, Roman Zolotarev, Hacker News, 2018.
 
 “[85]Low-Tech Magazine switches to a low-tech, low carbon website”, Lloyd
 Alter, Treehugger, September 26, 2018.
 
 “[86]The philosophy of low-tech: a conversation with Kris De Decker”, Aaron
 Vansintjan, Never Apart Magazine, July 2019.
 
 “[87]Reconsider the thinking that everything should become digital”, Svensk
 biblioteksförening, March 2020.
 
 “[88]Perfecting the solar powered web server”, Tom Nardi, Hackaday, October 8,
 2018.
 
 “[89]This Solar-Powered, ‘Low Tech’ Website Goes Offline When It’s Cloudy”,
 Slashdot, October 2, 2018.
 
 “[90]The Internet’s Carbon Footprint”, IRL Mozilla Firefox Podcast, July 2019.
 
 “[91]The Solar-Powered Website Offering a Vision for an Eco-Friendly Internet”,
 Leander Jones, RESET, April 2020
 
 “[92]Low-tech Magazine website”, Matthijs Sluiter, Fonts in use, January 9,
 2019.
 
 “[93]Low-tech Magazine’s Solar-Powered Website is Rewriting the Rules of Web
 Design”, Liz Stinson, Aiga Eye on Design, November 12, 2018.
 
 “[94]YouTube’s carbon footprint is huge, but smarter web design could fix it”,
 Nicole Kobie, Wired, May 7, 2019.
 
 “[95]How an online magazine avoids the internet’s impact on the environment”,
 Alexandria Neason, Columbia Journalism Review, April 30, 2019.
 
 “[96]Kris De Decker on web design’s energy-efficient future”, Kathryn Bishop,
 LSN Global, October 25, 2018.
 
 “[97]A solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-Tech Magazine”, Hemmert
 (pseudonym), Hacker News, April 2019.
 
 “[98]A website that runs on a solar-powered server in Barcelona”, Peey
 (pseudonym), Hacker News, May 2019.
 
 “[99]Solar Powered Website”, Ars Electronica, Ars Electronica Prix 2019.
 
 “[100]Low-tech Magazine and a better internet for the Anthropocene”, Naomi
 Huffman, MCD Books, April 9, 2019.
 
 “[101]The Future of Websites? How one site has Gone 100% Solar”, S. Fraser,
 Seabr0 .
 
 “[102]Restart Podcast Ep. 53: Our low-tech future with Kris De Decker”,
 Restart, May 2020.
 
 Off-line portal to the solar powered website at the Dutch Design Week in
 Eindhoven. Designed and built in collaboration with Marie Verdeil. More images
 here.
 Off-line portal to the solar powered website at the Dutch Design Week in
 Eindhoven. Designed and built in collaboration with Marie Verdeil. [103]More
 images here.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 Other low-tech websites:
 
 “[104]Solar Protocol”, March 2021
 
 “[105]Formafantasma”, February 2021
 
 “[106]Ontaarde Beschaving, 2021
 
 “[107]Post Growth Toolkit”, November 2020
 
 “[108]Low Tech Lab”, October 2020
 
 “[109]Branch”, October 2020
 
 “[110]Chaire Diament, Université du Québec, 2020
 
 “[111]Louwrentius”, July 2020
 
 “[112]Finding Pleasure in Scarcity”, Daniel Parnitzke!, May 2020
 
 “[113]Digital guide to low tech”, Gauthier Roussilhe, Gauthier Roussilhe
 Writings, March 11, 2019.
 
 “[114]Our lighter website”, Caroline Whyte, Feasta, July 16, 2019
 
 “[115]Fisk Solar”, A solar powered website in Sourhall, Todmorden, Yorkshire,
 UK, 2019
 
 “[116]Solar powered media project”, 2019
 
 Media links in French:
 
 “[117]Pour un Web Frugal”, Framalang (pseudonym), Framablog, January 24, 2019.
 
 “[118]Le design pour lutter contre le changement climatique”, Hubert Guillaud,
 internetactu.net, September 18, 2019
 
 “[119]Environnement : un site internet fonctionne à l’énergie solaire”,
 Caroline Drzewinski, RTL Online, October 10, 2018.
 
 “[120]Quel avenir pour les sites « low-tech » ?”, Geoffrey Dorne, Grafisme et
 interactivité, September 1, 2019
 
 “[121]Relier numérique et low tech”, Fing, Agenda pour un futur numérique et
 écologique, Défi No. 13, March 2019.
 
 “[122]Faire tourner un site web à l’énergie solaire”, Claire, L’assembleuse,
 November 15, 2018.
 
 “[123]Ce site est tellement low tech qu’il est hors ligne quand il n’y a pas de
 soleil, Numerama, October 2018
 
 Media links in Spanish
 
 “[124]Si internet quiere ser sostenible, necesita adelgazar”, El Pais, February
 15, 2020
 
 “[125]Low tech magazine, un sitio web sostenible”, Cátedra Telefónica-UOC de
 Diseno y Creación Multimedia, October 10, 2018.
 
 “[126]Esta página web funciona con energía solar y consume menos debido a su
 diseño”, Alicia Ruiz Fernández, Ticbeat, 9 october 2018.
 
 Media links in German
 
 “[127]Wie du einen mit Photovoltaik angetriebenen Webserver baust”, Thomas
 Reis, Spandauer Volksblatt, September 26, 2018.
 
 “[128]Solarbetrieben: Bei schlechtem Wetter ist diese Website offline”, Kim
 Rixecker, t3n, October 9, 2018.
 
 “[129]Diese radikal nachhaltige Webseite zeigt, wie ein umweltfreundliches
 Internet aussehen könnte”, Leander Jones, RESET, May 2020.
 
 “[130]Low-Tech-Website geht offline, wenn die Wolken aufziehen”, Helga Hansen,
 Heise Online, October 12, 2018.
 
 “[131]Wie das Internet Strom frisst”, Philip Bovermann, Süddeutsche Zeitung,
 August 28, 2019.
 
 “[132]How to build a solar powered website?” A Bits & Bäume 2018
 Podiumsdiskussion by Kris De Decker, media.ccc.de, November 18, 2018
 (mediafile).
 
 In other languages
 
 “[133]Uma revista com muitas dúvidas sobre a tecnologia”, João PedroPerera,
 Publico, May 5, 2019.
 
 “[134]Low Tech Magazine gaat terug naar zijn roots”, Branko Collin, 2019.
 
 The solar powered website in the Design Museum in London. It forms part of the
 exhibition “Waste age: what can design do?“, which runs until 20 February 2022.
 The solar powered website in the Design Museum in London. It forms part of the
 exhibition “[135]Waste age: what can design do?“, which runs until 20 February
 2022.
 View original image View dithered image
 
 Reactions
 
 To make a comment, please send an e-mail to solar (at) lowtechmagazine (dot)
 com. Your e-mail address is not used for other purposes, and will be deleted
 after the comment is published. If you don’t want your real name to be
 published, sign the e-mail with the name you want to appear.
 
 Reactions
 
 Seppe
 
 Very interesting project! It’ll be interesting to see how well it holds up
 during the winter.
 
 What software are you running on the server to keep the energy usage so low?
 (I’m mainly interested in the OS and HTTP server.)
 
 I have a few ideas/suggestions:
 
 I think it should be possible to reach much higher uptime by creating a network
 of nodes that all host the same set of websites. It wouldn’t be a very simple
 project, and you might argue that it’s not as lowtech anymore. But hear me out:
 
 Say you have 5 “lowtech websites” each running on its own server (node), and
 each located in a different place on earth. You could then duplicate the
 content of each server to the 4 other servers. This only costs you extra
 storage. The servers only need to communicate with each other when the content
 changes. The energy/bandwidth cost of this communication should be negligible
 for static websites that are updated for example once a day.
 
 The main challenge is the DNS. There needs to be some kind of load balancing
 between these 5 clients. A rudimentary solution would be to use round-robin
 DNS. Say you have and A record for solar.lowtechmagazine.com that contains all
 5 of the nodes’ IP addresses and a lifetime of 5 minutes. Every time a node
 detects it is going to go down in less than 5 minutes, it updates this DNS
 record: it removes it’s own IP address. Every time a node boots back up, it
 re-adds it’s own IP address to the DNS record.
 
 I’m not an expert on DNS, so I’m not 100% sure that this would work. But I
 think it’s worth investigating if you’re thinking about improving uptime.
 
 Obviously more complex schemes would be necessary to handle unexpected node
 downtime. Depending on the type of website this may be overkill.
 
 About the images. I think you may have gone a bit too far in the image
 compressing. I see that most (all?) of the images on the grid-powered website
 or stored in the lossless PNG format. In general this is not a good choice for
 photos (as opposed to icons or other graphics with few colors): the file size
 will be much larger than when you’re using the lossy JPEG format.
 
 For example: [136]the main picture for this article is 739 KB in PNG
 
 The dithered version in PNG is 43 KB, which is indeed a huge improvement, but
 comes [137]at a big cost in image quality
 
 The B&W JPEG version of the main picture [138](70% compression) is only 35 KB,
 and I’d say the image quality is much higher than that of the dithered image.
 (The image resolutions don’t match entirely. For the same resolution the image
 size of the JPEG would probably be more or less the same as the dithered image,
 but with increased image quality.) You could even lower the JPEG quality
 further than 70%, but this quickly becomes rather unpleasant to look at, so you
 may not want to do this.
 
 Jiehong
 
 Very interesting experiment!
 
 But what about CDN caching and all other kind of caching between your server
 and each of the browsers?
 
 It might very be the case that CDN will cache the content of this website for
 some time according to default cache policies, and also that the client’s
 browsers might also cache part of the website directly.
 
 I’d say that having big caching time for the browser is a big plus, as it would
 still allow users to access previously accessed pages when they are down at no
 energy cost.
 
 On the other hand, estimating network caching energy usage might be
 complicated.
 
 Sofie
 
 “The design features a background colour that indicates the capacity of the
 solar-charged battery that powers the website server. A decreasing height
 indicates that night has fallen or that the weather is bad.”
 
 So that’s what it is! It looks more like a glitch. I think it would be better
 to just add it to the header:
 
 This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline.
 Battery: xx%
 
 Some other minor issues (in Firefox):
 
 The area you can click on links is some places longer than the text.
 
 When the window is wide the images become too big and lines denoting cut-out
 text go much further out than the text, which looks odd.
 
 QWxleA
 
 Quite enjoyed the article, and am interested how you did the image dithering
 and coloring. Do you have a link that explains more?
 
 Thanks, Alex
 
 PS you could add a logo if you convert /create it in svg and embed it in the
 page.
 
 Case D
 
 I think it’s a really cool project. I’m a hobbyist website tinkerer with a
 blog, and I’ve been experimenting with CMSes (I just installed WordPress, but I
 think it might be too much for what I want to do – really I’d like a flat-file,
 static site that I can push to from anywhere (i.e., with a webform), which is
 what I can’t figure out).
 
 I’m writing you because I was curious if you’d share how your publishing
 workflow works – do you have a CMS that you use? If so, how do you get from a
 web form to a published post? Is that how you do it?
 
 tx
 
 Some thoughts:
 
 RSS feed is missing!
 
 jquery-3.3.1.min.js is the biggest file on your page, from the limited amount
 of JS I saw, it could be easily removed. you could cache the your in a separate
 js file, this would also prevent uselessly sending your script to browser that
 won’t support/accept it.
 
 would you mind sharing the dithering script you apply to images?
 
 I discovered LOW TECH MAGAZINE through this article and I’m really happy with
 the look and feel of the website! Keeping the default typeface is so rare
 nowadays and it works very well without JS.
 
 kris de decker
 
 Roel Roscam Abbing wrote a conference paper about Low-tech Magazine’s solar
 powered website: ‘This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes
 goes offline’: a design inquiry into degrowth and ICT.” Workshop on Computing
 within Limits. 2021. [139]https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/papers/
 limits21-abbing.pdf
 
 George Dorn
 
 @ Case D (#5)
 
 Look into various static site generators, like Pelican, Jekyll and dozens of
 others - [140]https://www.staticgen.com/
 
 They require a little bit of effort to set up, design the template, etc, but
 then whenever you want to publish, you run a command and it (re)generates all
 of the html. You can run the generator on the server itself, or on any other
 machine and just send the results to the server (somewhat automatically, via
 rsync, ftp, scp, etc).
 
 I publish a blog this way via Pelican. I edit a file in reST (other languages
 also supported) and when I’m ready I run ‘make html’ and ‘make publish’ to send
 it to the server.
 
 Perry
 
 very cool. have you considered p2p/distributed web technologies like beaker
 browser? [141]https://github.com/beakerbrowser/beaker
 
 Dan
 
 Your site doesn’t load in Naked Browser on Android.
 
 Ben S
 
 It’s a cute idea, but please don’t dither your images.
 
 One problem which you haven’t addressed is the increasing attitude towards
 web-pages as being “disposable”.
 
 A good page, living on a sensible URL, could be available for decades if not
 centuries - but then, surely, there must also be a compromise made to maintain
 sources at the highest basic quality possible? What is worse that researching
 an interesting topic, only to run into photocopies of photocopies of a now lost
 technical drawing, which has become indecipherable over time. Dithering is
 basically this. You are an important source. Please don’t be a source providing
 photocopies of photocopies. I often find myself just grabbing screenshots and
 putting them into presentations or other documents. Ironically, this leads to a
 continual bit-rot as others do the same and screenshot my content. It’s
 surprising how many images in searches are clearly screenshots of poorly
 rescaled original images. Dithering will make this even worse.
 
 I understand you’re trying to make a point - and there is a perverse value in
 stubbornly pissing into the wind, otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy low-tech so much
 and try to put it into practice myself - but please don’t let a low-energy
 perspective compromise on the real core of what you do, which is communicating
 excellent alternatives.
 
 Edwan Summers
 
 Thanks for this excellent post about a very important experiment. The
 adjustment around a website always being on seems like an important part of
 this work.
 
 I’ve recently been experimenting with dat [142]1 which can often involve
 adjusting expectations about when content is going to be online or not. They
 have some nice instructions for publishing your static site using dat [143]2,
 which would mean that someone could potentially get your website from a peer
 who is sharing the cost of keeping your content online.
 
 I honestly don’t know of what the energy costs associated with this are, but
 presumably the peers would only start to contribute traffic when content was
 requested. I imagine this is something the dat folks would be interesting in
 helping answer.
 
 PS. I love the idea of doing web comments over email. It also makes me wonder
 if there could be static site plugins for supporting this process. Like running
 a Pelican/Jeckle/Hugo/etc conmand every day to examine an mailbox and look for
 comments on webpages. I guess there would be a necessary step of reviewing them
 too.
 
 Damon Hart-Davis
 
 My off-grid solar server:[144]http://www.earth.org.uk/
 note-on-Raspberry-Pi-2-setup.html
 
 You may also be interested in some of my tools to reduce page and image weight.
 (No ditherin:; zopfli(png) and similar in my case…)
 
 Jeremy Keith
 
 Hi Kris,
 
 That’s an absolutely fascinating article! I really like what you’re doing.
 
 You mentioned that you were looking for ideas. There’s a technology you could
 use that would allow people to see something from your website, even when the
 server is down: service workers.
 
 As long as someone has visited your site at least once, you could show them
 something when they try to visit the site when the server is powered down. That
 could just be a simple message, or it could be articles that you previously put
 in the visitor’s cache (for example, every time someone visits an article, you
 could store a copy of that article in a cache to show them later when the
 server’s offline).
 
 Usually service workers come into play when the user’s device isn’t connecting
 to the network, but they also apply in your situation, where the server isn’t
 connecting to the network.
 
 I’d be happy to help you write the service worker script if you like.
 
 Jacob Hall
 
 Hello there,
 
 I absolutely love this concept, and I hope this is where the world is headed;
 it simply doesn’t make sense to bloat the internet with so much needless data.
 
 My first thought, which commenter Alex also mentioned, is that you may be able
 to preserve the “modern” look of your site by using .svg graphics for logos and
 some images (such as graphs). As cool as dithered images look, I suspect a .svg
 would have an even smaller footprint, and could greatly improve the readability
 of content such as graphs used in “How Much Energy Do We Need?”
 
 Secondly, I’ve heard a lot of people say recently that the future of the
 internet is decentralization, with users “seeding” visited websites to future
 users to create a more efficient and secure internet experience. I believe that
 this concept would lend itself well to the ideals of low energy consumption,
 potentially providing backup should your server ever go down due to weather. I
 know it isn’t practical to implement right now, but I hope that is where the
 world is headed.
 
 Thank you for the well-written and thought-provoking article.
 
 Jeff Jahr
 
 I like the old-timey dithered look of your images, and the way you are using
 the multiply blend to sepia tone them, that is very cool! However, if you want
 to have even lower page weight, then you might consider converting the images
 to grayscale jpg with a reduced quality instead of converting to dithered png.
 
 Here’s a quick comparison using your original image, the dithered image that
 appears in the article, and a conversion to gray jpg using an ImageMagick
 ‘convert’ command.
 
 zeppelin:/tmp> convert -grayscale RMS -quality 50 -geometry 800x600
 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png test.jpg
 
 zeppelin:/tmp> du -bh 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png
 sps_close.png test.jpg
 
 739K 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png
 
 43K sps_close.png
 
 28K test.jpg
 
 The image (test.jpg) is 15KB smaller than your dithered one, and still looks
 good with your color blending method.
 
 If you like the rough look that your dither gives the images, you could ramp
 the -quality parmeter down to 10 or so, and your jpgs will start to look rough
 and mottled too- AND the image size will be reduced into the 9KB range for even
 more weight reduction.
 
 zeppelin:/tmp> convert -grayscale RMS -quality 10 -geometry 800x600
 6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b23825200b-750wi.png test10.jpg
 
 zeppelin:/tmp> du -bh test10.jpg
 
 9.1K test10.jpg
 
 Cool stuff, good luck with your web server!
 
 Bill Daniel
 
 I’m such a fan. I love your work, I only wish you published more frequently.
 
 The low tech website is brilliant.
 
 I would happily pay to get print versions of your articles.
 
 I’d likely print the whole archive! I’m a paper freak. Film and paper-based
 photographer, book collector, and collector and archivist of a wide variety of
 paper-based artifacts.
 
 As a media archivist I’m constantly railing against digital storage, on the
 cloud or on drives. The future is going to have a dim understanding of what
 happened in our century, since most of the evidence will be non-existent/
 un-recoverable.
 
 Keep up the good work! I hope I get the opportunity to purchase some print on
 demand articles.
 
 Drew Gulino
 
 It might go against the spirit of what you’re trying to do with your solar web
 site, but users could go to the [145]web archive of solar.lowtechmagazine.com
 when it’s down (once it is archived; www. is already archived)
 
 On the other hand, you’re not using ads, so you’re not out any money if users
 go to the archived site instead.
 
 Francesco
 
 Like others have said:
 
 Instead of dithering you can use JPEG. I can achieve 52.4 KB with the image of
 this post, keeping the colors (compressing with gimp, quality 70, artifacts
 visible, but if you ask me only to somebody looking for them). Sure it’s
 slightly more, but the image looks almost the same.
 
