Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

by logtempo • 2 years ago

249 79 2 years ago

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

logtempo4• 2 years ago

Inspired by recent post about how bloated is the www today.

schiffern• 2 years ago

For historians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057

aaron695• 2 years ago

Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings.

Of course past tech, or more accurately past ideas, combined with todays technology can come back and be popular.

Using high tech computers for material design, an internet system joining 8 billion people (3 billion by one degree), and a higher regard for life[1] we have managed to get 100 year old tech, solar panels and batteries working for remote water pumping for instance. (Not a great example since windmills are older)

Real Low-tech is harder but fun. Why kick a ball around a field, that's stupid, but it's fun. Fruit walls are stupid, but fun and look cool, why be ultra rich if you can't build a few fruit walls and kick a ball around.

Just don't confuse eating cake for what the real poor should be doing.

[1] Windmill maintenance is too expensive because of OH&S

atoav• 2 years ago

No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings.

Doing/having/using less isn't automatically attractive. If we want people to embrace a more sustainable lifestyle a certain healthy amount of nostalgia and romanticism can help selling it.

These (mental) images are not without power and reason — we live in a consumer society where everybody is bombarded with images of desire, images that are usually about buying and owning things or traveling somewhere. I don't think you can win against that kind of indoctrination by not using images at all.

And not all of the lowtech stuff there is just flashy romanticism. E.g. the article about balcony solar without battery makes sense. Now what is low tech will always be graded on a curve. Compared to no electronics that is pretty high tech. Your ball is pretty high tech compared to just playing with conifer cones.

As a kid that grew up in the alps we usually played with what was availabe wherever we went and that was a lot of fun. But how do you make that attractive to people who grew up in places where they wouldn't even let you walk home alone after school and put a tablet in your paws as soon as you opened your mouth? The answer is romanticisim.

tivert• 2 years ago

The dithered images make me feel like I'm reading something from 1994, which is not a bad thing.

pjerem• 2 years ago

What’s cool is that they dithered the images to voluntarily to make them as small (in bytes) as possible.

So it’s visual nice but it also is coherent with their editorial and with the choice to host on a solar powered server.

Everything is explained here :

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...

I think that just this set of choices transforms this somehow classic blog into something special. Maybe some sort of technical art. Somehow it’s the living proof that in a low-tech world, we don’t have to ditch the internet, just transform it.

kibwen• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and specifically I'm wondering if we couldn't do even better if we had custom file formats specifically for two-bit grayscale images (or heck, even one-bit black-and-white images). For example, the OP is using PNG, but I'm wondering if there would be a material difference if, say, you had a format that didn't assume that you ultimately wanted 3 or 4 bytes per pixel. But maybe compression makes this moot?

Dansvidania2• 2 years ago

Frugality is a quality on which we have collectively given up in the technology field, sadly.

ornornor3• 2 years ago

And this habit is what keeps us on the treadmill of work work work because we can’t afford to stop: we think we need all this crap and the only way to get it (and replace it every 3 years) is to work more.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

I don't own much, but I do gotta pay a mortgage for where I don't keep it.

mouzogu• 2 years ago

sustainability, degrowth, frugality...these are choices of privilege.

you can only call for less when you have more than enough.

if you're poor you are already living in degrowth and frugality.

osmsucks• 2 years ago

Yes? That's the whole point.

100 years ago it was unthinkable for common people to eat red meat every day, they just couldn't afford it. Today, we are privileged enough that we can afford to do so, but just because we can it doesn't mean we should. It's not good for you.

Same happens in the tech world: we can afford to buy new tech devices to keep up with the bloat that inevitably envelops most things, but should we?

hkt3• 2 years ago

Degrowth is an economic doctrine, not a way of life. One part of it is the idea that there is enough wealth to go round, even within planetary resource boundaries, and that distributing it is more important than growing it. It is a very very valid criticism of the current system, but it isn't a critique or a choice of individuals, it is about political economy.

logtempo4• 2 years ago

sure, the question"If I can, should I?" it suppose that you have a choice. If you have no choice, there is no questions :D

that said, a good counter-exemple is wood stove efficiency. There are simple design that are more efficient than a firecamp, and very cheap. In some cases you can do a lot more with a little bit of more(sometimes less), so it's worth it.

brohee• 2 years ago

In the IoT world you often still count bytes and milliwatts. Less so when plugged to the grid.

tazu• 2 years ago

Anyone else driven crazy by the opacity decreasing on hover? I feel like it should be the opposite...

