Solar-powered, Self-hosted Low-tech Magazine

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

by sanmak • 4 years ago

94 27 4 years ago

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

danuker• 4 years ago

The dithered images are fun, but I thought PNG is optimized for large continuous areas of an identical color (or pattern?). Is JPG or WebP not better?

worldofmatthew2• 4 years ago

I sent them a email about that (to their comments email) and never got a response.

kragen4• 4 years ago

They're hypersensitive to suggestions that they might be wrong about something.

ReactiveJelly• 4 years ago

I tried to do a comparison once.

It was approximate, because I didn't have the original images (Or I only had one), but IMO JPEG looks better per pound of bits than dithering. At the same bitrate as their dithered images, it looks a bit crummy, but you can still pick up details that the dithering loses.

They won't admit it's for the aesthetic. If dithering looked as good bit-for-bit as JPEG, independent of aesthetic, nobody would have invented or adopted JPEG.

worldofmatthew2• 4 years ago

They would have to admit to transmitting more data (thus using more carbon) for aesthetics. That would undermine their blog and make some of their posts look very hypocritical.

klez2• 4 years ago

Am I reading it wrong that they're not doing this for file size but for processing power reasons?

I'd be curious (really, not being snarky) if you tested for that as well.

EDIT: nope, I'm wrong, they say they're doing it for bandwidth.

MisterTea• 4 years ago

WebP

No to webp as it's a still vp8 video frame meaning an image codec is burdened with a huge video codec dependency.

mdp20214• 4 years ago

Have you not tried?

A 4-cols PNG can be halfish a JPEG.

Of course, a ~10% quality JPEG can be one fifthish of the original, and present more apparent information than the PNG - but it will look dirty.

tunnuz• 4 years ago

I love how many times this shows up on HN. Is there a score for that?

yreg• 4 years ago

For Slack we post whenever it is down and for Low Tech Magazine we post whenever it is up. :upside-down-smiley-emoji:

oefrha• 4 years ago

I swear I’ve seen this a dozen times here already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29531145

6 months ago, 1225 points, 357 comments. So a dupe it is.

vaylian• 4 years ago

Still puts a smile on my face every time I see it posted.

xkcd 1053

klez2• 4 years ago

I'm one of today's lucky 10000, so I really don't understand why people are complaining for something they last saw 7 months ago.

focusedone• 4 years ago

I don't care how often it's reposted (within limits), this is a really cool site. Stuff like this needs more exposure.

mdp20214• 4 years ago

Either HN re-organizes the whole system so that "nothing can be lost" to the careful user - maybe in an encyclopedic txonomical tree -, or threads will be lost. This Solar powered etc. initiative is new to me, for example.

sph• 4 years ago

The funny thing is that every time it's reaches the frontpage, the HN rush will probably cause it to burn through the battery quite quickly.

Thankfully it's very sunny right now in Spain.

monkeydust• 4 years ago

Is this one of those stories people repost on purpose to build up HN points?

macspoofing• 4 years ago

So close but still using AJAX ...

mdp20214• 4 years ago

Why publishing a page on the topic of sustainability, and the page (markup) is 257KB big, when 54KB is the author's HTM and and the rest, _four fifths_, are visitors' comments?!

kragen4• 4 years ago

By contrast this discussion thread is 7 KiB.

Solar-powered, Self-hosted Low-tech Magazine

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