Our new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue — and because we try to practice what we preach — we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

        • porkloin
          1·
          3 years ago

          I live in AK and know a few people with solar setups, it depends a lot on how much south facing exposure you have, etc. There are seismic stations and stuff here that keep near 100% annual uptime here on purely solar, so it’s totally doable, but can be tough.

    • dozens
      1·
      3 years ago

      I even got into dithering images.

      How has this been going? I’ve been messing around with imagemagick this evening and haven’t gotten really close to the kind of dithering I see in their images.

      So far I’m using convert -monochrome -ordered-dither o2x2

  • bluerabbit
    31·
    3 years ago

    I wonder how much traffic you have to get for the manufacturing and shipping costs of a battery, solar panel, own server, etc. to outweigh the carbon footprint of adding a small incremental load to a shared hosting provider which resides in a conventional datacenter?

      • bluerabbit
        3·
        3 years ago

        Yes though it’s not really a symmetrical comparison. Let me make an analogy: suppose for transport I’ve been using a public diesel bus and I’m growing upset about the environmental impact of this vehicle. Instead I buy an ebike which is exclusively for my own use.

        When I do this the bus is still operating. For some people an ebike is never going to be an acceptable substitute. There are many reasons including age/physical ability, baggage or distance requirements, or a need to travel during bad weather. By not taking the bus, all I’ve saved is the extra diesel that was burnt due to my body’s mass being aboard the vehicle, a small contribution to the overall system.

        If my own traffic is very low - let’s take it to an extreme and say I travel only a short distance once per month - then in terms of carbon emissions it would have been better to burn slightly more diesel than to have my own ebike. As my level of use increases, at some point it becomes more environmentally friendly to have the ebike.

        Scalability isn’t a completely linear thing - when you are meeting a lot of people’s requirements simultaneously you end up with resources which are going to be committed anyway, which gives savvy users the ability to “freeload” on incremental costs only.

        • ree
          3·
          3 years ago

          In this situation other “person” taking the bus are multiples times heavier than the ones taking the ebike. Inducing a strain not only on the bus but roads as well.

          Imo we have to see this site as a statement : it’s possible to build low tech , light website, running off-grid.