I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.
I think the photos look like that to achieve a very small file size. The whole site is hosted and a small solar and battery powered server, so every MB matters.
For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.
The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute.
It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.
IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process.
If we are picking nits, almost every panel in the US and Canada is _both_ 120v and 240v. But even electricians here commonly say "two-twenty" instead of "two-forty."
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Might have changed their attitude since then as they posted in 2022 about a DIY guide on making a bike generator: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2022/03/how-to-build-a-pra...
I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.
I think the photos look like that to achieve a very small file size. The whole site is hosted and a small solar and battery powered server, so every MB matters.
For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.
Yeah, looks like you are correct. It seems it was maybe as much about style/design as it was compression:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar...
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ (Lots of comments at the bottom about image compression)
The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute.
It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.
It is an experiment, over the years various people have contributed “odd-looking” optimisations, its a great project!
More info:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...
https://github.com/lowtechmag/solar/wiki/Solar-Web-Design
https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html
IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process.
https://blog.llandsmeer.com/tech/2019/08/29/precompression.h...
https://github.com/google/zopfli
https://github.com/kurtmckee/pelican-precompress
Retro-look nit: all are outdated nominal voltages. The US is 120 V (since the 1960s), while the UK and EU are 230 V (since the mid-1990s).
If we are picking nits, almost every panel in the US and Canada is _both_ 120v and 240v. But even electricians here commonly say "two-twenty" instead of "two-forty."