Razengan• 2 years ago

Low-tech
"How to build a small solar power system"

The definition of "low tech" clearly varies over time :)

navane• 2 years ago

What a beautiful website on mobile. The font, the colors, the layout.

txutxu• 2 years ago

Booting a modern laptop, something I do every day, is the anti-low-tech paradigm.

Just my motherboard BIOS is 50348032 bits. And it doesn't provide many options, I think the other way around, it hides many options on purpose.

Then there is an i7 processor... a whole beast itself against simplicity. With its Intel Management Engine, it's microcode updates, etc.

Secure boot? UEFI? VT extensions? TPM? NFC? graphics initialization?

OK, so far, we've code and material to fill the whole life of an engineer, and we didn't reach still the OS bootloader.

Ah, the bootloader, who remembers lilo... here we go with grub. Go read it's source code, and return back to explain me everything that is in there... see you in 3 months only for this.

Here it goes, the kernel. A thing that normal users don't see or touch. More than 30 Million of lines of code more. I won't talk about complexity here, but this project can really say it's "batteries included". The same you get an old obscure filesystem/protocol nobody uses, than proc/mem/i-o/netowrk schedulers for supercomputers. Blobs, firmware, more graphics stuff, observability, wifi, storage, a whole word in itself and everything comes up in microseconds.

There is such initram thingy, which is another "mini" (not mini in lines of code) operative system. Busybox? xD look at that.

Now, here it comes... the low-tech king: systemd! our love-hated init system (only init? well you already know).

Now, here we can start the operative system (which may not bee too simple), we could be talking for years, of each of the micro-components that help to launch the base OS services until you get to the login page.

Depending on the distro... we're skipping a hell of complexity (it's not the same the ps aux of an ubuntu desktop, than the ps aux of a minimal system). Let's skip it, let's skip hundreds of software components and phone home stuff.

The auth part, gives for a few years more of reading code, talk about, skipping plugins and optional stuff.

Then you can get a window manager or a desktop environment (so a week or some months of code more), running over Xorg (do you think it's simple?) or Wayland (you can devote your life until you own this part).

And now... let's launch a "web browser". I will stop here, we won't finish if we go deep into the browser complexity.

Modern hardware, software and engineering, are a big ball of snow. The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.

lambdaba• 2 years ago

The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.

Yet my present computer can do far more than the one I had, say 30 years ago, when things were "simpler".

blueflow• 2 years ago

I keep an old Thinkpad around running Windows XP. Its some 512MHz CPU, so not really that fast. But: It boots faster, the UI feels less sluggish, you can tell apart buttons from inert text, and launching Age of Empires I and restarting my savegame takes like 5 seconds.

I keep this Laptop as living proof that computers did indeed get shittier.

adrian_b• 2 years ago

While that is true, most of the current complexity has nothing to do with enabling the present computers to do far more.

Most of the complexity is caused either by the need to provide backward compatibility or by the fact that the many parties who design the components of a computer had very different ideas about which is the right way to design them (so many compatibility layers are required) or by the fact that the manufacturers insist on implementing various additional features that are not really needed, because they may be useful for them even if they are harmful for the final owner of the computer.

Many of the most horrible features of the modern computers have been caused by the fact that Microsoft could not be bothered to implement in their operating systems certain features whose right place was inside the OS and Intel has kept piling workarounds over workarounds in their CPUs, one more ugly than the other, like the System Management Mode and the Management Engine.

npteljes2• 2 years ago

The system is the result of the structure and power distribution of the entities that built it. Another compounding factor is that I don't think any of the creators had "simplicity" on the forefront, when building their respective part of the system. So, yes, the end result is not simple.

As for reading the code or anything like that, I don't think I would have managed even a C64, and that's, I think, way simpler than the modern computer you described. So I've been lost for a long time.

Life is just complex.

overtomanu• 2 years ago

Yes, life is complex literally!!

Even our DNA has lot of "unused"/"dormant" code

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Modern hardware, software and engineering, are a big ball of snow. The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets

a sentiment already expressed in 1963! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35851599

p_l3• 2 years ago

Honestly, I think a lot of the parts that people complain about aren't actually as complex as they seem - but they are the surface visible parts. And lack of knowledge and nostalgia glasses sometimes make people unaware of how complex things used to be.

