I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.
I thought he was posting about some retro product until I saw the USB ports in the energy delivery. Weird that he edited his photos to look like that, and used retro components otherwise.
I think the photos look like that to achieve a very small file size. The whole site is hosted and a small solar and battery powered server, so every MB matters.
For photographic images, dithered PNGs have worse quality:size ratio than JPEGs. If you want small files and are willing to sacrifice quality you can turn the JPEG compression up or reduce the resolution.
The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute.
It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.