 Also, since your homepage has a lot of images and might get lots of visits, why
 not thumbnail the images to a lower resolution? This might cut in half or more
 the size of the homepage.
 
 Also embedded svg for the logo or other non-photographic graphics it the way to
 go (if embedded you avoid http requests).
 
 Additionally, like already said, eliminate jQuery (or at least use the slim
 build, that eliminates some features, see here [146]https://cdnjs.com/libraries
 /jquery).
 
 Putting the computer outside in winter might help a bit with energy efficiency
 and cooling.
 
 I am convinced this is a low-power website and I like the project, but it
 remains to be seen wether more energy could be saved in a data center where the
 computational resources are shared and they have proper cooling solutions.
 
 Evan V
 
 Just so you know, if you “snap to web colors” when exporting your dithered PNG
 you can get a similar aesthetic at an additional 50% size savings.
 
 Mengyang Li
 
 Yep, the JPEG format is much better in storing pictures than PNG, You can even
 use bpg to reduce size while maintain pretty acceptable quality.
 
 [147]Visual comparison
 
 I think this is over engineered with a huge trade off on the image quality.
 
 Leo Tindall
 
 One potential way to reduce energy consumption while still retaining content
 accessibility might be to publish the site on IPFS, as I’ve done with my blog
 [1]. That way, people accessing the site help serve the site.
 
 1:[148]https://leotindall.com/post/putting_this_blog_on_ipfs/
 
 Job van der Zwan
 
 So I checked the solar powered website images to the regular website images.
 
 To my shock and dismay, TypeKit for some reason uses PNGs for photos. This is
 extremely inefficient: PNG really is only good at compressing smooth surfaces
 and gradients. Photos are a terrible choice for PNGs.
 
 I made a test gallery to compare alternative options:
 
 [149]https://blindedcyclops.neocities.org/low-tech-image-tests/gallery.html
 
 In my experience, and as shown in the above gallery, cleaning up the image
 first makes an enormous difference in compression size, and results in better
 maintained quality at extreme compression values. I suggest Darktable and GIMP:
 
 [150]http://www.darktable.org/
 
 [151]https://www.gimp.org/
 
 Another conclusion that I would draw is that JPGs aren’t that bad.
 
 However, if we insist on using dithered PNGs, here are some suggestions.
 
 PNGquant is a lossy PNG encoder, which can be found here:
 
 [152]https://pngquant.org/
 
 The downside is that it only supports Floyt-Steinberg dithering.
 
 PNGs can also be losslessly optimized with optipng:
 
 [153]http://optipng.sourceforge.net/
 
 It is often even worth putting the output of GIMP and/or PNGquant through
 optipng for a few extra percentages.
 
 Ivan Vandot
 
 Love the idea, great job. For the even more low-tech site definitely remove
 jQuery and rewrite in plain JS part for the icon and weather.
 
 A Baldo
 
 Wow, this is good news! As one of your readers who lives in a passive solar
 off-grid home in northeastern North America, your new lower-bandwidth site
 loads wonderfully fast over my slow cell signal. I tend to browse in “text
 mode” anyway, for speed and readability on my little phone screen.
 
 Because of my slow connection I have become painfully sensitive to the growing
 bandwidth requirements you describe, even to read the news. I rely heavily on
 the text-only NPR page and the text-only National Weather Service forecast
 page; in cloudy weather they are sometimes the only pages that DO load!
 
 Glad to be able to add the solar version of your site to the list. It is an
 informative, entertaining, and practical resource (I am now a thermal cooker
 aficionado, thanks to you!)
 
 anja
 
 PS I agree with Sofie that a simple text battery percentage in the header would
 probably be sufficient and more readable (when Safari isn’t already in text
 mode) than having the web page display battery status via background color.
 
 Garve Scott-Lodge
 
 Love the idea. Here are a couple of ideas which might improve the site further
 
 There’s an easy way to shave a few bytes. The type=“text/JavaScript” attribute
 to the script tag is not needed on html5 pages like yours.
 
 But there may be a more complex way of doing away with jQuery entirely.
 
 All you seem to be using jQuery for is to pull in a JSON file with the current
 weather and battery stats. Your server is obviously creating the JSON file on
 the fly. If instead you created a small CSS file with the data you could pull
 it in instead, setting the attributes of the battery div and using the content
 declaration of :before and :after pseudo elements to insert words like “snowy”
 into your content. You’d need to ensure the CSS file wasn’t cached, either
 server side or using a little JavaScript.
 
 Cheers
 
 Jeff Gnatek
 
 hi there, curious if you have considered doing an inverted color scheme, so
 dark background with light text.(/blackle.com/ claims to have saved lots of
 watt hours for not being on a white background.
 
 i love the magazine and look forward to reading more in the future
 
 Sava Chankov
 
 Great re-design, completely in line with the site’s topic! Reminds me in a way
 of Fidonet, a lowtech computer network that was popular in early 1990s, before
 the Internet takeoff. It was ran by volunteers, who ran bulletin board systems
 that dialed automatically each other in the early morning hours to exchange
 emails, which took quite long to travel on it compared to the modern email.
 
 Jan Steinman
 
 YAY! You guys are my heroes! I’ve been wanting to do such a thing for some
 time.
 
 One of the fundamental choices we made was to build a static website. Most of
 today’s websites use server side programming languages that generate the
 website on the fly by querying a database. This means that every time someone
 visits a web page, it is generated on demand.
 
 But wouldn’t caching deal with that?
 
 We run a MediaWiki server on a Mac Mini, and are running memcached. About 90%
 of page requests end up being served by memcached, as far as I can tell. And
 with an SSD behind that, there isn’t too much energy penalty for a cache miss,
 anyway.
 
 Nicolas Huillard
 
 @Kris “due to the fact that the router is not yet solar powered”
 
 Yes, make sure that everything needed to connect the server to the Internet (on
 your side) is solar-powered. Not powering the router, ONT or anything else from
 the sun is cheating ;-)
 
 You should be able to switch off the grid in the house and still see the lights
 blink…
 
 Having a nice RRD dataset of the information provided in /api/stats.json, and
 generating graphs from it would be very educational: we could see how the
 battery drains in the night, probably faster in the evening when lots of people
 browse the site, then less so in the middle of the night. We could notice when
 solar production starts in the morning, offsetting the drain from the server,
 then starting to charge the battery, and produce a lot of surplus at
 solar-noon. We should also see seasonal variations and how they’re strong.
 
 I use 5 minutes resolution RRD for a few days, then ~1h resolution for a full
 year, then store nearly daily data for a few years. The problem with RRD is
 that you must predefine everything at the beginning. The positive side is that
 it’s very light, and suitable for the hardware you have (just take care of
 Flash wear, probably with tmpfs synchronized with Flash at intervals, or a kind
 of in-memory RRD server which will store the RRD file at intervals).
 
 (I post on the heavy-website, in the hope that it may reduce your hand-work.
 You may decide to redirect from the old site to the solar one ASAP, not until
 you have solved the differences in URIs : old /2018/09/
 how-to-build-a-low-tech-website.html vs. new /2018/09/
 how-to-build-a-low-tech-website/ ; we should be able to replace www. with
 solar. in the addresse bar and get the same article, not a 404 - nothing a tiny
 rewrite in nginx couldn’t solve)
 
 STPo
 
 You did a really great job here. Improvements are always possible (and welcome)
 but hey guys, that’s what I call a redesign!
 
 Glad to see some folks showing us the path.
 
 Laplace Victor
 
 First, I’m a huge fan of your solar project !
 
 I’m a front-end developer and I see some improvements :
 
   • as mentioned in other comments you can easily remove jquery (or at least
     use the [154]CDN version it will be less ressource intensive for your
     server) and as I like your project, I rewrite your code in [155]vanilla
     javascript (let me know if you have any issue)
 
   • images have width 100%, this is ok for mobile but not really on desktop, as
     your images max size is 800px, so I think you can add this style :
     .entry-content p.img{ max-width: 800px } it will be less pixel to render,
     so less energy consumption for visitors.
 
   • also mentioned in other comments, PNG is not the lightest image format, you
     can have almost the same weight and preserve colors with jpg (or even webp)
 
   • you can “minify” images. All images comes with metadatas, those datas are
     not necessary for displaying image on the web (ex for [156]sps_close.png
     40.172 bytes vs 43.415 bytes for original). Have a look at [157]https://
     github.com/imagemin/imagemin
 
   • you can [158]lazyload images. Don’t use the technique using ‘scroll’ event
     as it’s really ressource intensive for visitors, prefer the Intersection
     Observer API
 
   • you can also improve browser caching to limit reload of assets [159]https:/
     /varvy.com/pagespeed/leverage-browser-caching.html
 
   • you can also replace images cloud, sun in footer by unicode characters, 
     [160]https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=cloud [161]
     https://unicode-search.net/unicode-namesearch.pl?term=sun
 
 That’s it :)
 
 Paul Ito
 
 First of all: I love your website and wish I had come across it much earlier.
 
 The article on how to build a lowtech website was super inspirational and
 sparked (re-sparked?) my interest in building a website with easy and
 low-impact tools.
 
 My comments on the project:
 
  1. I would love if you would give direct IBAN bank account information if in
     any way possible. As much as I respect the mission of donation tools like
     patreon and librepay, they do take their cut from the donations. The most
     direct way to support your product and your mission is monthly payments
     directly to you. I understand that this is only free of charge if your
     supporters happen to have an EU bank account with IBAN/BIC, but it would be
     worth at least giving readers the option to support you in that way.
 
  2. I am not a big fan of the yellow battery indicator that is (as of right
     now) splitting the screen in half. This feels gimmicky to me and is
     distracting my attention from your great articles. (Very much personal
     preference of course)
 
  3. In addition to other people commenting on the use of dithered images, you
     might consider hosting more hi-res (jgp?) versions on the server and
     linking the dithered images to them. That way people who want the better
     picture quality can have it, without everyone having to load articles with
     heavy images in them.
 
 Keep up the great work, I will definitely come back more often!
 
 Cheers,
 
 Paul
 
 Frederik Van Der Veken
 
 Excellent project!
 
 I love the idea of a static, non-always on website.
 
 You’re making a fair point, and I agree we need to make a mental shift in what
 we expect from the on-time of a website.
 
 However, I have some issues with the images.
 
 As some people already mentioned, the dithering really lowers the quality a
 lot, while a lossy compression could achieve the same file size but with better
 quality.
 
 Another issue is the black-and-white. This is indeed a smart thing to do as it
 saves a lot in file size, however, you have to make sure that your article does
 not depend on the color in the image..
 
 E.g. in your [162]article on the high-speed trains the original low-speed train
 route and the newer high-speed train route between Paris and Amsterdam are
 shown on a map in different colours. Of course both look the same in black and
 white and the distinction is lost. Maybe you could solve such issues by make
 one of the lines dashed?
 
 Abelardo
 
 Kris, I am cuban reader that become crazy with the cool low tech website
 
 Could Low Tech design and host low tech websites for a fee, that contributes
 with the magazine?
 
 Skye
 
 Just wanted to say absolutely fantastic project - I will be watching this
 develop and plan to use your example as a template to follow in a website I
 will be building in the next year or so. The work you are doing is so important
 - thank you!
 
 Geoffrey Tolle
 
 I haven’t had a chance to read all the way through your latest article (and
 won’t understand most of it when I do) but I did catch one point that I thought
 worthy of consideration in the design of your energy storage system.
 
 I see that you chose to use lead / sulfuric acid batteries as your battery
 back-up. May I suggest that you consider switching to iron-nickel batteries. It
 may be that I’m preaching to the choir but, in case you haven’t heard of them,
 iron-nickel batteries are a proven if bulky rechargeable technology. They use
 alternating iron and nickel plates (relatively cheap) in a basic electrolyte to
 store energy.
 
 They are rechargeable hundreds of times, have less toxic waste products, and
 are very durable. They have a slow charge and discharge rate but should present
 few problems for powering low-tech websites. While the units can be quite
 expensive, they are also amenable to home-production (something that anyone who
 can assemble a low-tech website should be able to handle).
 
 Well, even if I don’t understand the exact nature of this technology, I feel
 that the possibilities and the look into energy cycling will be helpful to me.
 
 Roel RA
 
 @ Ploc, Jan Fabry,
 
 It seems indeed like a good idea to do the GZIP pre-compression as a step in
 the generation process. I’ll look into this. Thanks for the tips.
 
 @ Dave,
 
 The whole set up, including the webserver, is described here: [163]https://
 homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html
 
 I think both Apache and Nginx are quite suitable for small websites. They are
 particularly good to use when learning about selfhosting, since there are many
 articles online about these softwares.
 
 greetings,
 
 Roel
 
 Tomasz Jadowski
 
 Yes, grid-powered router is the weakest part of this project.
 
 Have you ever heard about mesh networks and [164]Hyperboria project?
 
 When you setup a hyperboria node you could backup your internet connection
 
 with Wi-Fi, GSM or another link and powered them by solar.
 
 The cost is access only via hyperboria network when a grid is off, you could
 run both versions
 
 (for “normal” IPv4 and for Hyperboria mesh) simultaneously.
 
 I don’t know how “expensive” in CPU and power is to run a Hyperboria node.
 
 Good luck! I love this idea!
 
 ijk_ijk
 
 Your new solar site is fully accessible from not so powerfull client like old
 pcs and old tablets with poor hardware and obsolete OS. The regular site makes
 the browser of my 6 years old tablet to crash but the solar one is perfect
 ..and faster. Static sites are increasing the life of all clients.
 
 J Campbell
 
 Hi,
 
 This is so cool.
 
 I have always thought static websites are the best when your content is just
 pictures and words. Even the old image rollovers can be fun and generate a
 little interactivity. But I especially like the dithering idea. I use dithering
 as an artistic tool for some of my works because I find the dot pattern
 generated rather pleasing to look at. I also play around with the number of
 colors and swap colors used in the images. Photoshop’s “Save for Web(Legacy)”
 tool is where I play with images and dithering. I find the diffuse style of dot
 pattern the most aesthetically pleasing.
 
 Another energy saving concept is that of a black background. When displayed on
 users devices it required less energy. But it’s a significant change to the
 site appearance.
 
 I just wanted to let you know that this is a fantastic idea you have and it
 gives your website a palpable quality that does not exist on any dynamic
 webpage.
 
 Joel Mikulyak
 
 I’m a front-end developer, and just wanted to state that I completely love your
 decision to go low-tech and energy-efficient with your site. If you have any
 other great resources on the topic, I’d love to read more.
 
 Marie Otsuka
 
 Hi all,
 
 I’m Marie, and I’m one of the designers / developers of the website. Thanks so
 much for your feedback! As Kris and Roel have mentioned, it somehow got out
 before we were quite ready, but it’s been amazing to hear all of the responses
 so far. We’d planned for this platform to provoke discussion, so we’re excited
 to get this jumpstarted.
 
 A large part of the challenge of this project was balancing functional
 decisions with the design concept. Often, we opted for the more radical option
 so that this design questions our current aesthetic expectations. To chime in:
 
 Images
 
 Dithering
 
 Certain images are better suited for other forms of compression. But our goal
 was to not only compress images, but also to call to attention this act of
 compression.
 
 We found that dithered images can be stretched beyond their actual image size
 while providing a distinct aesthetic, and that the artifacts of compression can
 become an integral part of the design.
 
 (Along those lines… many sites produce multiple images for different sizes
 appropriate for various display sizes. We opted to use the same image file for
 both thumbnail and featured images to prioritize the caching, even if it means
 that the listing pages may be a bit heavier.)
 
 SVG
 
 Inline SVG definitely makes sense as a lightweight graphic form! (They’re
 actually used for the social media icons already.)
 
 I also agree that the legibility of graphs can be improved with SVGs. But we’d
 need to convert the given raster images we have of these graphs into a vector
 format — which, if done automatically, would end up producing a super heavy SVG
 file. What would be ideal is for any informational graphics to be readable and
 text-based, with svg/css-based shapes, which we unfortunately currently don’t
 have the capacity for within our workflow. But definitely a problem to address!
 
 Using an SVG for the logo is a good practice too, which I’ve actually seen done
 well on many sites. But once defined, that logo would have to be preserved on
 any platform, not just on this website — whether publishing in print or web
 form. That file would need to be sent around as an asset for any marketing
 needs. Again, we wanted to question what it means to create a “brand” identity.
 
 We also played with Unicode for the weather icons, but found that the way they
 displayed (especially more non-default characters such as “windy” or “clear
 night”) were too unreliable. We’ll work on better sizing/compressing these
 though! Also, more improvements are coming to the battery indicator / dashboard
 / weather page!
 
 JS
 
 jQuery
 
 As Roel mentioned, removing jQuery is in the plans. Thanks to all those with
 the tips! We thought about doing some more research on potential browser
 compatibility issues the library helps take care of, but looks like it won’t be
 an issue.
 
 Offline
 
 Service workers for offline reading is something I’ve also been doing some
 research on! We’re looking forward to further develop how caching might fit
 into improvements for the site.
 
 Thanks again for all of the comments!
 
 And we appreciate your patience as we work through some kinks.
 
 More soon!
 
 QB
 
 I’m a longtime reader and fan; I just wanted to let you know that on Firefox
 61.0.2 on Mac OS 10.13, the website has a huge semi-transparent yellow box over
 the lower half. I think it’s a sun-meter or a battery-meter.
 
 I’m not sure whether it’s deliberate or if it’s a bug that is causing it to
 cover all the text on the page. If it’s deliberate, I just wanted to let you
 know that it makes it almost impossible for me to read the page, it’s super
 distracting. I’d love for it to be just a thin sidebar or something in a top
 scrolling navbar sort of thing. Having something overlaid on the text like that
 basically renders the website unusable for me.
 
 Thanks for all the work that you do, and the new server sounds really cool!
 
 TC
 
 First off thanks for introducing the world to your website, absolutely love it.
 I’m new to reading your site, but I assume low-tech is not at the exclusion of
 clever solutions (which IMHO is where the fun starts). The capability of low
 cost hardware means that there is a huge amount of potential in even the most
 basic setups.
 
 It is a very neat idea and I think it could be a very useful concept which
 could also be applied to many situations where internet access is difficult or
 limited. In some cases a link to the internet may not be possible, so localised
 hotspots could also be used. This could be in developing countries, areas of
 natural disasters or even war zones. Allowing vital information to be
 broadcast, from medical information/advice to emergency assistance, lost/found
 persons to providing educational resources. Potential website-in-a-box?
 
 This could also provide an excellent project for schools for teaching.
 
 With regards to the site as a technology news site, I have several observations
 (none is intended as criticism):
 
 Images:
 
 I agree the dithered styled images are a nice design feature and adds a real
 charm to the site, particularly the colour categories flowing through to the
 article. However, you are right to concede that certain images don’t lend
 themselves well to this treatment - ie. your web page speed test image. For
 diagrams/tables etc SVGs or similar would allow technical details to be read
 clearly, even if you apply the same grayscale colour mapping (if feasible).
 
 Power bar:
 
 Although I don’t think I have any particular sensitivity to colours, I do find
 the colour hue across the article very distracting when trying to read and
 absorb the content (people who are particularly sensitive to this - often a
 characteristic of neurodiversity - will find it even harder). Perhaps consider
 limiting the overlay to the home page only, or (if feasible) to the article
 header bar only. A nice feature would be to have a day/night theme so people
 can select a contrast which is best for them - ensuring the site is accessible
 to a wider audience (and as someone else commented an added bonus OLED devices
 will use less power).
 