A lot of underappreciated thing with boot firmware these days is that what is presented to you as end user is absolutely not connected to what options are actually possible. Also tons of complex and quirky code just to get the CPU and memory to the point of running other code. IIRC there's bits of code spanning early CPU reset and intel IME that are necessary to prevent the CPU from destroying itself, at least on some models. Similarly on AMD PSP.

Some of them will be disabled because the hw physically doesn't support them, or can result in weird behaviour that isn't going to be something you like, or effectively brick things.

Another part is that it allows real proper modularity of an open platform, at least on the vendor side. Add a new device that requires special driver? No longer you have to spend a long time just to integrate a blob, there's a standard API/ABI whether the driver is closed or open source. ACPI provides tons of ways to just specify the details of where something is and how to connect it. I love a lot about openpower, but PetitBoot is effectively less open if only because there's no possibility to use add-in card requiring drivers that wasn't already compiled into flash. With UEFI it works.

UEFI is honestly in many ways less complex than previous systems (no more hooking into tape drive boot sequence), especially since there's much less that needs to be in SMM block except for things required by hw (an example: some CPUs required SMM code for changing certain power levels, because the OS level API doesn't expose the low-level details like enforcing a synchronization point on all CPUs or low level internal registers).

If you use UEFI, you also don't need to implement whole complex (and IBM PC incompatible) craziness that is GRUB (or NTLDR with its ARC firmware emulation, or non-UEFI WINLDR which emulates chunk of UEFI...) - n.b. the last linux bootloader that properly handled IBM PC compatibility was LILO if installed in appropriate way (read: not how distros did it).

TPM and Secure Boot are reasonably easy parts of the whole thing. NFC and smartcards are also things that are reasonable for single engineer to grasp.

There's less visible, though some people remember about it, complexity that is enforced on us by corporate interests - big part of why AMD PSP is closed source is the same reason AMD was unable to open source some of the HDMI code recently - both AMD PSP and Intel IME are part of implementing "Secure Media Path", aka DRM bullshit for MPAA (HDCP and its DisplayPort equivalent). It's also why various DRM systems don't fully support fully open systems (for example normal linux distros, not ones that are built by vendor of a device with special blobs)

Now, systemd I'll agree it takes a good idea but does with horrible implementation, and that's from someone who gave in and tries to use it fully (mainly because I have no time to implement an alternative).

Wayland also makes in many ways life more complex than X11, OTOH XFree86 legacy of being lowest common denominator implementation even after reverting to X.Org means that people felt stuck.

AndrewKemendo• 2 years ago

Conway’s law does not define a maximum size of a system.

It simply defines that the systems as measured reflect the structure that created them.

If you look at the software ecosystem as a whole, it is increasingly indivisible without the underlying structure, because interface types have been totally monopolized - you need a create a client-server REST/LAMP service with stateless agents consuming services

That is to say if you wanted to build a technical service, but that does not comply with existing trends in engineering then you just don’t exist

Technology is social it’s not simply mechanical

Socially, we don’t have holism as a goal. Cybernetics is socialism according to academia and increasing specialization means that nobody can fully understand the whole thing.

Because nobody can understand the whole thing there are opportunities for fragility, and basically stuff to break catastrophically with nobody knowing how to fix it.

I anticipate the next couple decades look like a lot of broken stuff that people rely on, that increasingly nobody knows how to fix

roughly• 2 years ago

The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.

This is largely due to path dependency - there’s a required amount of “bigness” and complexity to do the things we want to do, but it’s substantially lower than the amount we have, because we’re not starting from zero, we’re building on what we already have. You can see this everywhere - telecom lines follow old train lines, keyboard layouts mirror old typewriter layouts, desktop file system layouts mirror old mainframe layouts.

It mirrors evolution in that way - the path taken is the cheapest path from the current location, not the ideal path, which is why a giraffe has the same number of bones in its neck as you do.

I’ve actually been interested recently in what it would look like to have a truly modern software & hardware stack built from the ground up for modern computing - I feel like there were attempts at this in the 90s (BeOS comes to mind), but even something like ChromeOS was basically Linux under the hood. It feels like the industry’s decided what we have is Good Enough, and that’s a bit of a shame, because you’re right, it’s really quite a ball of spaghetti.

BobbyTables2• 2 years ago

A minimal Alpine Linux install is what — 10MB?

A minimal Debian/AlmaLinux install is closer to 1G.

What did we gain with 100X the space, larger attack surface, and configuration complexity?

