How to Build a Solar-Powered Website

Outside/In

NHPR

Society & Culture, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. ELECTRIC VEHICLE SURVEY We’re working on a series about electric vehicles, and we’re looking to hear from you. Would you consider going electric? What do you think about the EV transition? Help inform our reporting by filling out this survey. It’ll only take a couple minutes, and it really helps us produce the show. Thanks so much! SUPPORT Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. Subscribe to our (free) newsletter. Follow Outside/In on Instagram or Twitter, or join our private discussion group on Facebook 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is outside in, I'm Nate Hegey.
0:02.2	And I'm Justine Paradise.
0:03.7	And today, our story begins on the floor of the US Senate.
0:09.1	The year was 2006.
0:10.7	It was hearing for a bill on net neutrality.
0:13.7	Nate, can you define net neutrality for us real quick?
0:16.7	Net neutrality.
0:18.0	The idea is that like internet service providers
0:20.0	must provide services like speed and communications
0:23.4	equally to all users and not just to the highest bidder.
0:26.6	Yeah, exactly.
0:27.5	Companies can't be like, my website should be faster
0:30.4	than your website because I paid more.
0:32.0	Right, exactly.
0:33.0	So senators were debating this.
0:34.2	They were debating an amendment to the bill.
0:36.3	And at this hearing, the late Alaskan senator Ted Stevens,
0:41.3	he stood up to oppose an amendment.
0:43.3	And in stating his opposition, he also uttered a phrase
0:47.7	that would go down in internet history.
0:50.3	But they want to deliver vast amounts of information
0:53.6	over the internet.
	...

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