 Uptime:
 
 I do agree with the principle of 90% uptime, and it underlines the whole
 concept - adding additional panels and battery/storage, like you say, isn’t the
 point. However it would be interesting if you can determine if the downtime is
 likely to be off-peak or not. Clearly for yourselves and your readers within +/
 -2-3 hours GMT their peak times will be very similar and may well be a good fit
 to the site availability. A study of loading before a downtime could provide an
 indication of if a certain group of readers are inadvertently being excluded
 (due to geographical or demographical reasons). Longer term it may be possible
 to characterise the charging and the loading to allow the site to predict the
 best times to go offline in order to meet peak times (and provide forecasted
 downtimes during off-peak periods). I’m sure that would make an interesting
 project for some students looking at machine learning.
 
 Multisite:
 
 The multiple site location concept does introduce some excellent possibilities,
 since even one similar site elsewhere in the world could provide complete
 coverage with additional redundancy, while reducing overall power needs by
 sharing the serving of multiple sites. This does complicate the setup a little
 but it does provide the opportunity to grow the idea further. This could
 perhaps provide the opportunity to scale down the setup with smaller panels and
 battery. As mentioned before this could have very useful applications for the
 website-in-box concept where multiple setups could be meshed to cover an area.
 
 Energy storage:
 
 I wonder how feasible alternative energy storage systems would be. It would be
 interesting if eventually you could replace the need for the batteries
 completely by using kinetic storage or similar (I claim no knowledge on how
 practical this is and probably is not suitable for your setup).
 
 John
 
 Great site, but what software did you use to generate the site?
 
 You’ve given hardware details but no software.
 
 peter garner
 
 I’m truly inspired!
 
 I’ve already been running my web site on a Raspberry Pi for a couple of years
 now and it’s proved very economical. This morning I’ve managed to get my home
 page size down from 225Kb to 7.5Kb just by getting rid of “decorative” images
 and reducing the size of others. I found that some page loading speed can be
 recovered by using sprites, assembled using glue-sprite.
 
 If you didn’t want to serve images on-the-fly a potential low(er) energy option
 is to use a Gopher server. I also run one of these on a low-power Raspberry Pi
 and it’s very effective for serving documents of all types. I know it’s an old
 protocol but according to a recent survey there are 333 active gopherholes
 (servers).
 
 I plan to start setting up a solar-powered web/gopher server soon, but as I
 live in Yorkshire, UK, my sunlight hours are not quite as good as Barcelona!
 
 Thanks once again for a brilliant idea - it’s the future!
 
 Craig Balfour
 
 My name is Craig. I’m a big fan of what you’re doing with the Low Tech
 Magazine, and I love the idea of a solar powered website! The newsletter asked
 for feedback and suggestions, so I had a look if I could come up with any. This
 is all pretty rough, so I’m sure I’ve missed stuff, probably with
 responsiveness etc.
 
 Anyway, this is my feedback:
 
 Make battery meter a lot less in your face
 
 Love the idea of the battery indicator, but it’s so distracting when reading!
 When it’s low it also visually breaks the content and makes anything in the
 battery indicator look like a footer. Here’s how I’d change it:
 
 Align it right, not left.
 
 Make its width something like 64px so it’s just a bar at the side (in the new
 whitespace)
 
 Move the top border from the content to the battery div so it covers the top
 nicely.
 
 Lessen the “intensity” of the black on the readout. I found something around #
 333 to be quite nice, but just play around and see what looks nice.
 
 Also, when at smaller screen sizes, reduce it further and don’t bother with the
 icon, and maybe even the number.
 
 Centre content
 
 Wrap your page in a div with margin: 0 auto; max-width 960px; or something like
 this to keep it in a nice tidy column on the screen. Otherwise it looks a bit
 like a newspaper and is hard to follow.
 
 Font family
 
 Really not a fan of the serif font. Nothing wrong with Arial and co, or maybe
 even a mono font to get that typewriter feel? Idk. I think just the normal
 sans. This won’t increase network traffic, since it’s not sending fonts.
 
 Spacing
 
 I have changed the page layout from using lists to using divs with
 display:flex. It’s pretty powerful and a lot more flexible than ul. I think it
 will make life easier, and it’s much easier to get decent spacing around things
 like the nav.
 
 Logo
 
 I do think you need a logo. A simple SVG is pretty tiny, and it makes the site
 look heaps more professional. I made a quick one, but use whatever (use that
 one if you want, or make your own, but I think it needs something!)
 
 Sky background
 
 I stuck a simply CSS gradient as a background to resemble the sky (since it’s
 solar, it seemed nice). Not sure I like the gradient, but whatever. I did
 wonder about changing the background gradient by time of day. So at night where
 it’s hosted, it would have a black background, then moving into yellow then
 blue as the day goes on. Only on the body background, not the content
 background or it would just be annoying. But it shouldn’t be too hard. I think
 a gradient of black through yellow to blue scaled to something like 5000vh then
 offset based on the time. Shouldn’t be much Javascript. Might look super ugly
 or distracting though, so not sure it’s worth it.
 
 Image sizes
 
 There’s one image I found called sunnyday.png which is displayed at width 20px,
 but the image itself is 800px wide! This is not good. It’s a simple BW png so
 it’s small, but a simple SVG is still less than 10% of the size. Further, if
 you’re displaying images small on some pages and big on others, save two copies
 and only send the small one if you can. Storage is cheap, bandwidth (for you
 server) is not.
 
 Minify agressively!
 
 Ok, so I know how much we hate inlining, but it has its place. Not at the
 element level, but on the document level. The size of the files being sent is
 important, smaller files use less energy. However, the number of files is worth
 thinking about too. Sending a bunch of small files results in a server call per
 file, which can add up. Having a working copy of the site with all its separate
 files is a very good idea for building it, it’s SO much easier! But for the
 published one, I would think about minifying everything and putting your
 stylesheet contents in a style tag, using inline SVG for icons (this is a
 tradeoff, since they are duplicated when you use them again. And doing the
 “use” trick is not a whole lot better because it sticks them in an iframe-which
 means you’ve got another request anyway. But for small, one-hit images you
 could base64 encode them. For icons, make a stylesheet for just these and
 base64 encode the SVG itself, which is very small and doesn’t require hitting
 the server again.
 
 I minified my version of your homepage to be one file which includes your
 original css, my overrides, the html itself, and the logo image as a base64
 encoded svg. The whole thing is 41kb and loads instantly. It would only be one
 request to the server (the images on the page would all be their own, but
 there’s not much you can do about this. Base64 encoding them would make them
 larger, so best to leave as is)
 
 Also, you’re using jQuery. I would avoid that tbh. It’s a pretty big library,
 and all you’re doing is reading some JSON data, which you could do in a similar
 amount of code without needing to import jQuery at all. Until you rewrite that
 function, why not hotlink jQuery from a CDN? It will save your poor little
 solar server from transferring it each reques.
 
 Don’t hold open connections
 
 Your script for showing battery percentage etc holds an open connection the
 server. I get why you did, but I think until you’ve got your power problems
 sorted, just query it on page load, then close the connection. Just fire and
 forget. Otherwise your server is maintaining a heap more connections than it
 needs, wasting power.
 
 With something like this, you want your server to be doing as little as
 possible while still working. So anything the browser can do for you is
 fantastic. The use of image filters etc you’re doing is really great! Keep that
 up! Same goes for Javascript. So many effects can be done by the browser with
 some clever CSS. Try to avoid animating etc with Javascript when CSS will do
 fine. When you do need Javascript, try and avoid jQuery and other large
 libraries.
 
 Also, when you are querying things like the weather JSON data, where are you
 getting that from? Can you hit that directly rather than storing it on your
 server then hitting your own server?
 
 I know this seems like a lot, I hope it doesn’t come across as arrogant or like
 I don’t like what you’ve done. I am so impressed! I wish I could build
 something like this tbh. Just trying to throw some ideas around, and they
 hopefully some help. You’re more than welcome to use any of my suggestions or
 code, or simply throw it all away.
 
 I tried attaching my modifications etc but google doesn’t allow sending zip
 files, so here’s [165]a drive link.
 
 If that link doesn’t work I could try sending loose files.
 
 I’ve also attached some screenshots just because it’s easier to glance at them
 quickly.
 
 [166]http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad3b4657e200b-pi
 
 [167]http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad394c691200d-pi
 
 [168]http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad394c69e200d-pi
 
 [169]http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e88833022ad36e9bd0200c-pi
 
 All the best, and hope some of this helps.
 
 [Craig, thanks a lot, I hosted your screenshots on Typepad otherwise the
 colours won’t show, KDD]
 
 Posted by: Craig Balfour | September 28, 2018 at 04:29 PM
 
 Premkumar Masilamani
 
 Hi Team - I am impressed with the solar powered website running from the home.
 Congratulations. I disabled comments on my blog and used a contact form to let
 the visitors send a message to me. That was one portion of my blog which is
 hosted elsewhere. Your idea of asking the users to send email to get the
 comments is really well thought of. I am going to implement that in my blog.
 
  1. How feasible is it to put the email address on the webpage?. Are you net
     yet spammed?. Are you doing something on this front?.
 
  2. How are the emails converted as blog comments?. Is it a manual conversion
     or automated? If automated, could you tell us how?. I would like to
     implement that in my blog as well.
 
 Hans Fast
 
 Many congratulations on taking this step: making the statement, showing that
 it’s possible and even extremely attractive to build a website without all the
 weight we’ve come to accept. Loading this website is like a breath of fresh
 air. And your server performance under peak load speaks for itself!
 
 It’s clear that you’re doing more than publishing a website, it’s a
 demonstrator of the energy usage involved in serving a site. Respect for that.
 
 I would like to mention dat and Beaker browser again (mentioned at least once
 above). While making a point of letting the website go offline when the battery
 is empty is a powerful educational move, the various peer-to-peer protocols all
 overcome this limitation of the http model (I’m only familiar with dat).
 Publishing over both http and dat simultaneously is fairly straightforward and
 maintenance-free, so it adds little overhead. Then everyone who views your site
 rehosts it: if your server is offline, others can still access it via those
 peers. No need for the solar panels and battery or even the server, you can
 publish from your laptop. Even more (embodied) energy savings :)
 
 Of course, this is only practically true once all browsers speak peer-to-peer
 protocols .. and I believe a server is still needed for DNS resolution (so
 people can find the dat archive that belongs with solar.lowtechmaganize.com).
 In the meantime, fantastic work of public education going on here.
 
 iří Maha
 
 Hey guys,
 
 love your project of low energy consumption website.
 
 I have a two questions:
 
 Any use of versioning system for development? If not, how would xou scale such
 a project?
 
 How do you deploy? Simply copy files manually?
 
 Thanks and cheers from Czech republic,
 
 Jiří
 
 Nikolaus Bartke
 
 Wow, fantastic project, I‘m in love!
 
 I really like the literally spoken „background information“ about energy and
 weather.
 
 This makes a big difference in perception and creates awarenes in several
 respects!
 
 Pertaining the comment section, perhaps you can publish a timestamp, like when
 the mail was sent…
 
 Kris De Decker
 
 Hi all
 
 Sorry for the late reply and delayed publication of the comments.
 
 We will address all feedback in a forthcoming article.
 
 Greg Melton
 
 Many thanks to all the work that has gone into this site. On a personal level,
 it has inspired me to take up something along the same lines.
 
 I’m not a technical guy, but I did notice that solar.lowtechmagazine.com loaded
 quite quickly even over a dialup connection. Image dithering may have played a
 role in the fast load time and perhaps it also requires less cpu power to
 present the image
 
 in the browser. Power savings at the server and the browser.
 
 Although it is most likely not compatible with the goals of
 
 Lowtechmagazine, the Gopher protocol, I understand is also much less energy
 intensive. Perhaps a gopher server on the same machine could serve up a Gopher
 version of Lowtechmagazine.
 
 Adam
 
 Hi there,
 
 I love your solar powered project. Fantastic post about it too. One thing I
 noticed is that your dithered images can be even smaller file sizes if you run
 them through the tool at tinypng.com - I tried out a couple and it shaved 3-5kb
 off each image.
 
 I’m a designer/dev and even though there are lots of ways to squish images in
 gulp, photoshop and many other tools, I’ve found that the tinypng tool works
 brilliantly, there’s even a CLI you can use.
 
 Just to clarify, I have no links to tinypng, I just really rate their tool.
 
 In my job, I make a lot of static sites with lots of javascript scrolling
 effects and images so I’m always squishing and minimising to optimise
 performance but I’m still dealing with quite large page sizes so it’s great to
 see optimisation really pushed to the limit.
 
 I think it’s a really interesting project. I work in the news industry so
 taking pages down to the bare minimum is a really interesting idea, especially
 when you’re disseminating essential news in countries or situations where
 internet is sporadic at best.
 
 Fascinating stuff and I can’t wait to read how the experiment progresses.
 
 Thanks,
 
 Adam
 
 Brando
 
 Hi, I saw yesterday your solar website (via Hacker Newsletter), amazing
 experiment: probably if half the web would save on bandwidth the world could be
 a better place.
 
 Just a note, the dithered images are a nice hack but on my full HD screen are
 streched to the border and I think they would look better if you put a maximum
 width at 1080 px, also because the text doesn’t reach the borders (good) and
 the images are 800 px wide.
 
 I subscribed the RSS feed, you have some nice articles there but I’m really
 curious how your experiment will evolve. And also you let me think about the
 option to migrate my personal site from WordPress to a static generator like
 HUGO.
 
 All the best, Brando.
 
 N Bennett
 
 Hi,
 
 I just read your article on your new web-server approach. Besides your
 technical implementation, I really liked the way you reduced the web sites data
 footprint. It is so refreshing to see a website that concentrates on content,
 and is not overloaded with cookies, banners and whatsoever content I had to
 ignore otherwise. Websites nowadays are so overloaded with functionality and
 advertisement, which distracts from the actual content of interest. Thanks! I
 think, others should follow your approach as well. Clean, nice, and slick.
 
 Leon Stafford
 
 I’ve been a happy subscriber to Low Tech Mag’s newsletters for many years now
 and so glad to see web hosting addressed here, as it’s also my nice product at
 the moment. It allows WordPress sites to be published as static websites,
 perfect for then serving on a raspberryPi, as some users have reported doing.
 Depending on the size/load of the site, you can also generate it on the Pi, but
 I’d keep that stripped down as much as possible and just do static file serving
 from it. Almost every Pi owner has another computer that can run their WP site
 for the development part.
 
 Tom
 
 You guys are awesome! I’ve been following your blog for quite some time now, I
 think the first article I read was the one on velomobiles. As an IT student and
 sustainable, low-tech living-minded individual, let me tell you that your
 article on a low tech internet rang close to home. And now that I see that
 you’re working on an actual low-tech website, I can’t help but offer a helping
 hand. I’ve got a few ideas on how you could make comments work in an
 computationally-efficient manner, and how you could further trim down on page
 weight too, so anyways, hit me up if you could do with an extra pair of hands
 on board.
 
 Tomas
 
 Hi
 
 I saw your article on the sustainability of solar power [1], and I believe your
 argment is a bit off.
 
 Yearly insolation for PV purposes doesn’t vary as much with lattitude as you
 think, at least judging by the use of GHI in the article, which is very unfair
 to any installation outside 30°N-30°S or so.
 
 A more fair estimate is to use global normal irradiance (GNI), weighted by how
 much power loss is expected due to imperfect pointing [2]. If I do this for the
 solar installation I’m currently building I come up with the number 2500 kWh/
 year, for a 2750 W installation, based on data from the Swedish Meteorological
 and Hydrological Institute for my location.
 
 Whether this pans out remains to be seen, so take these numbers with some
 reservation :)
 
 There’s two other problems near the poles however: fewer sun hours in winter,
 and the distance between rows must increase. The latter isn’t a huge problem
 since land is much cheaper than PVs. The former is nicely covered by wind
 power, which is more plentiful in winter (but turbines must be quite large to
 be worthwhile).
 
 Apart from this I think most of your points are valid.
 
 Using nuclear power to produce PVs is something I’ve suggested to some
 environmentalists, and reactionaries pretending to be environmentalists, and
 neither of those have wanted to hear it.
 
 Tomas
 
 [1] [170]https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-sol
 
 ar-power.html
 
 [2] [171]http://solarpaneltilt.com/
 
 Rod
 
 I agree the “battery meter” is not clear. The battery is around 90% now and I
 kept wondering why the “white header bar” didn’t scroll off with the top of the
 page. I read near the top of page and I hate the visual distraction (on all
 websites). If the battery was 50%-80% I think I’d close the page. :/
 
 Why don’t you make it 5-10em wide on the left or right so that it will (most
 likely) fall outside of the text column?
 
 Or better yet make it a thin horizontal meter at the top or bottom?
 
 Nick
 
 Hi there!
 
 Very impressive project, especially in today world of overkill. And thank you
 very much for detailed instruction, I was planning on doing something similar
 myself on RPi.
 
 But I have one question about storage: you mention that you use SD cards. How
 long do they last for you? I had two cards die on me that were used as system
 storage on Pi. If yours last better would you mind telling me which ones do you
 use?
 
 Best regards, Nick.
 
 Rick Canfield
 
 Hello Kris,
 
 Really love the design and mentality behind the website, I think it’s the start
 of a new trend for all potential eco-friendly sites in the future. I can
 picture a coalition of energy saving sites existing with their own badge of
 honor.
 
 One thing I’d like to suggest or ask about, and maybe it’s something you guys
 have looked into, but whether inverting the site (dark background and light
 colored text) might not save more energy? I recall Google having an energy
 saving day many moons ago and they inverted the Google homepage to black for a
 day, saving a significant amount of power.
 
 I use a plugin Google Chrome plugin called Dark Reader, which helps invert the
 color of pages in a readable manner, more for the sake of reducing fatigue on
 my eyesight.
 
 It doesn’t make much of a difference with LCD screens, but would with CRT and
 OLED screens, (which OLED may be the way of the future). It may be good
 practice to start with. [172]https://www.quora.com/
 How-much-energy-would-be-saved-if-Google-used-a-black-screen-instead-of-white
 
 I’m just wondering if this something you all have considered. I commend the
 extensive endeavor, creating rare and unique online experiences I believe
 enhances authenticity.
 
 Abraham Palmer
 
 You might have heard this from others but there are many peer-to-peer and
 synchronization type of technologies that align completely with your goals. It
 allows people to share the hosting. The technologies haven’t crossed over to
 critical mass, but do appear close. I follow things like Holochain, DAT project
 and Beaker Browser, IPFS, and Scuttlebutt. You have already done all the hard
 work and so any mostly available can be replicated now globally with very low
 total energy usage. I need to get my own website and cloud hosted application
 converted over to one or more of these. I’m sure the extended community will be
 happy to help further if you need it.
 
 Ander Gomez
 
 I’ve seen that you used Armbian, that’s a good choice.
 
 Did you consider Alpine with the lbu mode? (r/o image with commits made from
 the user with “lbu commit -a”, will all the new stuff is written back to the sd
 image, which is the rootfs.
 
 optipng can optimize PNG images without losing too much quality.
 
