Solar websites

One of my favorite websites is, without doubt, the Low Tech Magazine. If you get there, you’ll see a yellow background, with maybe some white on top. That is the battery of the website.

Let me repeat that: That’s the battery of the website.

Do you remember the old adage, “The cloud is someone else’s computer”? This is literally that. It’s not one of those Amazon servers, this website is hosted on a small computer connected to a solar panel. Sometimes, during cloudy days or night, it goes off. And I love it. You can find more info here: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/.

Well, using the explore funcitionality of Stract (a pretty cool search engine, if you want to try it!), I discovered another solar powered website: Solar Protocol. In this case, the page is quite reliable, thanks to a small network of servers around the world. In some way, this website chases the sun for energy.

And I love it.

You have another example (tutorial included) here, in Scott’s website.

I think we have, in a way, forgotten that those are computers on the other side of the wire. We have grown used to having 99.9% uptimes, all of the information always online. We don’t really use our devices too much, they have become “thin clients” for “the cloud”. We don’t own our data, even if it would be free to copy it. And we absolutely do not think about the energy consumption of those computers, far from us.

So yeah, I don’t have too much to add to the conversation. this website is, sadly, not solar powered.

…yet…