How to Build a Solar-Powered Website

Like most modern publications, Low-tech Magazine has a website. But when you scroll through theirs, you’ll notice an icon in the corner: the weather forecast in Barcelona.

That’s because Kris Decker, the creator of Low-tech Magazine, powers the site off a solar panel on his balcony. When the weather gets bad, the website just… goes offline.

In a way, the solar-powered website is an experiment: an attempt to peel back the curtain and to reveal the infrastructure behind it, and to raise questions about our relationship with technology. Should everything on the internet be accessible, all the time? Could progress mean choosing to live with less?

Featuring Kris De Decker.

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LINKS

Low-tech Magazine has published instructions on how to build a low tech or solar-powered site.

Solar Protocol, a solar-powered platform designed with the idea that “it’s always sunny somewhere!”

HTTP Archive tracks the history of web performance.

Re: that time it rained inside the data center.

This website lets you measure the emissions of any website (including this one).

Photographer Trevor Paglen’s images of undersea Internet cables (reportedly wiretapped by the NSA), and a video of sharks nipping at them.

Another example of the natural world interfering with computers, from the cutting room floor: the world’s first computer bug was a literal bug.

When Senator Ted Stevens described the internet as a “series of tubes,” many have opined that he actually wasn’t wrong.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Producer: Justine Paradis

Editor: Taylor Quimby

Additional editing: Nate Hegyi, Jessica Hunt, and Felix Poon

Executive Producer: Rebecca Lavoie

Special thanks to Melanie Risch.

Music: Pandaraps, Damma Beatz, Dusty Decks, Harry Edvino, Sarah the Illstrumentalist (sic), and Blue Dot Sessions.

The “Internet is a Series of Tubes” remix was created by superfunky59 on Youtube.

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