 Finally, thanks for your low-power site inspiration :D
 
 Fred
 
 Your website is really excellent, bravo! And it is nice & practical to follow
 the rss. Just one (small) regret, there are no social links (you know, images
 where you may click to “bookmark” the page), on twitter (I like), facebook (I
 hate) or other social media.
 
 Alex
 
 Dear Lowtechmag Team, hello Kris,
 
 First of all thanks you very much for this really nice and interesting piece of
 work. I find it quite inspiring – and also a bit discomforting as it does push
 the what-is-possible quite a bit and is therefore making my everyday life (in
 big IT) definitely not easier. ;)
 
 Recently I‘ve had the chance to dive quite a bit into Progressive Web Apps
 (PWA) and Service Workers and while a lot of this is just hype (in my eyes),
 one thing struck out: with PWAs it is possible to make websites offline capable
 and cache resources in a way that goes way beyond Cache Headers in HTTP.
 
 I would like to explore this in the context of your website and for that
 already cloned you theme on Github and had a look.
 
 Of course it has turned out that things are not as easier as they seemed
 (because I have to learn how to setup pelican with your theme and plugins
 first) and so, before wasting time, I wanted to ask you if this would be of
 interest for your project?
 
 If yes, I would create a well documented Pull Request on Github and leave it up
 to you to decide whether or not you find it worth to merge it – but if you know
 this is nothing you would consider I would much rather not invest the effort.
 :)
 
 Please keep up the great work and publish more inspiring articles!
 
 Best regards from Berlin
 
 Alex
 
 Andy Jacobs
 
 I love the idea that you’re pursuing with the server and it clued me in to some
 great resources for open-source hardware and related projects.
 
 A couple thoughts on the comments section (and community). First, there are
 ways to accept comments, store them in git, then rebuild the site. Check out 
 [173]https://staticman.net/ which is designed for Gatsby.
 
 Secondly, there is a burgeoning movement called IndieWeb that allows people to
 comment, like, or RSVP to your posts from their self-hosted website. Your site
 can be notified using a “webmention” so that you know they’ve commented via
 their own website. Webmentions work a lot like trackbacks, but have some cool
 new features. [174]https://indieweb.org/Webmention
 
 Somewhat related ideas: how does hosting on IPFS or Dat align with your goals?
 In that way, the static resources are distributed among nodes, and would still
 be available from the mesh if your node goes down.
 
 Keep up the good work! Someone turned me on to your work from the Scuttleverse.
 
 LWATCDR
 
 Like the solar website layout but I agree that your site would use fewer
 resources if it was run on a cloud server. Modern cloud-based systems are very
 energy efficient. When no one is visiting your site you are still using power
 waiting for a request. On a cloud, that system is serving someone else’s site.
 Second, your solar powered site is not low tech. ARM-based SBC running Linux
 using PV solar is anything but low tech.
 
 I find it kind of funny that some of the same things you are using today I used
 20 years ago when I wrote my companies website. I was obsessed with making it
 work well over dial-up and used a lot of static pages. For example, I had a
 directory of people looking for work. It was a static page that was generated
 when someone added an entry.
 
 The dithering is kind of cool and retro looking but just not really worth it
 for informative sites.
 
 christian weber
 
 Hi Lowtech<-magazine Team,
 
 Great work with your new solar driven web-server. Even when my SBCs are mostly
 a bit more power-hungry, I like the concept of max out an A20. ‘Featured’ in
 the forum now. :)
 
 [175]https://forum.armbian.com/topic/8315-daily-tech-related-news-diet/?do=
 findComment&comment=64064
 
 I would love to see a short sum-up tutorial here as well (if time allows it):
 
 [176]https://forum.armbian.com/forum/26-research-guides-tutorials/
 
 You might get some hints when posting it again there how to improve consumption
 even more.
 
 Benjamin Henrion
 
 There might be a way to consume way less energy would be to use a mix
 
 of an openwrt router as an HTTP proxy caching the connections, and
 
 waking up a more powerful device, such as an Allwinner A20 board.
 
 Some Allwinner boards have a PMU chip that is well supported on
 
 Android kernels. But last time I looked at linux-sunxi.org, the
 
 suspend to ram supporting that chip was sparse.
 
 I have tried a setup with an openwrt router caching the pages, and
 
 that can wakes up an x86 PC with an SSD within 2 seconds with a WOL
 
 packet, and some iptables+tc delay magic.
 
 Andreas Kosmehl
 
 Hello,
 
 i read the article about image compression on your page.
 
 [177]https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html
 
 If you compress the image with [178]https://tinypng.com/,
 
 the image quality is better than dithering and the file is also small.
 
 Dithering is not so nice in the browser display when zoomed out.
 
 [179]https://homebrewserver.club/images/international-switchboard.jpg
 
 tiny.png from 163.3 KB (jpg) to 81.9 KB
 
 Dominic
 
 Thanks for this excellent post on a very interesting topic.
 
 I share your concerns about the increasing energy demand (not only) of the
 internet. Therefore using a purely solar power setup (except for the router…)
 is a pretty radical, yet very consequent (given the “low tech”) approach. In
 addition, to me it seems a bit like art :-)
 
 Coming from a job, which is all about power conversion and power management
 (funnily enough: for ARM based system) and having an interest into solar power
 applications for myself I could not stop myself from digging into the described
 and depicted solar charger and supply setup.
 
 I may well be wrong (having maybe searched for the wrong part, or maybe just
 found outdated information), but is it possible, that the charge controller is
 just a linear type with no MPP tracking? (I found this one:
 
 [180]https://wholesaler.alibaba.com/product-detail/
 CM2024-PWM-12v-24v-20a-solar_6 0099884539.html)
 
 In this case, the power being stored into the battery is not 50Wp, but just,
 say, 20Wp (depending on the way the solar panel is built/ internally
 connected).
 
 Opting for the (indeed) more complex technology of an MPP tracker, or at least
 simple switch mode step down converter (Solar -> Battery) could drastically
 increase the amount of power you can use for your setup or other
 
 household applications.
 
 Even if the charge controller was an MPP tracker, you might want to consider
 using one with a lower current rating. Using (massively) oversized supplies,
 
 can ruin (usually it does) the efficiency of such a switcher.
 
 In addition a separate step down converter from the solar panel directly to 5V
 for powering the server board might (depends on how’s it built) increase the
 efficiency of the system even further. The input of such a setup would
 
 be a (wired) OR (using a dual diode with a common cathode) from solar panel and
 12V lead acid battery then.
 
 Having built my own solar powered setup (for a clock and an USB charger/ 5V
 supply for all kind of stuff) I can highly recommend using some(!) more
 sophisticated parts. It really pays!
 
 I would also be interested in getting to know, which way the supply voltage
 (5V?) for the Olimex board is generated?!
 
 Best regards
 
 Dominic
 
 Pete
 
 I have seen your low-tech-website and when I have seen your “Room for
 improvements” section, I had some ideas, I want to share:
 
 Image Dithering:
 
 I am not sure, if you can use that for your website, but another day I stumbled
 upon thet project for compressing images: [181]https://github.com/FLIF-hub/FLIF
 
 According to the compression experiments we have performed FLIF files are on
 average:
 
 14% smaller than lossless WebP ,
 
 22% smaller than lossless BPG ,
 
 33% smaller than brute-force crushed PNG files (using ZopfliPNG),
 
 43% smaller than typical PNG files,
 
 46% smaller than optimized Adam7-interlaced PNG files,
 
 53% smaller than lossless JPEG 2000 compression,
 
 74% smaller than lossless JPEG XR compression.
 
 Another more popular image format is “WebP”:
 
 [182]https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/
 
 From description:
 
 " WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy
 images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM
 quality index. "
 
 Router for the internet connection (lower power consumption):
 
 I would expect, that a sort of ARM computer like RaspberryPi con do the job
 with less power comsumption. As most of them are only equipped with one NIC
 only, you hace serveral options to add a second network interface, which is the
 “clean” way for a router.
 
 a) use a USB to RJ45 network card and connect it to the USB port of the
 single-board computer.
 
 b) use a “Multiple Ethernet Expansion Board” [183]https://www.raspberrypi.org/
 forums/viewtopic.php?t=179904
 
 Look here for a example for RaspberryPi: [184]https://www.raspberrypi.org/
 forums/viewtopic.php?t=179904
 
 And here: [185]http://www.industrialberry.com/ethernetberry-v-1-1/
 
 SSL and Legacy browsers
 
 Should we maintain both HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site?
 
 In my opinion: A clear NO. There are a lot of linux distributions, that offer
 SSL compatible browsers with a very small footprint. So I will not trade in the
 security for old browser compatibility.
 
 Just my two cents - hope it helps,
 
 Pete
 
 Paul Clarke
 
 I like the idea of the dithering, especially combined with the idea of “print
 on demand” of articles or issues - let people have the high quality images if
 they really want them, but offline. Could perhaps do a paywall with high
 quality versions of the images? Not quite sure how it works with a static site
 but I will think on this. I like the dithering but think you do need to be sure
 you have the lowest file size if you’re going to have low quality images, I’m
 sure you’re on to this now.
 
 I also moved to a static site for my family tree site (using metalsmith) and
 don’t really have images on there at the moment, but will be taking some
 inspiration from here, muting my colours and adding in some low res black and
 white imagery while still trying to give it some style.
 
 Also inspired to reinstate my solar powered ambitions - I had a raspberry pi
 based webcam powered by motorcycle batter and solar battery charger, but could
 not keep it online for more than a few hours…
 
 I have a solution for searching articles while using a static site, for example
 [186]http://www.clarkeology.com/wiki/#solar/power - the (very simple, no
 dependencies) source is below, the minified version is inlined in the page.
 
 ‘(function (location, innerHTML, path, div, h2, folders, i) {
 
 function get (url, callback, request) {
 
 request = new XMLHttpRequest() // sorry ie6 etc
 
 request.open(‘GET’, url, true)
 
 request.onreadystatechange = function () {
 
 if (request.readyState == 4 && request.status == 200) { // eslint-disable-line
 eqeqeq
 
 callback(request.responseText)
 
 }
 
 }
 
 request.send()
 
 }
 
 function change (e, hash) {
 
 hash = location.hash
 
 if (!hash) return
 
 path = hash.substr(1)
 
 div = document.getElementsByTagName(‘div’)[0]
 
 h2 = ’’ + path.replace(/\W/g, ’ ‘) + '’
 
 // div.innerHTML === div[‘innerHTML’] and we passed in the string innerHTML
 
 div[innerHTML] = h2
 
 folders = [’/names’, ‘/gig’, ‘’]
 
 for (i in folders) {
 
 get(folders[i] + ‘/wiki/’ + path + ‘/’, function (content) {
 
 div[innerHTML] = div[innerHTML] + content
 
 })
 
 }
 
 }
 
 window.onhashchange = change
 
 change(location.hash)
 
 })(location, ‘innerHTML’)’
 
 Rob van der Zwan
 
 Dear Kris and team,
 
 First of all, thank you for many years of inspiring articles. Not only were
 they a joy to read, I have used the insights from them on many occasions in my
 own life (though admittedly I have trouble going through with all the radical
 steps required for sustaining this planet, because the mismatch with current
 societal structures makes it so hard to (ironically) sustain).
 
 Not only than that: I have shared specific topics on response to people asking
 for advice on buying something new, fixing an issue in the house, and many
 other cases were your articles can give inspiring alternative ideas¹.
 
 Which leads to my suggestion. The articles are great, but also very dense and
 often elaborate, giving historical contexts, developments, etc.
 
 My sister just got a new apartment. It is empty. That is a great opportunity to
 start fresh and do things right from the start! I am looking for one myself,
 and when the time comes I look forward to having the same opportunity. However,
 while I enjoy doing the research, the act of “optimisation” my lifestyle, so to
 speak, my sister represents the more typical case of simply not having the time
 to read the whole Low Tech Magazine archive digging for gold nuggets.
 
 While I’m already suggestion infrared heating, hooded chairs, Japanese-style
 insulated tables (forgot the name), putting thermal masses on sunny parts of
 her room, fireless cookers, pot skirts, but I know I’m missing lots.
 
 Now imagine an illustration of a house, featuring almost all of the ideas you
 ever wrote into one image. A counter-image to the stereotypical technologist’s
 House of the Future. A House of the Past for the Future, as it were.
 
 Add an image map (look it up, its forgotten but amazon old HTML technology)
 with links to articles and summaries of articles, and you have a something that
 lowers the treshold for people to start changing their lifestyles.
 
 Kind regards,
 
 Job van der Zwan
 
 ¹ for example, last week I shared the article on heated clothing with the owner
 of [187]https://www.sockmama.com/, who actually makes most of her money selling
 special socks in person on markets. Both as a suggestion for heated clothing
 for herself to keep warm in Christmas markets, as wel as promoting warmer and
 even heated clothing through selling the socks herself - she loved the idea and
 is looking into it!
 
 (Oh, BTW: I have donated to the project in the past and would like to again,
 but I’d like to do so directly per bank transfer. Is that a possibility? And
 I’ll try to make some time to contribute to that research into image dithering
 pipelines, but I can’t promise anything)
 
 Hunor Karamán
 
 Yo Kris,
 
 First of all good job on the carefully crafted magazine. I really enjoy the
 content and the whole way you handle this site!
 
 I don’t know if you intentionally haven’t done it, but sharing the site through
 Dat would be a good fallback for the times it’s down (because of the sun). If
 you’re not familiar with the protocol, I would happily help on that
 
 I’m just overall curious about your opinion on this.
 
 Michael
 
 I’m from Germany and read on an advertisement in the bus this afternoon about
 your website and that it goes out during bad weather. I believe that pointing
 out the last part that the websites sometimes shuts down delivers the wrong
 message about solar which is the biggest argument for coal and other dirty
 forms of energy.
 
 The argument that you can’t store solar energy. But it is possible to store
 energy with batteries. Have you thought about buying one so that your website
 doesn’t shut down? Like a Tesla power wall or something. It would deliver a
 much better picture about the sustainability and availability of solar power.
 
 Thanks for reading my thoughts on this small topic.
 
 Ploc
 
 Hi,
 
 I’ve been very interested in reading your article named “How to build a
 Low-Tech website: Software & Hardware” :
 
 [188]https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#
 compression-of-transmitted-data
 
 I’m also involved in generating static website and I’m surprised that you
 confifured your server to gzip resources on-the-fly. As the website is static,
 and already generated, the result og gzipping is a predictable process and can
 then be done at the static website generation step.
 
 This would consume less cpu on the server than compressing of the fly, and
 hence save energy.
 
 What do you think of that?
 
 Jan Fabry
 
 Hello,
 
 One small CPU improvement for nginx: if you use the gzip_static module, you can
 serve precompressed files, instead of letting the server gzip the requests on
 the fly every time. This should save some CPU cycles.
 
 [189]https://nginx.org/en/docs/https/ngx_https_gzip_static_module.html
 
 You would need to change the Pelican workflow to also create .gz versions of
 the content that can be compressed, but that can’t be too hard.
 
 Regards,
 
 Jan Fabry
 
 Dave Evans
 
 Hey there!
 
 Just a quick word to say hi and that I really appreciate the project that
 you’re working on. I’ve been a HBSC mailing list lurker for a while as I too am
 interested in self hosting a low power solutions to hosting and creating
 networks.
 
 I’m actually doing a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London speculating on the
 relationship between historical
 
 asceticism (hermits, monks, austere protestant living) and networks, looking
 for clues to how reimagine the network at a more human scale (I’m not religious
 in the slightest, but the link between how monks etc dealt with the vastness of
 their God and how we might cope with the vastness of the web seemed like a
 nice, perverse lens to look at the
 
 internet!).
 
 Anyhow. I’ve made some solar wireless local area networks (the most recent in a
 community permaculture garden in a train station). I’m also just trying to get
 a raspberry pi running as a home server to host my research. What web server do
 you use for the magazine? I used apache as it was what I’ve been used to, but
 would be interested in
 
 alternatives (although I studied printmaking and sculpture so am on a steep
 technical learning curve these days!).
 
 I have presented at various international conferences and written some stuff
 about the relationship between asceticism and the internet at the address below
 - and would love to publish to your magazine if you think it might be
 appropriate.
 
 [190]https://independent.academia.edu/DaveEvans19
 
 Keep up the good work - I will follow with interest!
 
 Best wishes from Liverpool,
 
 Dave
 
 Raúl
 
 Hi Kris,
 
 your project just boom me!
 
 I am a webdesign freelance from Madrid mountains that works to transform
 internet into something more simple. I also use portable solar panels to work
 on the woods.
 
 If you need some collaboration or help with the project please contact me! you
 can check here some of my portfolio [191]https://lapatineta.com/en/portfolio
 
 hasta luego!
 
 Raúl
 
 Mikoláš Štrajt
 
 Hi,
 
 I just found link to Low tech magazine on Hackers news.
 
 I really enjoy the articles because I am interested in both old technology and
 solar punk.
 
 I also enjoy the somewhat controversial design element - dithering of images.
 
 But - sometimes dithering the images makes them “unreadable”. For example some
 of those wood carvings in article about ropeways ([192]https://
 solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01/
 aerial-ropeways-automatic-cargo-transport-for-a-bargain.html). Even worse is
 map at article about high speed trains ([193]https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
 2013/12/high-speed-trains-are-killing-the-european-railway-network.html) - this
 probably should stay as is, because it’s already PNG with limited color set.
 
 Anyway I really like your site. I hope there will be enough light/battery to
 stay online at weekend. :-)
 
 Also If you need some photos of obsolete tech (steam trains, old tramways etc)
 I can look for it in my archives. I visit transport themed events quite often.
 
 greetings from Prague by
 
 –
 
 Severák
 
 [194]https://tilde.town/~severak/
 
 PS: now after some 30 years we have again trolleybuses (in trial operation) in
 Prague
 
 They did presentation with old vehicle from musem on new track.
 
 My photos from that event: [195]https://www.zonerama.com/metropolis/303066
 
 Paul Laborde
 
 Hello,
 
 I read your article from France and I love your idea.
 
 I tried few time ago to create this kind of machine for an automated solution
 in gardens.
 
 Maybe I can share some ideas :
 
 Add a proxy page when your server is down a temporary offline page can be
 displayed
 
 How is user traffic ? Wan you maybe integrate directly a cellular connectivity
 instead of optical fiber ? (like Soracom)
 
 This new connectivity allow to move server to original hosting zones (trees,
 mountains, etc)
 
 Maybe you can add an power indicator about battery capacity and solar level
 with a downtime estimation ?
 
 A super light server with ESP8266 could be original too
 
 I just discovered your website, it’s great !
 
 N Valova
 
 Hello, Kris.
 
 I’ve just come across Lowtechmagazine project, thanks to a reshare of a friend
 on Mastodon.
 
 The idea behind your project is wonderful, and it’s valuable that you provide
 RSS subscription (thank you).
 
 The project is also broadcasting on Twitter. The big Twitter with fat data
 centres. Have you heard of Mastodon? It’s one Fediverse project - a
 twitter-like federating platform.
 
 To be honest, Mastodon relies on modern web technologies, so it can’t be easily
 hosted at home on a small computer. But there are other interconnected projects
 (for example, Pleroma) that are more ligthweight and can be hosted “on a
 potato” some users say.
 
