OPPAI ORACLE

drummyfish wrote: Thu Sep 03, 2026 12:00 pm

Based thread. I think the number one idea (for me anyway) is to reduce and optimize power consumption rather than search for ever more miraculous "sustainable" energy sources to maintain the crazy addiction for infinite growth and far too high "comfort" levels. In this I've been experimenting at my caravan with things like my "doomsday computer" and "paper internet". The computer is a simple Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a small display, fully running on a power bank that can be charged with small solar panels. TBH I've never completely charged the bank with the panels yet, though, so I dunno how long that takes I've been a little lazy and always charged the bank at my parents' house and given the minuscule power consumption of the simple computer, it takes hell of a long time to drain, so I don't charge often. Even if it took several days to charge a power bank with the solar, the computer will last longer (given "normal" use), so if you have two power banks (one being used while the other one is charging), you can always have power for the computer. As for performance, it's sufficient even for playing videos and simple games like Freedoom, but I mostly just read text or view images. I think power consumption could be taken to hilarious extremes if we tried, for example by using the passive e-book reader displays instead of LCDs.

For heating I have a stove -- like you say, it's less wasteful than heating with electricity, plus more independent and suckless etcetc. In the winter I complement this with hot water bags to keep me warm until morning when the stove burns out as I sleep, it works very well. The solar powered website gave me a good advice and food for thought: "heat people, not spaces". Not to say I don't heat the inside of the caravan, but I am aware that heating up a whole room is a luxury that is not always necessary.

Next I try to use as much manual power as possible, I never use any electric tools. For example I have a manual powered lawn mower, it works like a charm. Water pressure for the sink and shower can be provided by gravity. I find it ridiculous that people pay for gym memberships and then take elevators and drive electric bicycles and shit. Why not just do useful manual work, burn calories, build muscle, learn skills and save money at the same time?

Thanks to all this I became a little interested in manual and non-electric devices (like that lawn mower I mentioned). Recently at my grandma's house I spotted some cool old manual powered vacuum cleaner, but I don't know how well it works, I couldn't try it yet. Does anyone of you know of any other manual powered devices like this? Please share, I'd love to know.

Thricegreat wrote: Thu Sep 03, 2026 2:10 pm

I had never been a fan of smartphones, but as I started to calculate electricity usage I have realised how much they are efficient.

A typical smartphone uses 1-2W. A typical tablet uses 3-5W. Compared to that, my Thinkpad T440p uses 25W.

That is partially because T440p has an old CPU that is not energy efficient. But even compared to modern laptops, those ARM devices are far more efficient than x86 devices.

So now I'm trying to substitute a large portion of my laptop usage with them. By doing that I realised that tiered usage is best. Subsidiarity again.

You don't need a laptop or a tablet to do tasks like lightweight reading, messaging, basic browsing, &c. A smartphone is enough for that.
Also I found that by using Termux, I can even use bash, vi, ffmpeg, yt-dlp, &c. I can use ssh to connect to my home server too.
Though it was quite hurtful that I can't use things like dmenu. Also I have to use external mpv app. In fact I can use mpv within Termux, but that requires Pulseaudio which I absolutely hate.
Maybe Linux phone is the answer? Considering that Android becomes more closed.

A tablet is good for tasks that are simple but require a larger screen size than a smartphone. Like drawing / viewing illustrations, watching videos, editing documents, reading books, &c. It can also be a backup for when the smartphone fails.

But a smartphone or a tablet can't do energy intensive tasks like training an AI, running a blockchain node, high performance gaming, &c. Those tasks are for a PC or a laptop. It can also be a backup for when the smartphone and tablet both fail. I think I should divide laptops and PCs, but I currently don't own a PC.