ATYH
till kingdom come
OFFGRID COMPUTING:
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Hardware:
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When you generate your own power, you become much more aware of how
much energy things use. When designing our off grid living systems, it
became pretty clear to me that we would need to make some changes to
our computing habits. For people who live on grid, a laptop that uses
"only" 60 watts seems trivial. But when you are off grid, that laptop
uses 60 watts PER HOUR. Meaning, that over a 24 hour period, that
laptop would require 1440 watt hours. To put that into perspective,
the largest battery "generators" (which arent generators at all, this
is a made up marketing term) have around 1000 watt hours of storage,
or 1kilowatt hour. Meaning, that to run a Macbook Pro for 24 hours,
you would need one and a half of these just to power it. As most of
these battery units run over $1000, you are looking at $2K just to
power your laptop. And then you have to figure out how you are going
to charge those batteries every day.
Before we took the plunge and moved off grid, I went through an "old
thinkpad" phase, as all self respecting nerds do. The pre 2012
Thinkpads were some of the most durable, repairable, and otherwise
perfect laptops ever made. But the race for profit through cheaper
manufacturing won out, and the quality degraded over time. I purchased
a Thinkpad x200t off of Ebay for $70. This was before they became
popular again and more expensive for a variety of reasons. Through
experimentation, I noticed the x200t used less power than any other
computer I owned. In fact, The x200t uses less power than a Raspberry
Pi 4 when its coupled with the external monitor and keyboard required
to use it. The x200 and the x200t use an average of 16-20 watts during
normal use. This means for a 24 hour period of constant use, the
thinkpad needs about 400 watt hours. Or less than 1/3 the power a
Macbook Pro requires. This is doable in an offgrid situation.
After all of the testing and experimentation I did, my personal
conclusion is that the best single unit computers (meaning keyboard,
screen, and hardware in one unit) for offgrid use are the Thinkpad
x200 models, and the Pinebook Pro from Pine64. The Pinebook Pro is
even better power wise, but it can be much more difficult to get ahold
of these days than an older Thinkpad.
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Software:
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Why bring up software choices in a post about living off grid? Because
I've never encountered someone who does the work to live off grid, who
does not have at least some inherent resistance to being controled by
governments and corporations. Most of the people Ive met who live this
way have a string desire to make their own decisions, and take charge
of their own lives. And with this increased autonomy comes increased
responsibility. There is no power company to call, or plumber to
hire. You are responsible for all of it. And those who do well in an
offgrid lifestyle, thrive in this kind of environment. You have to be
a jack (or jill) of all trades.
This being the case, having a computer that you can repair and control
is important and inline with this lifestyle. For this reason I choose
Libre or open source operating systems.
Before moving offgrid, I used Void Linux as my primary operating
system. Void is a rolling release operating system, meaning updates
happen in chunks continually so that there is never a "version
upgrade" event. Once its installed, especially if you keep it minimal,
you are set for years. But now that we are living offgrid, our
internet is not the wide open unlimited pipe that ongrid people
enjoy. We have to pay for gigabites of mobile data. So I needed a
different solution to downloading software every day. So I switched to
OpenBSD. As this is not a post about OpenBSD, I wont go on and on
about how great it is. (It is). Ill just say that OpenBSD is very
stable, reliable, and secure. Updates occur every 6 months, and are
trivial to install. And interesting sidenote... every major operating
system in the world uses code from the OpenBSD project. Windows,
MacOS, GNU/Linux, Android, and iOS, all use as least some code from
solutions created by OpenBSD.
In addition to this primary laptop, I also like to experiment with
9Front, which is a fork of the Plan 9 operating system from Bell
Labs. I have a spare hard drive with 9Front installed, which I swap
out in the Thinkpad from time to time, as well as a Rasberry Pi which
runs 9Front. Between these two operating systems, there isnt much I
cant do.
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Server:
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Because I want to be able to run my own web services, I run two
external servers. One is a standard Linux server which runs my
Fediverse instance, my email server, my xmpp server, my Searx
instance, and other various services. The other is an OpenBSD server
through OpenBSD Amsterdam. I love the simplified logic of serving web
content through OpenBSD. As well as the security first ethos. OpenBSD
currently runs my gemini capsule and my gopher server. I am working on
moving everything over to OpenBSD, one service at a time. Though
lately, the garden is taking top priority.
I have a dream of eventually running everything off of a single board
computer on site, with its own solar input and backup battery. This is
not terribly difficult to do. The one difficulty is having an open
port to serve the content when you are using mobile data. I have not
found a way to do this yet. I am researching weather or not this is
possible with Starlink. If it is, I many go that route. Not to mention
enjoy the added benefit of still having internet access in the event
of a complete grid outage with Starlink.
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