Even hardware is this way…

Look at the weight and power requirements of a SFF PC.

Then look at a blade server… Still requires heavy steel case, heavier than SFF PC because it’s larger, only job is to fit into heavy steel enclosure. Enclosure requires beefy steel rack to handle weight.

Every layer makes logical sense but the end result does not!!

Older NAS servers held multiple 3.5” drives (heavy), requiring big power supply. Now a plastic clip holds NVMe drives onto a motherboard — no steel!

logtempo4• 2 years ago

computers are complex indeed. That said, I don't think lowtech philsophy is about browsing HN with a Macintosh II. It does have this "get things done simple" branch, but also the ecology side of it, the reflexion about the relationship with technology, its social component, eventually the sovereignty we have over technology and its sustainability.

galdosdi• 2 years ago

Maybe if you run the Arachne web browser for MS-DOS on an older non-UEFI intel machine, you might be approaching something where one person could still understand the whole sequence

helsinkiandrew• 2 years ago

Interesting magazine. Not to detract from its content - but are any of those technologies really low tech? Old computers, solar panels, and the various generators all rely on exceptionally advanced science and technology. It would take decades of research to recreate them from scratch.

It's more about reusing/repurposing 'old' discarded tech. Or keeping high tech going as people would do in a post apocalyptic society.

npteljes2• 2 years ago

I feel the same. It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example.

So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general.

spurgu• 2 years ago

It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example.

Solar is not low-tech but I think you need to view it from the point of being able to have a computer and internet at all, in which case you'll need some form of electricity generation.

For hunting you don't need a firearm, bow and arrow does the job just fine for most game.

So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general.

Yup. Lots of elementary stuff like do you really need to heat your whole house in the winter or could you just use a blanket (or some other form of localized heating) where you spend 95% of your time. Stuff like most people won't give much consideration to because the tech is there, it's easy to use and it's cheap.

logtempo4• 2 years ago

I agree with your second paragraph. I think the bait of "lowtech" name is thinking that the main goal is doing AI with stick and mud. It's one of the goal (ofc not literally ), but the most important one is showing alternative and inviting people to think about what is really "technology" and its implications. Mainly because browsing a website hide a ton of processes that one user don't have to think about it.

hkt3• 2 years ago

The magazine goes in to more than that, solar/old tech stuff is included (I would think) because at this stage, disengaging from tech effectively excludes people from society. So I read it as meaning "within the boundaries of remaining included in society, how low tech can we go?" and the conclusion is seemingly "we can host a high traffic site on a battery powered raspberry pi".

The other stuff in the magazine is very low tech indeed: their articles on hot water bottles, pedal power, very early solar power, and agriculture among others are exceptionally interesting and I'd recommend reading them.

derbOac• 2 years ago

Yeah I was going to say something similar, but you put it more succinctly.

It seems the message is really about efficiency and sustainability, not necessarily about low tech. Also, framing it as being about low tech sort of helps things but also hurts things.

For example, I was really interested to read the article about bicycles, and think they make a set of excellent points, points that don't seem to get enough attention in the cycling community. But my guess is the cycling community (to the extent there even is one cycling community), often (although not always) focused on the latest and greatest tech, would respond more to a bike being marketed as ultra-durable or upgradeable and efficient than being "low tech".

phreeza• 2 years ago

I think that tension is basically their whole thing.

RetroTechie• 2 years ago

Lowresourcetechmagazine.com is too long domain name, no?

But yeah, "doing more with less" is the focus here. Skip unnecessary cruft. Not so much avoid using (high) tech stuff.

Also note that in the realm of computing (or even general electronics), high-tech IS frugal, if used appropiately. Thx to Moore's law, switch-mode power supplies, RPi style computers (or microcontrollers on the low end), e-paper / OLED displays & similar fancy stuff. Doing without those would be wasteful, imho.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

If you have electricity you are not really in realm of low tech. I would consider mechanical human powered(not bike with generator) to be low tech. And those might make sense if you value that type of thing and don't want easiest way out...

jalict• 2 years ago

More like adjacent keywords & topics: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html

There are loads of activity on perma- and frugal computing on https://merveilles.town/

#indieweb movement also has a lot of roots in similar ideologies with people going into lowtech -- so I would also check that out, but that is a pretty massive hole to dig into already :-)

SamWhited• 2 years ago

Looks like it's a sunny day at the moment, but check out the website after it's been overcast for a day or two. The background (which just looks yellow right now) doesn't always look that way and it's really cool when the battery is at partial charge!

louwrentius• 2 years ago

I’ve built a bike generator (badly), inspired by low-tech magazine. Previously I made my blog solar-powered also inspired by what low-tech magazine built.