 Self-hosting. Could this topic be of interest to you, in the context of what
 you’re writing about?
 
 I don’t know whether self-hosting one’s social media can possibly decrease
 energy consumption worldwide… May be? If people start paying small ammounts of
 money for energy (self-hosting) or to friends-administrators who will do the
 server work for them, perhaps people will re-evaluate their social network
 habits? When there’re no big companies providing “free” unlimited server space,
 and no algorithms showing constant ads with brands telling you to buy this and
 that “because fashionable”, perhaps, users will stop over-consuming and learn
 once again how to have meaningful online conversations.
 
 Please, consider joining Mastodon (Fediverse generally). There are ways to
 automatically post from Mastodon to Twitter ([196]https://
 crossposter.masto.donte.com.br) Many people follow your project on Twitter. I’m
 sure there are also people among fedizens who will be glad to read you on
 Fediverse. Perhaps even some of your Twitter followers will eventually join. :)
 
 Sylvain Couhault
 
 Hello,
 
 I loved your low tech website and think you’ve done e real great job.
 
 Since I’ve read the “Room for Improvements” section I’ve got some ideas to
 share with you that, I hope, will help you to go further:
 
 -Images: Did you try the “.GIF” format ? You can use it for static picture
 limited to 256 colors. It is supported by most of internet browsers. [197]
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
 
 -SSL ciphers: if there aren’t any sensible or personnal datas on the website,
 maybe it’s not needed to maintain HTTPS. The new General Data Protection Rules
 requires Ciphered content only if you use personnal datas. For full public
 datas, it’s not mandatory I think.
 
 Nevertheless it would need to be tested on different internet browsers because
 some of them are blocking sites or displaying security warnings when not in
 HTTPS (Google Chrome mainly). I think Google Chrome plans to block non HTTPS
 website in the longterm future but for the moment it works and other browsers
 will still allow it in the future. Maybe the best way is to test your site with
 HTTP (no S) with different browsers (Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Microsoft Edge,
 Brave … ), see how it displays (warnings and so on ..) and to inform people
 about the browser they can use to watch your site and the warnings they could
 encounter.
 
 -Energy sources: maybe you can combine the solar panel with a little wind
 turbine (thus you can still collect power even with bad weather. It’s less
 efficient than solar panel, but in combination it could be useful to keep along
 a few hours or days without sun). I think this can be coupled with your battery
 system (with some other components to avoid interference between solar panel
 and wind turbine) Here are some examples:
 
 [198]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBx3O55lTDw
 
 [199]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2XEQZsXcIg
 
 I hope these ideas will help you :)
 
 Regards,
 
 Sylvain
 
 Adrien CLERC
 
 Hi,
 
 I read [200]https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html and I was
 
 interested by your image compression techniques.
 
 I would like to give you two ways of optimizing more aggressively.
 
 Optimizing JPEG
 
 ==========
 
 If you want to keep the same quality of the input image, here are my
 
 best experience : use Guetzli (first) and MozJPEG (after Guetzli). The
 
 first one (see [201]https://github.com/google/guetzli/) is destructive, and
 
 produce a different image, but with the exact same perceptual result for
 
 our human eyes. The second (see [202]https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg) is a
 
 fork of JPEGTurbo with aggressive optimization without any change to the
 
 final results.
 
 So here are the two steps with your original image
 
 ([203]https://homebrewserver.club/images/international-switchboard.jpg):
 
   • guetzli international-switchboard.jpg international-switchboard.g.jpg
 
   • jpegtran -outfile international-switchboard.g.m.jpg
 
 international-switchboard.g.jpg
 
 I have the following resulting images:
 
 156721 nov. 22 10:55 international-switchboard.g.jpg
 
 135206 nov. 22 10:56 international-switchboard.g.m.jpg
 
 163314 nov. 22 10:54 international-switchboard.jpg
 
 Optimizing PNG
 
 =========
 
 If you have PNG (from ditherised images), you can use zopflipng. This
 
 tool (see [204]https://github.com/google/zopfli/) tries to find the best
 
 combinations for a PNG, and achieves better result than optipng.
 
 One step from your 11 color image
 
 ([205]https://homebrewserver.club/images/international-switchboard11.png):
 
   • zopflipng -m international-switchboard11.png
 
 international-switchboard11.z.png
 
 I have the following resulting images:
 
 111255 nov. 22 10:59 international-switchboard11.png
 
 106772 nov. 22 10:58 international-switchboard11.z.png
 
 Conclusion
 
 ======
 
 With the original JPEG, I have a 17.3% improvement, using only JPEG.
 
 This image is still 21.5% larger than your 11-color PNG.
 
 With the 11-color PNG, I have a 4.1% improvement. This is not so much,
 
 but still significant.
 
 Note that guetzli needs a lot of memory and CPU. Other tool are more
 
 lightweight.
 
 Have a nice compression day,
 
 Adrien
 
 Erick Lavoie
 
 I have read your magazine over the years and I have found tremendous
 
 value in your writings. I occasionally give workshops for kids in which
 
 I want to introduce principles of low-tech and alternative energies
 
 using Lego and custom parts, partly inspired by some of the ideas you
 
 have articulated so well.
 
 I have just read “How to Build a Low-tech Website” and couldn’t help
 
 wonder whether you have thought of using decentralized technologies to
 
 distribute your content. The main advantage is that your server does not
 
 need to be online all the time for content to be accessible, it can be
 
 distributed by your readers themselves. We could even imagine hosting
 
 availability following the day cycle around the Earth to reduce the need
 
 for energy storage, i.e. people could pull their content from places
 
 that are currently sunny.
 
 Some friend of mine has started to build their own magazine with the
 
 Beaker Browser [1]. I have personally been using Secure-Scuttlebutt [2],
 
 which has a mobile application in the works [3], and I am currently
 
 actively participating in the community. Obviously most of your readers
 
 are currently not using either one of those so that is not a viable
 
 replacement to web hosting now. But I think they could still be part of
 
 a future analysis in an article and a potential progressive transition
 
 as more people adopt them. I also think you would fit right in with the
 
 ethos of the current SSB community, so I would be glad to get you
 
 on-board and introduce you to people if your are interested.
 
 Cheers,
 
 Erick
 
 [1] [206]https://beakerbrowser.com/
 
 [2] [207]https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
 
 [3] [208]https://www.manyver.se/
 
 Terry
 
 Hello Kris, Roel and Marie,
 
 Very cool project for the WebServer.
 
 I am even more interested how you run the office (light and what i guess is an
 good old IBM Thinkpad) on solar power.
 
 Are you charging the Battery of the Laptop or are you running it without
 battery direkt through solor / or batterythat is loaded through solar panel.
 
 Could you share the experiance please?
 
 Or give the details on the “electric” hardware you use?
 
 Thank you very much in advance.
 
 I plan on doing similar and wonder what Solarpanel and PowerControler/Battery
 controler to use.
 
 Best regards
 
 Terry
 
 Arne
 
 The gatling webserver is especially resource efficient.
 
 [209]http://www.fefe.de/gatling/
 
 It’s author uses it for his own blog (blog.fefe.de), which has a wide
 
 readership but was hosted on very old hardware until recently.
 
 Léo
 
 Hi,
 
 I find your solar website amazing!
 
 Compressing a page is quite demanding for the CPU so your server may use even
 less power if you cache a compressed version of your pages.
 
 Basically, you just need to tweak your nginx configuration and generate a .gz
 for each page, which is very easy to script. Then, for each request, nginx will
 use the .gz file and avoid recompressing the page. If the browser does not
 support compression, the .html file is served.
 
 This blog post describe the all process https://www.carnaghan.. Here is the
 official documentation of the module [210]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ which
 seems to be installed in every version of the debian nginx package.
 
 Best regards,
 
 Léo
 
 Viga
 
 I just stumbled upon your website, and I really love the idea.
 
 However, I will agree with a lot of the comments about the battery indicator.
 It fails both on conveying the message (it is far from obvious what it
 represents) and at making a user-friendly website.
 
 At first it got me to not even attempt reading past the introduiction. It is
 that annoying. I enentually came back because I al really interrested in the
 project, but was annoyed constantly during my reading.
 
 It is also marked with a sun icon, wich doesn’t map to “battery” in my mind, so
 the meaning of it may get lost. 
 
 I understand that you want to convey the message that it isn’t a standard
 website, and the dithered images do that pretty well (with the caveat of graphs
 and tables, as others noted), but the battery meter in its current state isn’t
 the way to go.
 
 Also, did you consider minifying the html/js source? Just stripping whitespace
 and comments from the javascript saves a bit more than 2kb per page load. You
 could go further than this by stripping whitespace, comments, and mangling
 variable names in the whole html/js. I do understand why you wouldn’t want to
 do it, as it closes the code by obfucating it, but the CSS is already minified,
 so you may not consider this as an issue.
 
 Also, as I read this articles and comments today (jan. 25th, 2019), I have no
 way when they were published, which is a context I really would like to have
 when writing this comment. I believe it would be a nice addition to the site.
 
 Viga
 
 Sebastian Furnigel
 
 Hi,
 
 Your project got our attention and we’re thinking about what would it take to
 make a similar project.
 
 Therefore, I’m curious about
 
 the solar cell used – we’re considering a 230w cell;
 
 the raspberry model and what aspects were optimized on it;
 
 and the battery pack used – which direction did you follow for battery metrics?
 
 Your project is a real head-turner and it would be really interesting to have
 some insight into how yours was done.
 
 Thank you and have a nice day,
 
 Sebastian Furnigel
 
 Kyle Norton
 
 I absolutely love the solar-powered website. I love the design, I love the
 concept.. I want to try and build one of my own here in Austin, Texas.
 
 If I can toss out a suggestion … I love the battery level indicator, but I
 would also love to see an indicator of local time and if the site is operating
 on solar or battery power.
 
 Jim Morgan
 
 I’ve recently had problems with aggressive searchbots on some websites I run.
 Up to 80% of the bandwidth of the webserver was from bots! I imagine if you
 reduced or blocked bots on your site, you’d also see some energy savings. 
 
 To combat this, you can create a ‘map’ in nginx, whereby you ban or rate-limit
 bots matching a certain regex pattern. 
 
 eg. In the main nginx.conf
 
 map $http_user_agent $limit_bots {
 
     ~*Baiduspider 'baidu';
 
     default '';
 
 }
 
 limit_req_zone $limit_bots zone=badbots:5m rate=10r/m;
 
 Then in the actual website config in the server{} stanza
 
 rate limit for poorly behaved bots
 
 limit_req zone=badbots;
 
 Monitor the error.log to see crawlers getting banned.
 
 Jim Morgan
 
 Aleksandar Milovac (Александар Миловац)
 
 Hi,
 
 Maybe this can help to get more accurate result of battery status, temp, etc…
 
 [211]https://github.com/KoljaWindel
 
 Br,
 
 Aleks
 
 RC
 
 I suspect 99% of power consumption for solar.lowtechmagazine.com is from
 regular kernel book keeping. From what I read, using less ticks per second for
 the HZ variable in Linux or enabling NO_HZ should reduce power even more. I’m
 not particularly knowledgeable in this, but I do admire the direction of your
 website as tech companies build websites only for people who buy the latest
 products, and for everyone to use the latest unmaintainable codebases.
 
 As I read this, it looks like your five week uptime may finally fail.
 
 Chris
 
 Hello,
 
 I’ve came across your website today and like your minimal attitude to web
 design pretty much. It is quite a contrast to the bloated webpages we are used
 to today (the performance improvement is even very noticable when using a quite
 fast connection - 1000mbps at work / 100mbps at home) and I think the web would
 be a lot more enjoyable if more pages were built like that.
 
 I’ve read the article about the webserver configuration [1] and got a
 suggestion for a configuration change to the nginx configuration. As it wasn’t
 listed there in the improvement list you might not be aware of this already.
 There is a configuration item called “gzip_static on” [2] which does tell nginx
 to simply deliver precompressed files from the webroot (so if requesting
 “index.html” it does send “index.html.gz”)
 
 Pre-Compressing the Webpages when updating the site and shipping these
 compressed versions should decrease cpu load and therefore energy consumption
 of the Server as the computation for the compression is only necessary one time
 when updating the page and not for every request. You might even use a higher
 compression level for this one-time task (though with gzip bumping the level
 from 6 to 9 doesn’t improve the compression ratio a whole lot in my experience
 - at least with my usual datasets)
 
 I’ve got no idea how much of a difference this does make - especially as there
 is quite a bit of processing necessary for the https encryption but it might be
 worth a try.
 
 Kind regards,
 
 Chris
 
 [1] [212]https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#software
 
 [2] [213]http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_gzip_static_module.html
 
 David Galeano
 
 Hi,
 
 I think your solar powered server project is very interesting and I may have a
 couple of suggestions.
 
 I think you could improve performance when serving static files by using the
 open file cache: [214]https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#
 open_file_cache
 
 The size of PNG files depends heavily on the compressor used and the contents
 of the image. I found zopfli to be the best compressor: [215]https://github.com
 /google/zopfli/blob/master/README.zopflipng
 
 Also the PNG format is very good at compressing images with vertical patterns
 because each row can be stored as a delta of the previous one, not sure how
 that could help you but for example in the past I found that just by rotating
 the image 90 degrees it became a lot smaller.
 
 Anyway, hope any of this helps.
 
 Kind regards,
 
 David
 
 Matisse VerDuyn
 
 The goal of this project is great!
 
 A while ago, I put together [216]https://github.com/matisseverduyn/aureum with
 a similar goal in mind. The concept stemmed from two objectives:
 
 1.) The sole purpose of a website is to provide content, and to be useful, that
 content must be “comfortably readable” (on any device), and
 
 2.) It’s critical, for many reasons, to minimize data transfer (through the
 elimination of all non-essential HTML tags / attributes, and all CSS classes,
 especially those that are merely there to indicate visibility toggling).
 
 Aureum helps to display “comfortably readable” information on all screen sizes
 (including both very large projector screens and very small displays, like
 smartwatches), and does so with only 3kb of minified CSS. I guess it could be
 considered a “reset file”, but as I’ve actually used it on a few projects
 without adding much additional CSS, that classification might not convey its
 benefits with much justice.
 
 It seems that “certain devices” which may not support features such as CSS
 media queries are a concern of your current design (“keep the blog accessible
 for visitors with older computers”)? If not, I hope that Aureum is useful to
 your project. As another commenter Anja mentioned, having sites load quickly
 (or at all) under really low-bandwidth is both environmentally sensible and a
 pleasant relief (and quite a surprise to come across).
 
 Thanks for what you’ve done here,
 
 Matisse
 
 sune Petersen
 
 Hello Low Tech Magazine.
 
 What are your thoughts on IPFS and DAT?
 
 Have you thought about putting a mirror of your site up on these protocols?
 
 Götz Hildebrandt
 
 Dear de Decker,
 
 reading about your low tech magazine, and the solar powered server.
 
 is thier a plan to enable hosting on that server, or clustering with several
 servers world wide,
 
 that works on the same way - low tech as yours?
 
 For most web site no interpreting language is need, data access is neeed yes
 but that is all.
 
 C++ as server side language is for common cases enough. (for mine it is)
 
 what are your plans?
 
 Greetings from Germany
 
 Ruben
 
 Hi!
 
 Your article on your setup is great, but I was surprised that you don’t
 precompress your pages, images, etc and serve it with nginx, using the option
 “gzip_static on”.
 
 It would be better on your CPU (you’d have to just compress once) and
 
 you could use the strongest compression possible. Would be good for
 
 speed as well, as nginx will be able to sent the page right away,
 
 without waiting for the slow arm CPU to compress it.
 
 Just my two cents!
 
 Cheers,
 
 Ruben
 
 Brian Sutherland
 
 Hi, Kris:
 
 Cool website, and one I may be discussing in my PhD thesis on DIY sustainable
 IT and electronics design.
 
 I suggest that instead of batteries you use a graphene supercapacitor array.
 Buy it once, it lasts for 10-20 years, and the system can recharge 1,000,000
 times without wearing out. No heavy or toxic metals, just carbon, plastic and
 aluminum. Just be careful about insulating it properly if you stack it into 12
 volts rather than 5 volts and use the appropriate cell balancing kit to ensure
 the capacitors charge evenly.
 
 Also, if your site mirror was in a different time zone with the sun shining, it
 would never need to go offline, but it would still be 100% solar powered. Fibre
 optics being light don’t need much power to send information far.
 
 +1 to 117) Ruben’s suggestion to use the gzip standard for webpages to reduce
 the storage and data transfer.
 
 I’m not certain I agree that static HTML pages make for a significant power
 saving compared to dynamically generated pages since the CPU still needs be
 running on the storage requests and it writes requests into a log file, that’s
 not much different from a web page call.
 
 Complements to your awesome city: my spouse and I visited a few years ago. We
 enjoyed the art and culture, especially the architecture, and I’ve been
 following Francisca Bria’s digital citizenship work very closely.
 
 Paul Geraghty
 
 Hi,
 
 I followed with interest the Olimex link to your pages (via twitter and
 @EENewsEurope)
 
 Fine work, this board might be a solution for a problem I have too.
 
 However, being an ex-LAMP dev kinda guy, with experience of caching I noted
 with interest you do not seem use a memcache.
 
 Heres a link to more info:
 
 [217]https://blog.octo.com/en/http-caching-with-nginx-and-memcached/
 
 I used to do similar on a .gov website for certain common webpages like home
 page etc.
 
 But this was 10+ years ago using PHPs own memcache on Apache, so I cannot
 really help you much more.
 
 In effect, this loads, for example, your html in MEMORY so you are not
 constantly pulling from your sd card. You just need to flush the ram every time
 you update your page, or it will do it when the SBC reboots, or you can set a
 time limit, I used to use hourly.
 
 Sorry if my ignorance of SBCs is lacking, and what I am saying is not doable -
 eg more ram is a no-go, or even if the idea of ram does not translate to the
 SBC world. Your the sample nginx config seems to show you are not using this.
 
 Just thought I’d share that with you in case it leads to something positive.
 
 Thanks again for the detailed write-up.
 
 Shelby Marvell
 
 I’m thinking of making my raspberry pi a super low-power server… Just wondering
 if you had done any more to improve it since this article: [218]https://
 homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html
 
 And had a suggestion to maybe reduce image size. GIFs? They take dithering
 really well… But I know PNGs are compressed at varying strengths. And now I
 need to find a way to use a solar battery or something for powering it…
 
 Nicolai
 
 Hello,
 
 I love your site! It’s pushed me to make actual changes in my life.
 
 Here are some small changes you can make to improve your https
 
 configuration to maintain (or increase) security while also using less
 
 electricity.
 
 First, on the server itself, type these commands and compare the output:
 
 openssl speed aes-128-gcm
 
 openssl speed aes-256-gcm
 
 openssl speed chacha20-poly1305
 
 Since your server’s CPU (ARM Cortex A7) doesn’t support accelerated
 
 AES, chacha20-poly1305 should be SIGNIFICANTLY faster (possibly 10x
 
 faster) which means less electricity usage. Similarly, aes-128-gcm
 
 should be a bit faster than aes-256-gcm. In the real world, in actual
 
 TLS usage, aes-256 doesn’t solve a problem that aes-128 doesn’t.
 
 So, you should configure nginx to support and prefer only these ciphers:
 
 chacha20-poly1305
 
 aes-128-gcm
 
 aes-128-cbc
 
 You don’t even need aes-256. For ECDH curves, you also don’t need
 
 secp521r1 or secp384r1. Even google.com, which is famous for not
 
 wanting to lose any users, doesn’t support these curves. You should
 
 just support x25519 and P-256 (aka secp256r1).
 
 Finally, making ECDSA signatures requires less power than making RSA
 
 signatures. So switching from an RSA cert to an ECDSA cert would
 
 lower your electrical usage.
 
 Hope this helps, and thanks again for your outstanding website!
 
 Artūrs Pupausis
 
 Intresting project for sure!
 
 When speaking of server efficiency. Old 40nm SoC isn’t the way to go. PNG could
 be optimized by PNGgauntlet or use webp but I guess it only supports 24bit
 colors. Brolti compression is more efficient than gzip. CSS, HTML & JS can be
 minifyed before compression. One commented about Flif but it isn’t optimized
 and not natively supported in browsers.
 
 Combining multiple websites on one server to uses hardware more effectively.
 SPF+ uses less power for given amount of data compared 100m nic. From a larger
 server waste heat can be recovered for water heating or room heating in winter.
 Waste heat can be recovered from waste water drain as well as that water can be
 reused for toilet. 10nm ARM server uses far less power for the same work
 compared even to latest Intel offers.
 
 Even better if it is running on hybrid solar PV system with a small battery
 backup plus optimized PV system with minimal conversion of electricity.
 
 Lastly reusing certain parts of servers like a case and hard drive
 Remanufacturing instead of shredding could help reduce emissions of the
 internet.
 
 Speaking of printed version depending on the tech used on paper production,
 weight, shopping, power source, raw material, disposal & etc. Typical sheet of
 A4 paper uses ~50 watt hours of energy or more. While reading on modern
 smartphone for one hour takes Less than a watt hour, but it quickly changes if
 done on a laptop or older desktop with multiple monitors. But does not include
 cradle to grave impact of hardware and software used for it Also it would need
 to be divided by all other stuff used on computer.
 
 Amos Blanton
 
 I thought I’d share my solar powered website as it stands, along with
 
 the offer of any help I can give should anyone run into problems I might
 
 be able to help with.
 
 [219]http://solar.amosamos.net/
 
 ([220]https://gitlab.com/Lightnin/amosamos.net)
 
   • It uses an ina219 to measure the state of the battery (Thanks Roel!)
 
   • I’m experimenting with changing the background image depending on the
 
 weather. I’m intrigued by the idea of physically situated servers tied
 
 to their place in space.
 
 I have yet to tackle the data optimization or server customization and
 
 caching, and logging the power usage to look at trends / see if I can
 
 cope with a Danish winter (unlikely at this point). And I am proxying to
 
 my site on nearlyfreespeech.net [221]http://nearlyfreespeech.net when the
 
 pi is down. I’m rather attached to uptime at the moment as I am looking
 
 for new opportunities in the realm of playful learning and sustainability.
 
 Thanks for to you all for making this list / club, and for your
 
 contributions to solar.lowtechmagazine.com
 
 [222]http://solar.lowtechmagazine.com and associated documentation - which
 
 I found to be really inspiring.
 
 Best,
 
 Amos
 
 Petar Marinov
 
 Hello,
 
 I’ve been reading articles when you post on lowtechmagazine.com and I like how
 your photos look (and how little space they take). I’ve spent some time
 attempting to replicate the dithering effect of my own photos by I couldn’t
 make it look like in lowtechmagazine.com.
 
 Could you please share what is the command-line (imagemagic) which you use to
 produce your photos?
 
 –pe
 
 [223]https://github.com/pmarinov
 
 Roel Roscam Abbing
 
 Hello,
 
 We wrote a Pelican plugin for it.
 
 You can find the code here:
 
 [224]https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/rra/page_metadata
 
 greetings,
 
 Roel
 
 Stephen Henderson
 
 You forgot to subtract, car trips to library, record store, theaters, not
 watching TV, delivering newspapers, producing paper. The internet is an
 extremely efficient, fast, decentralized way off transferring information
 compared to other methods. Therefore your premise of the Internet as a carbon
 problem is just not true, it’s a large savings.
 
 If there was simply a fair carbon tax on on everything producing carbon they
 would all use renewable energy. A server farm produces NO carbon using
 electricity from an utility. The utility produces carbon because they burn the
 fossil fuels to supply a server farm. ALWAYS, atack a problem at it’s source.
 
 A fair carbon tax is just so simple it makes you sick to think it’s not
 implemented.
 
 rockyIII
 
 Hello,
 
 Thanks for your very interesting website.
 
 I´m reading “How to Build a Low-tech Website?“ with lots of attention.
 
 I also have read on several other places (e.g. [225]https://developer-blog.net/
 raspberry-pi-mit-sonnenenergie-betreiben-teil-4/) that the needed emeryfor a
 singelborad computerdoes not so much depend on the use of given capacity… so
 even so astatic web page is faster and needs less energy we could still
 consider to build also dynamic pages…
 
 That said – I really like the design of [226]https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
 but it limits us by using some interesting functions if we think of interactin
 websites, which is a feature that becomes more and more important.
 
 You seem to have no problem to use Facebook and twitter - but this use is a
 contradiction to your project I want to to address here.
 
 Have you heard of the “Fediverse”?
 
 [227]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
 
 and the decentralized networking options? This is a very interesting option
 which would be interesting to integrated in the Low-tech website project too.
 
 Here I want to recommend the project Hubzilla.
 
 [228]https://hubzilla.org
 
 You can run it in a PHP environment.
 
 Hubzilla has a function called „normadic identity“. With this function you can
 clone and transfer network accessibility from one to an other server. If one
 server is down, the other server takes over the job and can do the work. So
 this concept would allow downtime for a solar driven websites even so
 functionality of connections would still be working. You jut have to find few
 partners - self hosted severs, spread all over the world, each powered by solar
 power, to have a 100% up time. This would be an other innovative concept for a
 low tech website ;-)
 
 What do you think?
 
 all the best
 
 chris
 
 Tom Sparks
 
 For static comments, you could look at [229]https://mademistakes.com/articles/
 jekyll-static-comments/ it is jekyll centric but you should be to adapt it to
 use with Pelican.
 
 stilbruch
 
 Greetings,
 
 First off, I just want to say how much I absolutely love the lowtechmagazine
 website. I’m a member of tilde.town, and me and some other members were talking
 about the site today. We all enjoy the special attention that is paid to design
 and sustainability. However, the one thing that many of us find slightly
 annoying about using the site is the presence of the yellow line through the
 articles indicating the battery of the site. The site would be much easier to
 read in my opinion, if simply the battery level, or perhaps a bar indicating
 the level, were presented on the page. Thanks so much for putting out this
 amazing content!
 
 Hayden
 
 Rick Carlino
 
 Hi Kris,
 
 I loved the article about building a low tech internet. I started building a
 software package that could support people and systems that do not have the
 luxury of constant power or connectivity. Its main use case is for peer-to-peer
 sneakernet applications.
 
 I wanted to share it with you because your work was one of the main
 inspirations for it. The first proof-of-concept is still in the works ([230]
 https://github.com/PigeonProtocolConsortium/pigeon-cli-ruby). I hope you have a
 moment to look it over and I would value your feedback very much, given your
 level of research into low uptime / low tech systems. Please feel free to share
 it with anyone and everyone.
 
 [231]https://github.com/PigeonProtocolConsortium/pigeon-spec
 
 Thanks again for all the great articles and research!
 
 Alva
 
 I saw many comments regarding the battery level indicator.
 
 One thing I didn’t see mentioned, is that it forces the web browser to
 
 perform (possibly expensive) compositing operations, due to the
 
 resulting layers.
 
 It can’t just move the whole page without redrawing the visible parts,
 
 when scrolling.
 
 On computers that can’t use hardware acceleration (such as mine,) this
 
 results in very poor scrolling performance.
 
 Making the browser do more work than neccessary means it consumes more
 
 power for all of your visitors, so I think it could be quite beneficial
 
 to reimplement it in a way that does not require compositing several
 
 layers.
 
 Kapibara
 
 Very good ideology, but no way to make it alive. Ip address and DNS are the
 bottlenecks. It’s my opinion, but it’s much more efficient to place an
 optimized website on shared hosting in a data center with an optimized
 environment placed in an optimized climate zone + use CDN to reduce the load on
 routing devices. Your hosting machine is NOT an energetical bottleneck.
 
 Maik Merten
 
 Dear Mr. De Decker,
 
 I find the concept of low-power website hosting very interesting -
 
 thanks for documenting your effort!
 
 The choice of using dithered PNGs to save bandwidth is an unique
 
 approach and your website demonstrates that it can result in quite
 
 charming results.
 
 I noticed, though, that the pictures you host don’t appear to be
 
 optimized with latest PNG optimization tools. For instance, the
 
 open-source tool “zopflipng” can losslessly recompress PNGs (it contains
 
 a better implementation of the DEFLATE compression algorithm than what
 
 usually is used in graphics software).
 
 For the pictures on [232]https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html I get
 
 the following results with zopflipng:
 
 file | original size | zopflipng size
 
 —————————————+—————+—————
 
 new-solar-charge-controller.png | 44591 | 41135
 
 solar-panel-solar-powered-server-2.png | 63238 | 58667
 
 solar-powered-server-detail-2.png | 33061 | 30346
 
 sps_bats.png | 36452 | 33559
 
 —————————————+—————+—————
 
 total | 177342 | 163707
 
 That’s a saving of 13635 bytes, which means that roughly 8% of savings
 
 can be had.
 
 With best regards,
 
 Maik Merten
 
 Heikki Lotvonen
 
 Hi!
 
 Big fan of LOW←TECH MAGAZINE and as a “critical” web developer&designer, very
 inspiring to read your approach with how you built your site and your ideas
 behind it.
 
 On the page [233]https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/
 how-to-build-a-low-tech-website.html
 
 you had said you are looking for ideas and feedback to further improve the
 website and reduce its energy use. I’ve been musing on a very incidental power
 saving possibility on the users side. According to this discussion [234]https:/
 /superuser.com/questions/483456/
 does-a-computer-screen-consume-more-power-to-display-black-or-white, white
 background on a page saves more power on LCD monitors, while a black background
 saves power on OLED screens. This led me to think that serving a “dark mode” to
 mobile users and “light mode” to desktop users could possibly save some (albeit
 probably a minuscule amount) energy on the users side. Just a thought!
 
 cheers,
 
 Heikki Lotvonen (Finland)
 
 Guillaume
 
 Hello,
 
 I seen you’re using Armbian Stretch (base image ~300 MB)
 
 Had you tried Alpine Linux (base image 128 MB) ?
 
 Have a good week-end, from France :)
 
 IPv7
 
 James
 
 Hi,
 
 I noticed that you say that the solar powered server used gzip compression. I
 wonder if you’ve configured Nginx to serve .gz files if available? If the site
 is already static that should avoid all the CPU load due to compression leaving
 only I/O load and could save a couple of Watts.
 
 Jörg
 
 Hi There,
 
  1. perhaps this could be interesting
 
 [235]https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-POE/open-source-hardware
 
 since is very low power and there is software available for serving
 
 static files from microsd card.
 
 its low cost and poe powered, so stackable..
 
 you can use a standard PoE switch for multiple boards and
 
 multiple webpages/vhosts. like this one
 
 [236]https://www.edimax.com/edimax/merchandise/merchandise_detail/data/edimax/
 global/smb_switches_poe/es-5104ph_v2/
 
 you just have to connected the PoE switch to your solar power supply.
 
  2. you generally could save more traffic and avoid unnecessary requests
 
 by doing this:
 
   • packing/compressing html. since most modern browsers understand
 
     html.gz if your server delivers this.
 
     [237]https://www.lemoda.net/mod_rewrite/gzip-static/index.html
 
   • put all images base64 encoded in this single html per article.
 
     so it’s easy to archive and copy an article. don’t use a image twice
 
     in the document. set reference to it.
 
   • don’t insert menu and double content, social media stuff and anything
 
     like that. use server directory listing as
 
     menu. just for choosing and delivering static html files. and just a
 
     normal about.html.gz for further information about author etc.
 
   • don’t blowup up html files with bullshit tags, javascript etc.
 
     dont use css classes. just clever combine short html tags and set
 
     style for that tag. h1,h2,h3,p,em,b and so on.
 
     generally: don’t force user visitor to use
 
     your stylesheets at all. give him plain old html and one single
 
     reference to your stylesheet.
 
   • save spaces, line breaks etc. in html since you can use auto line
 
     wrap while editing. (have a look at html coding style in
 
     the attached example)
 
   • insert <link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,="
 
     to prevent browser from trying to fetch a favicon icon,
 
     which doesn’t existent. (addition useless request)
 
 example attached. have a look at source code via any
 
 text editor with line wrap mode.
 
 total page size ~ 136kb (including images)
 
 compressed… ~94kb.
 
 This is a quite minimalistic and function html wrap:
 
 no need for body/head tags etc. saving additional
 
 requests and has not further dependencies.
 
 <html style="padding:4em">
 
 <link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,=">
 
 <style>img{width:100%;height:auto;}</style>
 
 <meta charset="utf-8">
 
 ... put your html code here...
 
 </html>
 
 Kind Regards
 
 Jörg
 
 Oliver Fleischer
 
 Dear Lowtechmagazine team,
 
 thank You so much for providing a website that dares to stand up against
 
 modern design fantasies of the modern web and the bloat that follows.
 
 Thank You all so so much for creating a responsive, fast-loading website
 
 that respects their users and puts them first. I felt obligated to get
 
 this off my chest seeing how this is the first comment ever left here by
 
 me.
 
 The dissection of how this here experiment worked out, how to improve it
 
 and the fundamentals is has to rely upon is fascinating to read. I too
 
 like to see such efforts since they inherently come with speed and
 
 efficiency from which every user benefits.
 
 If web-design is cut down, then client software would be cleaner,
 
 smaller and more efficient. Less required computing power obviously
 
 comes with cheaper and less power hungry hardware.
 
 I am sorry for rambling on, I just wanted to elaborate on why everyone
 
 should be invested in this.
 
 What I wanted to throw into the conversation – since I have not seen it
 
 in the comments yet – is Gopher. An ancient protocol which sadly has
 
 been supplanted by HTTP. It is way more resource-friendly because all of
 
 the metadata has been cut. It’s document format (the gopher menu) is
 
 much smaller than HTML.
 
 This is mainly due to the fact that it uses TSV which has way less
 
 overhead than XML on which HTML is based.
 
 Just my two cents.
 
 Anonymousemail
 
 Please add an option to remove the “coloring” that shows how much the battery
 of the website is charged. It is a nice idea but I find it a bit annoying and
 makes reading harder. This is of cource not urgent just a tip.
 
 N07070
 
 Hello.
 
 I’m writing to you after reading your last article on growing oranges in
 
 the snow. I liked it a lot, as I’ve liked a lot of other articles I’ve
 
 been reading for a few years now.
 
 I really enjoyed the initiative to build a Solar-Powered website. And,
 
 as the world is going more and more to shit everyday, I’ve been thinking
 
 of low-tech ways to keep the internet running, in situations where grid
 
 power might not be available, and where fiber optic links might not be
 
 available. In that optic, I’ve started
 
 [238]https://git.n07070.xyz/n07070/Solar-Server, which ..is an ongoing
 
 research project that aims to develop a Solar-powered off-grid internet
 
 server." I thought you might like to contribute to it, maybe ? You can
 
 send me patch commits by email if you wish !
 
 Another thing, is that I might have a few suggestions about improving
 
 the website. I’ve seen that it might soon be offline, as a lack of
 
 battery. But, maybe someone has a copy of the website that I could read
 
 ? Like, when the library is closed, I can always ask around, see if
 
 someone else has the book.
 
 On the internet, we can do it in several ways. On of this ways if the
 
 DAT protocol. “Dat is a new p2p hypermedia protocol. It provides
 
 public-key-addressed file archives which can be synced securely and
 
 browsed on-demand.” Think HTTPS, but decentralized. Do you think it
 
 could be interesting to implement this solution ?¹
 
 Second, more minor, but regarding the interaction of the website, I
 
 think the language selector should be more visible, for example by
 
 making the round black button a globe emoji. As you already load
 
 font-awesome, it should be trivial to implement. If you have a git repo
 
 I can make a pull request too, I can do it myself. Is the website
 
 open-source ?
 
 I look forward to hearing from you,
 
 N07070
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 [1] : [239]https://www.datprotocol.com/
 
 Marcia
 
 Hi, Kris,
 
 My son introduced me to your site today.
 
 I am now a fan and a subscriber!
 
 My ranch is in a cold canyon in California’s central coast where we get temps
 down to 16 degrees fahrenheit on winter nights. Until now I thought I couldn’t
 grow citrus here. After reading your article I’m eager to grow Satsumas which
 we loved in Santa Barbara.
 
 Long ago I was a book designer, learning the trade in a small publishing house.
 
 Book design isn’t just lllustrations or cover art; it really means making the
 material accessible.
 
 Serif fonts were all designed for readability, sans-serif came in for
 advertising.
 
 A well chosen serif font, correct line width, and enough space between lines
 (what used to be called “leading,”) are all important factors in the
 readability of text.
 
 I implore you to think about ways to improve the accessibility of your
 material!
 
 Check out The New Yorker online, which is probably the best in this area.
 
 All the best,
 
 Marcia
 
 Swann Sokolov
 
 Hi ! Nice website !
 
 I guess the texture of your pictures allows them to be very light. What is the
 process ? How do you call this kind of texture ?
 
 Thanks !
 
 David Schlachter
 
 Hi,
 
 I enjoyed your article on building a low-tech website. You mention that
 dithering is an open question: I wanted to recommend HyperDither, which
 reimplements the dithering algorithm in Apple’s HyperCard software [1]. The
 algorithm creates distinctive images in 1-bit color, which you could convert to
 a different two-color (white, color) palette to match the site’s aesthetic. I
 find the quality is such that it could be realistic to use 1-bit images. I’d
 suggest post-processing the resulting images by converting to PNG and
 optimizing with a tool like optipng [2].
 
 David
 
 [1] [240]https://www.tinrocket.com/content/hyperdither/
 
 [2] [241]http://optipng.sourceforge.net/
 
 Nicolas
 
 Hello
 
 I found your articles about running a very low tech website on a solar powered
 RPi really inspiring
 
 Do you think it would be feasible and relevant to create a hosting company
 based solely on this kind of setup ? And why not replicating it in several
 places and use ZeroNet or Hypercore Protocol to make the whole service
 distributed and more resilient ?
 
 Thanks
 
 Best
 
 Nicolas
 
 Jannis
 
 Hi,
 
 I just stumbled over the Low Tech Magazine and its solar-powered website and
 I’m absolutely intrigued. This is a very nice project, and I even find the
 solar-powered version better to use than the regular version. (I think this is
 especially because the delay between clicking a link and getting a fully
 rendered visual result is noticably lower than with most websites. I really
 don’t know why people don’t bother to reduce UI latency. Anyway.)
 