I love the site.

a_gnostic• 2 years ago

This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline

https://archive.is/CFrk2

tooltechgeek• 2 years ago

I think at some point people get tired of so much turnover of technology that doesn’t correlate with much improvement in quality of life (i.e. the latest phones are probably marginally better than older ones) sometimes it even feels like one is forever forced to upgrade computers, operating systems, etc, with minimal improvements. For me that pointed me towards hobbies that are lower tech such as working with hand tools, or crafts that occasionally use tech (i.e. 3d printing) but the higher tech is not the main point to the projects.

wholinator2• 2 years ago

Honestly at this point I've ceased to see even marginal improvements and now observe almost exclusively regressions. They keep taking away functionality, maybe the CPU is faster but my ability to accurately manage the device i own to my personal specifications is forever being reduced. I've encountered many settings that claim to have been "moved" since upgrading windows that just are no longer there. But the old control panel controls that would've given me enough information to proceed debugging are replaced with soft cornered, sterile, white boxes with single toggles, giving the absolute minimum of information possible, and refusing to provide any means of forcing it to elaborate further!

Every app i use consistently gets worse every update, especially social media. I had been saying it for years, but even my non tech friends now are beginning to agree with me which tells me it must be getting really bad.

It seems that every piece of software that can be updated synchronously to the entire population of users enjoys a brief period of success as it actually gets more usable, before inevitably being consumed by profit interests and falling deeper and deeper down the engagement and micro transaction rabbit hole.

specproc• 2 years ago

This may be a good time to give Linux a go as a daily driver, if that's possible.

I made the switch a year or so ago, and it's been really refreshing having my laptop not treat me in the way you describe.

pxmpxm• 2 years ago

I must be getting old or something, because that is my sentiment exactly. Every (forced for bullshit CVE reasons, zomg state actors are after my cat photo collection with $1mio 0days) upgrade introduces yet another user-adverse change aimed at either merchandising something I don't care about, selling my data or changing my existing configs to default back to one of the two formerly mentioned avenues.

Also it's mildly terrifying this dynamic is now pervading things outside of general computing - there are people on this very forum that cargo cult forced "security upgrade" mentality for things like tvs and appliances, without having the slightest idea about the real revenue motives that drive this. Here's a hint: whirpool doesn't give a f about your wifi washer the day after you bought it; any money/engineering time spent on OTA updates is done strictly to sell you a new washer.

spencerf• 2 years ago

There is a sister site “no-tech” magazine which is what I think many people on this site think of when they think of low tech.

https://www.notechmagazine.com/

ris• 2 years ago

I read this blog for years but more recently got tired of its gimmicky contrarianism.

I've lost count of the number of "alternative" energy solutions it has breathlessly presented which, to anyone with a calculator and a basic understanding of physics, can't possibly make sense. e.g. the sister no-tech magazine still has an article up on the GravityLight https://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/01/how-to-design-more-po...

That's not to say it's not occasionally informative about obscure technologies of the past.

k99x552• 2 years ago

The most underrated technology is the bicycle.

It the least discriminatory mode of transport: it caters to all ages, almost-all abilities (1). It give you free exercise, its good for the environment, for the community, for the local economy (small commercial shops benefit from cycle infra, ask notjustbikes and search it)

The reason we dont use the bicycle more often is because cars. Cars monopolized our streets taking most of the space making conditions too hostile for many to cycle. We then built cities (actually bulldozed cities) for the car and now distances are just too big (specially in the US).

Build cities for people not machines.

(1) I am including trikes and wheelchairs, and anything on wheels powered by humans.

pjmlp4• 2 years ago

And weather, some of us aren't into sweety arrival at the office, or completely soaked in water/snow.

Yeah I know about clothes, snow spikes and such, no thanks.

ace_of_spades• 2 years ago

There are also bikes with wind shields and roofs. Also battery powered acceleration support. Probably also heating if you are so inclined. Just saying bikes can be pretty comfortable if that’s what you need.

drekk• 2 years ago

... people might sweat or get dirty if they had to bike their office commute, so the only logical option is to accelerate a climate controlled 1-2 ton metal room for each worker

or we could reimagine commutes? they only exist because we redesigned our environments around cars.

Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

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