 Since you write on [1] that gzipping »lowers the size of transmitted
 information at the cost of a slight increase in required processing« I wanted
 to remark that I noticed the Caddy web server [2], when configured to serve
 static files, will transparently serve the contents of an equally-named .gz
 file that is stored next to the file that was actually requested, and gzip
 encoding is Accepted. So for example, if you request about.html with
 Accept-Encoding: gzip, and the server sees the file about.html.gz, it will
 serve the contents of about.html.gz.
 
 (If you’re wondering how I noticed, imagine somebody only updating the contents
 of the uncompressed file, and wondering why the change doesn’t become apparent
 in their browser…)
 
 While I haven’t got any experience with the power overhead of a Go-based HTTP
 server over nginx (might be an interesting experiment though, let me know if
 you’d be interested in me running benchmarks), maybe there is a way to teach
 nginx the same behaviour? This might further reduce the average power usage
 since the compression algorithm only needs to be run once.
 
 Best regards from Heidelberg, Germany
 
 Jannis
 
 [1] [242]https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#
 compression-of-transmitted-data
 
 [2] [243]https://caddyserver.com/
 
 Charles-Édouard Coste
 
 Hello,
 
 I’m a big fan of the solar version of the lowtechmagazine. The only bad aspect
 for me, is that it requires a battery to work. And the availability of the site
 depends a lot on the battery capacity.
 
 So I don’t know if you are aware about those new peer-to-peer oriented
 protocols like ipfs, zeronet, and hypercore… Hypercore is my favorite for now
 as it’s easy to try with Beaker Browser ([244]https://beakerbrowser.com/).
 
 I told myself that if this kind of protocol would become popular, it could be
 possible to remove the battery and just seed the web site few hours a day…
 
 Maybe, you already know all of that… So I write you this mail to ask if you
 already experienced things with it and what results you got. If you didn’t ever
 eared about it, just take it as some hints for futur potential improvements. :D
 
 Best regards
 
 Brian Ramirez
 
 Hello Kris,
 
 I really love your site and and what it stands for.
 
 I just noticed that the images are not lazy-loading. You might want to consider
 adding a little attribute to your image links so that they lazy-load and save
 kilobytes of data whenever visitors don’t scroll down the whole way (at least
 in Chrome): [245]https://web.dev/native-lazy-loading/
 
 Sincerely,
 
 Brian
 
 [246]http://blr.design
 
 Pablo Lazo
 
 Hi!
 
 I came across an article on your website and I love the idea of running it off
 solar power.
 
 I found the battery meter background made it a little hard to read the article,
 just wanted to suggest lowering the opacity a bit. I tried the same color with
 50% opacity and it’s much less jarring while keeping the same effect.
 (screenshot attached)
 
 Best,
 
 Pablo
 
 Luis M. Portillo
 
 Hi,
 
 First of all, congratulations on your project because I think it is very
 interesting and successful.
 
 I wanted to ask you about the interpolation used in the images of the web. Do
 you use any program or script in particular? I’ve been trying different options
 in some programs (using GNU/Linux) but, even if I get a similar aesthetic
 effect, I can’t reduce the size of the images.
 
 I was hoping you could give me some hints about it.
 
 Thank you and best regards,
 
 Luis M. Portillo
 
 Marcus Rohrmoser
 
 Hi fellow Low-Techies,
 
 [247]https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#
 sensible-comments-on-static-sites says “Dynamic content such as comments are in
 theory incompatible with a static site.” - which is true and isn’t.
 
 While it is true for what the server sends as a document, it is not for what
 the reader gets as a visible document.
 
 Think of images - they (usually) are not part of the sent html, but are
 nevertheless part of what the reader considers the document.
 
 As to comments - put them into an iframe! See my blog as an example without 
 [248]https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-making-of/ and with [249]https://
 blog.mro.name/2009/07/nsurlcache-joke-iphone/ comments.
 
 What do you think of that?
 
 Cheers,
 
 Marcus
 
 P.S.: Awesome magazine.
 
 Kea Youll
 
 Hi Mr. Kris,
 
 As a suggestion for further reducing your websites energy usage, may I suggest
 offering a fully compressed downloadable version. I think Wikipedia has
 something similar where you can just download Wikipedia as a file. At this
 point I’ll probably end up reading all your pages over time.
 
 If you need ad revenue, you can simply have people hop through a few ad-page
 hoops to reach the download link perhaps. But then, perhaps I should grow a
 beard? Growing a beard saves on razors after all, but denies a source of
 donatable bird nest material.
 
 My teeth go clack,
 
 Kea Youll
 
 Mike Graham
 
 Hi Kris,
 
 I love the solar-powered edition of Low-Tech Magazine, and the really
 
 thorough articles you’ve written about how it was achieved. It’s given
 
 me a lot to think about – and maybe a project to embark upon. The
 
 climate up here is perhaps not as conducive to solar-powered hosting.
 
 I was working on a friend’s (non-solar-powered) website redesign, and
 
 one of the main goals was to reduce page-size as much as possible. I’d
 
 independently realised dithering as one way of doing this, followed by
 
 heavy optimisation/compression of the dithered images to further reduce
 
 file-sizes.
 
 In that vein, I did a quick test on some images I pulled from the
 
 solar-powered edition of LTM. I wanted to share the results in case
 
 they’re useful to you.
 
 I made up a sample set of 13 images from the site and optimised them.
 
 Here are the results:
 
  Original size: 362K
 
  After optipng: 360K  -0.55%
 
  After tinypng: 337K  -6.91%
 
 Some notes:
 
   • All sizes reported are as output by du on Mac OS 10.11 using the ‘-h’
 
     and ‘–apparent-size’ flags.
 
   • I used optipng with the flags ‘-opv’. This runs locally as it’s an
 
     installed package.
 
   • I used the tinypng-cli program available here:
 
     [250]https://github.com/websperts/tinypng-cli
 
     This sends the image to tinypng.com, which compresses it and sends it
 
     back. It needs a (free) TinyPNG API key, which is limited to 500 uses
 
     a month. You also need to make sure you have a good backup –
 
     occasionally this loses a file by replacing it with a 0-byte file of
 
     the same name.
 
   • I have absolutely no idea how much power you’d use for these
 
     optimisations, and how long it would take to ’earn’ the power used by
 
     serving the smaller files.
 
 I’ve attached a zip file with the three sample sets in it. I figured
 
 this was probably preferable to leaving the zip sitting on Dropbox or
 
 iCloud’s servers.
 
 Cheers,
 
 Mike
 
 Reg Tait
 
 Hi there Kris, Roel, and the team
 
 First, I’m a huge fan of solar LOW←TECH MAGAZINE. I love everything about it.
 The lightweight presentation makes it a much better website. So much more of
 the web should be built like this.
 
 I have a simple suggestion to help reduce energy use. Add (native HTML) lazy
 loading to each image.
 
 As you might know, the idea of lazy loading is to defer loading any image until
 it’s near the viewable screen—so only loaded when needed. The idea has been
 around for a long time. It’s great for performance, but needed JavaScript
 plugins in the past. Now we can do it in HTML. It works really well.
 
 Hope that’s worth looking up and trying out. Appreciate everything.
 
 Cheers
 
 Reg
 
 Mattieu Moreau-Domecq
 
 Hello Chris,
 
 I hope you’re fine
 
 First I want to congratulate you for the good work on your website !
 
 I’m building a website mainly inspired by your guidelines for some friends of
 mine.
 
 I have a question and I thought you might help me.
 
 What script do you use to display the weight of your pages at the bottom of
 each page ?
 
 is it a script ? or some text ?
 
 I’m trying to do the same but I can’t find any resources, I would appreciate if
 you can help me with this !
 
 thanks and best from Paris !
 
 Marco
 
 Hello,
 
 I really like your solar website and the technology behind.
 
 It has been since I found out about your website that I thought how nice
 
 would be to have a webserver like yours for my website.
 
 I lack all the skill to make a webserver, I would like to know if you are
 
 considering selling kits or sd card configured to run on a raspberry.
 
 I am of course willing to pay for this. I looked in the internet but I
 
 found no one that sell this kind of kits.
 
 I don’t think I am the only one looking for more sustainable ways to do
 
 activism.
 
 Anyway I bought both of your books so that I do not have to use a computer
 
 to read all the nice articles you have made.
 
 I hope one day to be able to deploy a solar powered website like yours.
 
 All the best,
 
 Marco
 
 Hans Wernars
 
 Dear Lowtechmagazine,
 
 Instead of dithering pictures there might be another technique to get the
 desired low file size.
 
 This is the (often forgotten) JPEG compression in combination with reduced
 resolution.
 
 Reducing resolution sounds dramatic, but when showing in the browser it can be
 showed with a factor 2x.
 
 In this way the visitor will see the image at the original size.
 
 Most visitors will hardly notice any difference. Some do.
 
 By adding optimal JPEG compression it is possible to reduce even further.
 (optimal for the tool used=50% setting)
 
 The advantage is that the picture still has the full-color properties.
 
 Example:
 
 Original picture: 1280 x 518 pixels. File size 160KByte
 
 Compressed to 50%: 1280 x 518 pixels, file size 90.8Kbyte
 
 Half size and compressed: 640 x 259 pixels, file size 28.2Kbyte (17%)
 
 Tool used: JPEG resize V2.1 from Heinrich Peuser ([251]http://
 www.virtualzone.de)
 
 Attached the original picture and the compressed ones to verify the results
 
 The original picture can be downloaded at: Megen_panorama
 
 With kind regards,
 
 Hans Wernars
 
 Christian Hieke
 
 Hi Low-Tech-Team,
 
 I rediscovered this project while researching solar and battery-powered
 devices.
 
 While I was looking at your website code I saw some room for improvement in the
 JavaScript code. Attached [1] you can find the modified code which reduces
 filesize by over 2 KB (uncompressed) or 0.7 KB (gzipped) when run through a
 compiler ([252]https://closure-compiler.appspot.com). Hope that helps to
 further reduce energy consumption, even if it’s just on a small scale :) If you
 have any questions or need more help don’t hesitate to contact me.
 
 Christian
 
 [1] [253]https://www.codepile.net/pile/3m4jZRQ5
 
 Daniel Parnitzke
 
 Dear Kris
 
 I already wanted to reach out to you earlier. Based on the example of
 solar.lowtechmagazine.com I hosted my MA thesis on a solar server out of my
 bedroom. I think you might have already come across it. You can find it here:
 pleasureinscarcity.com (currently I’m on the move, so it’s in a box, the stats
 don’t work). It’s not as consequently designed as solar.lowtechmagazine.com,
 and it’s also been offline more frequently as it’s consuming around 4W
 constantly, (in the Netherlands). Therefore I started scheduling offline times
 every night.
 
 I recently graduated from my MA Social Design in the Netherlands, with a
 research on how change can occur in simple acts of creation and joyful moments
 of communal gathering. I therefore constructed rocket stoves with locally
 available (scrap)materials and with the help of local communities. Therefore,
 your articles were super inspiring, regarding the theme of setting limits to
 behaviour based on the availability of resources. Your research on rocket
 stoves, efficient heating, windmills, alternative ways of energy production
 (and so on) offer great insight into ’ecological alternatives’, and more than
 once it helped me develop my own research.
 
 If you’re interested in my graduation work, which promotes a different
 perspective on ’enacting change’ – not through fear/guilt but through pleasure/
 joy – you can find a short video outlining my research and the outcomes. [254]
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oocbejOMXtA
 
 Right now I’m fixing up a van which will be my mobile home and workshop for
 2021. Therefore I’m building a wind generator, carving some wood rotors at the
 moment (thanks for that) based on the plans of Hugh Piggott. In 2021, I hope to
 visit (and participate in) interesting projects, places and initiatives all
 over Europe. (Maybe you know of a place that I shouldn’t miss on my trip?)
 
 As a last note, I’d like to bring your attention to two people I came across in
 the past year: Barnabé Chaillot, a French YouTuber and Alexandre Monin, a
 French academic/teacher/philosopher. The former was great in terms of applied
 inspiration, the latter just initiated a Master program in Lyon which is called
 “Master of Science Strategy & Design for Anthropocene”.
 
 Keep up your great work, and if I’ll ever be close to Barcelona I’d love to
 visit to see the server and how it works :)
 
 I hope there are good things coming your way.
 
 All the best from Germany,
 
 Dani
 
 Simon
 
 Hello Kris De Decker,
 
 together with friends I am starting an architecture collective near Cologne,
 Germany.
 
 We are willing to go unexpected paths and engage ourselves in transformation
 and urban design tasks in this area.
 
 There is plenty of work as the area is mostly aligned on car-depended urban
 design and coal energy.
 
 Since we stepped on the low-tech magazine website we would like to adopt your
 idea and the technology for our project.
 
 On the other hand we should focus on our projects and the urban design field.
 And, we like the idea of becoming accomplice for future development.
 
 Therefore we would like to know, if you ever thought about the possibility of
 hosting other sides (with the solar low tech system) as a business model?
 
 At the moment we do not have enough time (and less sun hours) to build of our
 own system…
 
 I am looking forward to hear from you!
 
 Best
 
 Simon
 
 Jakub
 
 Hey Kris,
 
 I’ve been reading Low-tech Magazine magazine for a while now, I find the idea
 captivating and the content is thought-provoking. Thank you for working on it!
 I also appreciate the fact that it has an RSS feed, it makes it much easier fo
 find the new content.
 
 One piece of feature-requesty feedback that I have is it’d be cool if the HTML
 
 Best wishes,
 
 Jakub
 
 Nathan Landry
 
 Hola desde el soleado puerto rico,
 
 Me gusta su sitio web de bajo consumo y me gustaría sugerir cómo reducir el
 consumo de energía del enrutador.
 
 calor = desperdicio
 
 Use un tubo de calor pasivo y saque el enrutador de la carcasa, móntelo en el
 chip caliente del enrutador.
 
 Mo Lotman
 
 Hi Kris,
 
 I just wanted to say I’m a big fan of Low Tech magazine and have the printed
 version. I started a magazine/nonprofit along a similar theme a few years ago
 (The Technoskeptic), although ours is more related to social crit/philosophy/
 policy than physical implementations. We’ve been in a bit of hibernation lately
 so there is not a lot of new content up there right now, but I’ve been thinking
 about what the next steps might be, and I’m very interested in following your
 lead so far as the web design/sustainability, both in terms of saving energy
 and also (I presume) avoiding interfacing with abusive tech companies. Did you
 do it all yourself? I’m curious if you could recommend anyone to help do a
 redesign according to the principles you generally espouse. I don’t think the
 average person would know how to do it. Any suggestions?
 
 Thanks so much, and keep up the great work!
 
 Best,
 
 Mo
 
 Gauthier
 
 Hi guys,
 
 Following your excellent work on building a solar powered host for lowtech mag,
 you mentionned that a service rate lower than 100% is essential to a truly
 efficient system in terms of ressources vs service ratio.
 
 It sure is, yet the internet is not an autonomous system (as you mentioned) -
 so could you not use this as a leverage for a higher service rate?
 
 The idea would be to use a network of fair players - let say a community of
 solar powered websites (yours becoming one amongst many others) - on each,
 several other websites being mirrored and hidden most of the time (I’ll come
 back to this point a bit later).
 
 Once your server power runs super low, it just anticipate a bit and request
 another server to play it’s mirror role. Once your server is back online,
 another request is sent and voila, back to normal.
 
 With a network of those servers, it would become easy to have virtually 100%
 (let say 99.9999% of the time) at least a way to access knowledge.
 
 Back on the hidden concern, in terms of energy, I don’t know what’s the actual
 impact of distance between server and client and if it would make sense to have
 closer mirrors used when enough power is available.
 
 I guess this should also be compared to the increasing power consumption of
 local servers hosting several sites and being more visited due to geographical
 reasons (let say servers closer to high density areas such as big cities).
 
 Anyway, that was just an idea :) Thanks a lot for everything you do!
 
 Gauthier
 
 Peter Fischer
 
 Hi Chris!
 
 this got some traction in nerd circles lately:
 
 [255]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
 
 centre of the gemini universe
 
 [256]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
 
 list of awesome links regarding gemini
 
 [257]https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
 
 feels like the 90ies (the good, new shiny party of it).
 
 -> 1 URL = 1 document, no inline content.
 
 -> styling is don in the client, no CSS
 
 -> server kays are handles like in SSH, no CAs involved
 
 What it needs is more non-nerd content, like
 
 solar.lowtechmagazine.com … ;)
 
 Cheers,
 
 Peter
 
 P.S.: lowtechmagazine.com (the “normal” version ) seems to be down at
 
 the moment?
 
 vadim
 
 Hi,
 
 thanks a lot for your solar journal/blog/magazine, whatever you call it.
 
 I thoroughly enjoyed your logic and consistency you operate with.
 
 Insightful articles as well ❤
 
 I thought I’d share the feedback about site’s CSS, I slightly tweaked it
 
 for my own pleasure using the Stylish extension.
 
 3 points:
 
  1. I find the article text with is too narrow for reading. (Maybe the
 
 artificial big margins also look weird on mobile, wasting useful screen
 
 space?) I opted to make max-width: 40rem; oh and I also used 90% zoom,
 
 the text was too big for me.
 
  2. Images are hard to view when they are stretched to full width on a
 
 16:9 monitor, made them smaller
 
  3. Captions also centered now, because images are
 
  4. Battery. I understand this might be artistic, but I noticed from an
 
 UX point of view, I scrolled down such that the “entire” reading area
 
 was covered by the yellow indicator (i.e. text I’m reading is not split
 
 between yellow/white). It’s the same phenomenon like on mobile: Even
 
 though you have 30%+ space left, you scroll further down (wasting
 
 precious battery charge btw).
 
 So I made the battery indicator a smaller bar on the right and it
 
 stopped bothering me. Yet it was still an “eye catcher” to see how much
 
 % remains. The CSS for it looks fine with articles, but a little off on
 
 the main page.
 
 I’m no CSS wizard, this absolutely needs testing on mobile etc. :)
 
 Greetings from Germany,
 
 Vadim
 
 Yiming
 
 Hi Kris!
 
 I’m Yiming, a student writer/illustrator from China. I was applying some low
 tech mindset for some time, and recently I rebuilt my blog into a low tech one
 ([258]http://www.wellobserve.com/index.html). I mostly rebuilt the style into
 what it looks like the solar one and did some optimizations for Chinese
 paragraph viewing and printing. And to showcase some of my paintings, I made a
 gallery mode which made it easy to layout text and images for direct printing
 into pictorial books, like this one here.
 
 [259]http://www.wellobserve.com/blog/2020/04/
 01_CloudTravelClassics_03_TropicOfCancer.html
 
 Although it looks almost the same to the solar site, I did not use existing CMS
 but wrote my own script to generate the HTMLs according to my need. My script
 can be downloaded at this page.
 
 [260]http://www.wellobserve.com/blog/2021/01/15_StaticBlogGenerator.html
 
 :D
 
 Your low tech stuff is so inspiring! Thank you for bringing such wonderful
 content into the world!
 
 Yiming
 
 Stefan
 
 Hello,
 
 I’ve just discovered your very interesting site.
 
 I’ve found two issues:
 
  1. German RSS feed content does not reflect the latest German articles
 
  2. The bottom icons for RSS, Twitter and Mail overlap the footer text.
 
 Best regards
 
 Stefan
 
 Juan J. Alcolado
 
 Hola Kris!
 
 he conocido de vuestra iniciativa desde artículo en El Economista, encontrando
 cierto hermanamiento como podéis comprobar por el nombre de este dominio
 ServidorSolar.com desde donde os estoy escribiendo.
 
 Ciértamente nuestra finalidad es que la fuente de alimentación sea plenamente
 solar, si bien -y para evitar sensaciones frustrantes- lo tomo como un ideal en
 pos del que trato de luchar de forma efectiva.
 
 Además de felicitar por el logro y la gesta, también me permito alguna
 indicación que en aras de la eficiencia humildemente apunto.
 
 Así, veo que el código html, al menos de la home [261]https://
 solar.lowtechmagazine.com y el de la página principal en español, idem + /es/,
 adolecen de algunos errores en cuanto al cierre de etiquetas de contenedores
 (“div”), por cuanto su interpretación por los navegadores fuerza el uso de
 recursos para corrección y sucesiva presentación en pantalla.
 
 En la home ocurre en la línea nº 21 del código, que con el browser Firefox
 marca en rojo </link></link></meta></meta></meta></meta>.
 
 Saludo cordialmente, y quedamos a vuestra disposición, de forma personal y como
 medio editorial que gestiono encantado de publicar sobre cuánto estiméis
 
 Juan J. Alcolado
 
 [262]https://suelosolar.com
 
 Isaiah
 
 Hello,
 
 I am not sure if you have researched but I think the Tor Network and their
 hidden services would provide a lot of benefit in hosting/domain costs and
 encourage, lean energy efficient websites like yours. I really believe in Tor.
 I think Tor among a few other projects have really great potential to allow
 secure, private independent, but also far more energy efficient services than
 the terribly bulky garbage that is normally available. I personally am doing a
 lot of research into this and I will let you know any progress. I hope you have
 a wonderful day! Linked below is a link to the Tor Project.
 
 [263]https://www.torproject.org/
 
 [264]http://expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion/
 
 With great respect,
 
 K N
 
 “…do the same with less…”
 
 This is a great statement - this is the first time I’ve come across someone who
 wants to get off the “perpetual upgrade arms race”.
 
 Some suggestions, if I may?
 
  1. Reduce your kernel size and potentially make it run more efficiently.
 
 e.g Minimise RAM utilisation by Kernel and save on SD card swap space (which
 delays things).
 
 The following might be a useful overview as to why the kernel should be
 optimised.
 
 It’s in the context of embedded hardware, but I think you’re aiming to do the
 same.
 
 [265]http://events17.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/
 opdenacker-embedded-linux-size-reduction-techniques_0.pdf
 
  2. Blacklist kernel modules: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
 
 Disable drivers for bits of hardware you’re not going to use on the board =
 more RAM
 
 Faster kernel execution.
 
  3. Recompile your kernel
 
 This is to remove modules that are integrated into the kernel itself that can’t
 be black listed.
 
 [266]https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainline_Kernel_Howto
 
  4. NGINX Web server
 
 It’s not clear whether this was the standard (dynamically linked) one from the
 repository or whether you built this with static modules from source.
 
 If pre-packaged, suggest that you consider building from source a binary to
 optimize.
 
 Above presentation also covers RAM, Size & performance profiles of dynamically/
 statically linked binaries.
 
 Faster execution if smaller
 
  4. Investigate changing the clock frequencies - although not 100% clear if it
     can be done on this board.
 
 Whilst I didn’t find a specific link to underclocking the CPU, I did find
 references in the Linux sunxi pages that refer to overclocking.
 
 This suggests you can specify lower values to attempt to underclock.
 
 Simliar or same performance with less power.
 
 Here: [267]https://linux-sunxi.org/Cpufreq
 
 My Raspberry Pi 2 is underclocked and works just fine.
 
 Kwok
 
 Erik
 
 Hi Kris,
 
 I’m not quite sure you don’t mind the informal salutation. If you do, I’m
 
 sorry.
 
 Yesterday, I read about the Gemini project in the German computer magazine
 
 »c’t« and immediately thought of you because it might be of interest for
 
 your magazine since it is quite »low-tech« and therefore sustainable. I’m
 
 not involved in this project (although I’m thinking of launching a Gemini
 
 site myself), so this is not an ad 😉
 
 In short, the Gemini project is about some kind of parallel Internet which
 
 does use the Internet infrastructure but has its own super-lightweight
 
 software stack on top of it (like Gopher). The explicit goals, among
 
 others, are to keep it as simple as possible while protecting people’s
 
 privacy (no cookies, tracking and the likes, but encryption of the
 
 connection is mandatory). As an illustration, my Fairpone 2, which is
 
 always short on memory and often takes minutes to open a ordinary web page,
 
 has no problem accessing Gemini content.
 
 From what I have understood, the Gemini »web« is quite text-centric. It is
 
 made up of text pages called »gemtext« which contain a simplistic markup
 
 (even more simplistic than basic HTML). They don’t even include extensive
 
 styles so that the device which displays them is free to adjust the looks
 
 to the user’s requirements and wishes. It’s not so simple that it does not
 
 support multimedia files, but they’re only loaded on request.
 
 Gemini also has made adjustments on the tech below the gemtext (like the
 
 before-mentioned abandonment of cookies, minimalistic requests and so on),
 
 but i wrote »in short« above, so …
 
 If you’re curious, you might want to start here (I’d like to link you the
 
 c’t article but it’s behind a paywall unfortunately):
 
 [268]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
 
 I imagined that this might also be something for your solar-powered
 
 website. Just a suggestion 😉
 
 Anyways, keep up the good work!
 
 Erik
 
 Jiri Slimarik
 
 Hi,
 
 I really like your blog. The way it is made and the topic as well. I’m
 
 curious how to make my photos to look similar. I guess making the
 
 photos look this way also reduces energy consumption, so I wonder, how
 
 do you do that? Is there any blog post on this theme? Any rules to
 
 apply?
 
 Looking forward to your response.
 
 Best regards,
 
 Jiri Slimarik
 
 Alexander
 
 Hello, Kris!
 
 I learned with great interest about your site running on a
 
 microcomputer. The Internet is full of instructions for using a
 
 microcomputer as a home hosting server, but there are almost no real
 
 applications.
 
 However, I can tell you about another amateur site running on a homemade
 
 microcomputer hosting service! This site works in Russia and on a
 
 Russian microcomputer. Home page [269]http://mb7707.su/ notes on the Russian
 
 microcomputer [270]http://mb7707.su/module/articles/articles.html homemade
 
 products [271]http://mb7707.su/other/handmades/handmades.html gallery of my
 
 developments [272]http://mb7707.su/other/gallery/gallery.html The site was
 
 launched in early 2018, last year I changed my domain, but in general,
 
 my Internet resource has been working for three years.
 
 I wish you further creative success!
 
 Sincerely, Alexander.
 
 Ian
 
 Hi,
 
 A friend pasted a link to your site on IRC (libera.chat #gopherproject).
 
 Having read some of your articles over the past day or so; I would like
 
 to firstly say, thank you. The articles are informative and appear well
 
 researched. Secondly, I’d like to recommend offering your site via
 
 Gopher. Gopher provides ultra low resource content browsing and delivery,
 
 the forerunner to the modern web. It would seem to fit well with the
 
 ethos of what you are doing.
 
 Gopher is making a comeback, due to people becoming increasingly
 
 frustrated with surveilance and marketing on the web. Myself and a
 
 number of others who share the same feeling host our own Gopher servers.
 
 Gopher has more a feel of the old web, where the content was mostly
 
 provided by enthusiats.
 
 Gopher Protocol: [273]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
 
 More about gopher: gopher://gopherproject.org
 
 My gopher-hole: gopher://gopher.icu
 
 Hopefully you have lynx installed which will allow you to browse gopher
 
 sites without additional software. Though there are other clients,
 
 http proxys and browser plugins also available.
 
 Best regards,
 
 Ian
 
 BTD Master
 
 This is partially crazy, but how does moving to Redbean for reduced
 
 power consumption sound? [274]https://redbean.dev/ [275]http://
 redbean.justine.lol/
 
 Ruben Vorderman
 
 Dear Kris,
 
 Thank you for your inspiring website. It inspired me to start working on
 
 my own blog that will be hosted in a similar way.
 
 As a consequence I found an easy way to save power on the server. The
 
 server CPU runs on a certain frequency. Higher frequencies are faster,
 
 lower frequencies save more power. This is however not a one-to-one
 
 relationship. Higher frequencies cost more power than the speed that
 
 they bring. It is therefore most efficient to run at the lower
 
 frequencies. By default power is managed by the “ondemand” governor.
 
 That governor quickly ramps up the frequency when the demand increases
 
 and quickly ramps down again as it decreases. This makes the system more
 
 responsive but in terms of power efficiency this continuous over
 
 correction leads to power loss. This is fine for wall-connected devices,
 
 but for battery powered devices it is less than optimal.
 
 It can be fixed quite easily. For this you will need to install
 
 ‘cpufrequtils’ and run ‘cpufreq-info’. This shows you the current
 
 frequency as well as the available governors for your CPU. It also shows
 
 you stats about how much time is spent in certain frequencies. Very useful.
 
 I recommend using either the “conservative” or the “powersave” governor.
 
 Powersave runs at the lowest frequency all the time and is therefore
 
 most efficient, but also always slowest. Conservative is the next best
 
 thing in power-efficiency, it scales up when demand is higher for a
 
 longer period of time. It is therefore more suited for continual load
 
 tasks with spikes such as your web server. I recommend checking if
 
 powersave delivers adequate performance, and if not switching up to
 
 conservative.
 
 To set the governor to powersave use “sudo cpufreq-set -g powersave”. To
 
 make this change persistent at boot make sure that the cpufrequtils
 
 service is enabled with “sudo systemctl enable cpufrequtils” and create
 
 a file /etc/default/cpufrequtils with contents GOVERNOR=powersave.
 
 Hope this helps!
 
 Best regards,
 
 Ruben Vorderman
 
 More information on available governors:
 
 [276]https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/pm/cpufreq.html#
 generic-scaling-governors
 
 Johannes Löthberg
 
 Hello,
 
 While discussing dithering and image compression on IRC I was linked to
 
 your article on building a low-tech website[277]0, and I have some comments
 
 on your decision regarding using dithering.
 
 It essentially boils down to that if you want to save data transfered
 
 you should be using a modern JPEG compressor such as MozJPEG[278]1, not
 
 dither the images. I do not think that you’re going to be able to find
 
 any cases in which a dithered PNG will be able to beat compressing the
 
 original image with MozJPEG.
 
 For example, passing the first JPEG of the switchboard operators through
 
 MozJPEG’s cjpeg without any option leads to an output file that is 104.5
 
 KiB, which is not only smaller than the original (159.5 KiB), but also
 
 smaller than the your final dithered PNG (110 KiB). And this with no
 
 loss in visual quality.
 
 If I run it with -quality 70 that number goes down to 82 KiB, also
 
 without any loss in visual quality.
 
 If you want to keep the dithering because you like the visual look of
 
 it, then running the last dithered image through MozJPEG with `-quality
 
 70`, the resulting image is 94.9 KiB, which is still significantly
 
 smaller.
 
 JJ
 
 Like many, I presume, I found your project through Hacker News and I’d like to
 answer this question:
 
 “For example energy savings from disabling some of the hardware such as the the
 USB-hub? Some tips or insights into this are greatly appreciated!”
 
 Powertop is what you need. Just apt install powertop and you’ll start saving
 energy immediately. More information in man powertop or on [279]https://
 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP
 
 Best of luck with your awesome project!
 
 Greetings,
 
 JJ
 
 Roel
 
 Hi,
 
 First of all, what a brilliant project! I love seeing solar-powered computers
 online, especially so well thought out! I’m curious to know how the project
 evolves.
 
 In the past I have played a little bit with a similar setup to yours. I ran a
 raspberry pi zero w on a 9Ah 12V battery with an IVT SCplus charge controller.
 My code from back then can be found here[1].
 
 What I did on the Pi zero was:
 
   • Turn off USB ports, see [280]https://github.com/roeles/solarpi/blob/master/
     code/disable_usb.sh
 
   • Turn off HDMI
 
   • Turn off DHCP for reduced traffic
 
   • Turn off IPv6
 
 I also noticed that flash reads cost me more power than using a RAMdisk
 (tmpfs).
 
 I think you could also turn off the second core on the machine, if it normally
 has enough power. The frequency on the first core can perhaps be limited.
 
 If the IVT SCplus charge controller might be interesting for you, here[2] is
 some reverse-engineered code to get data from it over USB. I turn on USB, wait
 for the bus to settle, read data, turn USB off again.
 
 best regards,
 
 Roel
 
 [1] [281]https://github.com/roeles/solarpi
 
 [2] [282]https://github.com/roeles/solarpi/blob/master/code/scdplus.cpp
 
 Noah Pendleton
 
 This is a very cool project!
 
 Multiple solar-powered servers with a non-100% uptime could work
 
 together by using something like IPFS, so that content can be served
 
 even when the “main site” hosting the files is down. Such a system
 
 could be very flexible in terms of surviving certain servers going
 
 down.
 
 Cheers
 
 pep
 
 Hey, I enjoyed your article after seeing it on hacker news.
 
 [283]https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/
 how-to-build-a-low-tech-website.html
 
 I’ve made the transition to static sites a few months back and am absolutely
 pleased with the results.
 
 One thing suggestion to make the site even more efficient would be to use a
 tool like [284]https://purgecss.com/
 
 I went with Hugo for the static site builder and have the purgecss command run
 on build. I’m sure you can figure out how to hook it in with Pelican.
 
 Cheers to a faster, more energy efficient web.
 
 pep
 
 Erik Wallace
 
 Good morning, I read your article “How to Build a Low-tech Website” and enjoyed
 it. Most of the things I could think of you have already checked off. However,
 there are two quick wins that will shave down file size: minifying your CSS and
 further optimizing your images.
 
 Minify CSS
 
 Your stylesheet is 21 k at the moment, a minified version would be 16 k.
 
 Image Optimization
 
 Using a drag and drop image compressor (ImageOptim) I was able to shrink the 5
 images in the article without a loss in the quality. The savings range from 13%
 to 6.8%.
 
 Best,
 
 Erik Wallace
 
 Draco Metallium
 
 Hi! I know that the solar powered website is an old project, but I was
 
 wondering if it would be possible to still make some changes to the
 
 presentation.
 
 I love the look of the solar site and find it more comfortable to read
 
 than the standard one, but only when the battery is full or I disable
 
 javascript (which I can’t do on my phone). I find the change of the
 
 tint at half the page uncomfortable. I have found myself going to the
 
 nonsolar site just to have a consistent look across the screen.
 
 Could you please limit the battery charge to a bar a few pixels wide?
 
 Something like changing the battery div style to ´#battery{ position:
 
 fixed; bottom: 0; right: 0; width: 1em; background: #fff5d1;};´
 
 might be enough.
 
 Anyway, thanks for your articles! I find them thought provoking. I
 
 have changed some of my routines already. Thanks!
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 Draco Metallium
 
 Mirroronthewall
 
 Something to possibly blog about or create (don’t think I saw on the site), in
 trying to consume less internet bandwidth, some sites have a text-only mode,
 for example NPR: [285]https://text.npr.org/
 
 It’s often that URL format of text.[Address], like solar.lowtechmagazine.com to
 text.lowtechmagazine.com
 
 sometimes pictures just aren’t that necessary, sometimes they’re helpful
 
 Cheers
 
 O.Q. Olarte
 
 Hi Low-tech Magazine!
 
 I came across the “Can I Help?” section in your site and eventually stumbled
 upon the “SSL & Legacy browsers” section[286]1.
 
 Old machines can benefit from the Gemini Protocol[287]2, a new internet
 protocol that is text-based yet still secure. Since this is text-based, I think
 it would drastically reduce the power consumption required to host, serve, and
 fetch the data in this protocol.
 
 It’s written in Gemtext, a variety of Markdown. There are programs that can
 convert Markdown (or even HTML, I think) to gemtext, like lowdown[288]3.
 
 I guess the challenge would then be to format the content of Low-tech Magazine
 for gemtext. That is, if you consider this route.
 
 And finally, at its current state, old browsers can still access the site via
 terminal-based programs like w3m[289]4 or lynx[290]5 among others. That means
 old computers with these old browsers connected to the internet technically can
 still read your content.
 
 I hope this helps!
 
 Regards,
 
 O.Q. Olarte
 
 542.94KB
 [291] ↑
 
 [292]LOW←TECH MAGAZINE
 
   • Server Stats
 
   • Forecast
 
   • Info
 
     [293] About [294] Power [295] Our Team [296] Donate [297] Privacy Policy
   • Contact
 
     © Kris De Decker
     solar [at] lowtechmagazine [dot] com
 
     [298] [299] [300] [301] [302]
 
 
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 [243] https://caddyserver.com/
 [244] https://beakerbrowser.com/%29
 [245] https://web.dev/native-lazy-loading/
 [246] http://blr.design/
 [247] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#sensible-comments-on-static-sites
 [248] https://blog.mro.name/2019/05/wp-to-hugo-making-of/
 [249] https://blog.mro.name/2009/07/nsurlcache-joke-iphone/
 [250] https://github.com/websperts/tinypng-cli
 [251] http://www.virtualzone.de/
 [252] https://closure-compiler.appspot.com/
 [253] https://www.codepile.net/pile/3m4jZRQ5
 [254] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oocbejOMXtA
 [255] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_%28protocol%29
 [256] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
 [257] https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
 [258] http://www.wellobserve.com/index.html%29
 [259] http://www.wellobserve.com/blog/2020/04/01_CloudTravelClassics_03_TropicOfCancer.html
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 [261] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
 [262] https://suelosolar.com/
 [263] https://www.torproject.org/
 [264] http://expyuzz4wqqyqhjn.onion/
 [265] http://events17.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/opdenacker-embedded-linux-size-reduction-techniques_0.pdf
 [266] https://linux-sunxi.org/Mainline_Kernel_Howto
 [267] https://linux-sunxi.org/Cpufreq
 [268] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
 [269] http://mb7707.su/
 [270] http://mb7707.su/module/articles/articles.html
 [271] http://mb7707.su/other/handmades/handmades.html
 [272] http://mb7707.su/other/gallery/gallery.html
 [273] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
 [274] https://redbean.dev/
 [275] http://redbean.justine.lol/
 [276] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/pm/cpufreq.html#generic-scaling-governors
 [277] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html
 [278] https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg
 [279] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerTOP
 [280] https://github.com/roeles/solarpi/blob/master/code/disable_usb.sh
 [281] https://github.com/roeles/solarpi
 [282] https://github.com/roeles/solarpi/blob/master/code/scdplus.cpp
 [283] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low-tech-website.html
 [284] https://purgecss.com/
 [285] https://text.npr.org/
 [286] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#room-for-improvements
 [287] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
 [288] https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/
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 [290] https://lynx.invisible-island.net/
 [291] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#top
 [292] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
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 [294] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/
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 [302] https://www.youtube.com/@lowtechmagazine/videos