Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument.
https://100r.co/site/orca.html
(I love the Dwarf Fortress background for this video, it absolutely nails the vibe)
RickS · 48m ago
Love orca, and that's a really nice example. Messed with it a bit when it came out, and one toy project I'll share in the hopes that someone does it before me: an orca GUI that uses a larger grid with representative images in place of single char glyphs. I found that writing orca is fairly straightforward — you look up the sheet, find a thing and do it. It's reading that's the hurdle. An 8 char chunk that made perfect sense when I wrote it takes just as many lookups to read later. This probably gets easier over time, but I still think it's a cool design opportunity.
lovich · 5m ago
Oh this is the same group behind ORCA? I should read up on them more if they have multiple projects like this
jvanderbot · 5h ago
I love the contrast in "Low tech/bootstrapped tech" this way vs, say, duskos.org. I call this "rabbits vs forth" tech bootstrappers. [1].
It's somewhat strange to me that their tech journey is so narrative and ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech. But then again, I'm probably on the forth side of the spectrum.
> ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech
I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications. They can be repaired seemingly indefinitely with a soldering iron and spare caps.
anthk · 3h ago
- gopher browser -> gopher://magical.fish as a portal
- HN can be read at gopher://hngopher.com
- irc -> bitlbee.org to chat with anyone, even IRC with TLS itself.
Kirc will run on any potato.
- a high end 486 it's needed to play MP3's. Either that or burn
your favourites into CD's.
- sc-im+gnuplot/emacs' ses+gnulot
- srln+slrnpull
- telescope/sacc can do gopher fine. gemini can be stalled.
- sfeed+links to read news. Altough gmane.io and gwene.io can relay mail lists and RSS feeds as NNTP groups and then your might slrn will just read all news happily in a 486 (or less).
Nice post. I hadn't noticed the "subtle suggestions" of donations myself, to be honest, but maybe I hadn't browsed around their pages enough.
Anyway, if they do mention it, is it not a very far cry from the situation everywhere else? Youtubers begging, screaming, shouting, seducing, murmuring, doing the bug-eyes, repeating, cloying, getting emotionally heavy and forceful, for subscriptions, likes, and comments? Interspersed with violent sudden shifts to advertising products, etc.
So it was a bit of a surprise to hear it mentioned like it might be bad. Are you surprised that the suggestions are so gentle? Or what
jdiff · 4h ago
With their stance of permacomputing, you don't think the two go hand in hand? A simple VM that can be implemented quickly on almost any hardware or underlying tech stack you can scrounge together? The only thing they'd be really against is designing new hardware to run Uxn "natively," which would seem to push you exclusively to reuse what you have.
kragen · 2h ago
100r's Uxn/Varvara aspires to be that, but that's not the same thing as succeeding at it. AFAIK the smallest computer with a full Uxn/Varvara implementation is a Nintendo DS [correction! Game Boy Advance], which is faster than the Sun workstation I was using in the 90s (though it has less RAM). You probably aren't going to get it running on an eZ80-based TI calculator, for example, or an Arduino UNO.
It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
jdiff · 1h ago
The Gameboy Advanced has a full emulator with the standard devices, and incompleteness is often not a dealbreaker as long as it supports the devices you need. There are incomplete emulators for ESP32 and STM32 based devices, DOS, and even an extremely limited emulator for the original Gameboy.
Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
kragen · 1h ago
You're right, that's smaller. I think I was confusing the DS and the "Game Boy Advance", because I was thinking of a machine with a few hundred K of RAM. The GBA is a 16MHz ARM7TDMI with 288KiB of RAM, not counting the 96KiB of VRAM; the Nintendo DS's main CPU is a 67MHz ARM946E-S, and it has 4MiB of RAM.
As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM.
(Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.)
What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the drone that blew up your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips.
In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it.
In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers.
> Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious step toward Kay's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost in mobile devices since.
While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison of me to Alan Kay is not.
anthk · 3h ago
I still use an Atom N270 netbook, and DuskOS is on the edge; but there are zillions of Atom netbooks in LaTam and in the outside as goverments agreed to ship these to students. With TUI/CLI tools you can do wonders, far more than CollapseOS. Yes, I know Forth, I did a good chunk of Starting Forth.
UXN once tweaked it can run stuff like Oquonie.
BTW, a properly set Emacs can double as a great legacy platform too; from IRC to whatever (Bitlbee<>IRC), Web browsing, email, gopher and gemini browser with elpher (and the Gemini proxy gemini://gemi.dev), epub reading, music and video (Emacs' emms, but mpv+yt-dlp can be set to play stuff at 480p/720@30FPS), Usenet client, RSS, Elisp itself, M-x calc and Gnuplot, PDF viewer (pdf-tools), Org-Mode+Hyperbole to expand your brain like nothing, sokoban gaming, Tetris, ZMachine text adventures with Malyon, MUDs, trace routers from OpenStreetMap with osm.el ...
For stucking I/O:
Usenet->slrnpull+GNUS.
Mail->Mu4e+mu.
People doesn't know that today computers from 2003 can do wonders and access far more services than they would think.
Once you can do TLS 1.3 'fast' enough (P4 w/ SSE2), you can do anything from IRC, email, gopher, gemini, usenet and rss from proxies and terminal or Emacs clients.
0xCaponte · 4d ago
It has been a while since I found a site this interesting, I have been reading it on and off for the past few days.
As per their site: "Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future. We live and work aboard a 10 m sailboat named Pino in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world"
themk · 6h ago
I highly recommend reading their north pacific crossing log book.
They used to do a monthly vlog too, I think it's still on YouTube.
fitsumbelay · 1h ago
I'm forever impressed by these folks' energy and creativity
xrd · 2h ago
A friend asked me whether I was concerned about energy usage of AI. I didn't have a good answer. It feels inevitable.
But, I love the write-up here on why the sailboat, and why UXN, because those two things are complementary when you are living in a sailboat and are thinking intimately about your power consumption.
Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year was a treat (and took a lot of mental energy!)
Mr_Eri_Atlov · 4h ago
100 Rabbits is the most successful example of solarpunk I've ever seen.
Tech with a focus on sustainability and creation.
Love their work!
QRY · 1h ago
Their work has molded a lot of my views on technology, such a breath of fresh air when I first found out about them! They really inspired me to look at my own work and ask how to make it more resilient, how to decrease dependencies.
From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes constantly.
Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local AI + custom CLI tools for development work, and I never would have thought to pursue this sort of thing if I hadn't found these people. Great stuff!
Oh and ORCA is a LOT of fun! Give it a shot if you're into sounddesign, or generative electronic music stuff: https://100r.co/site/orca.html
muzani · 4h ago
It's remarkable how good you have to be at tech to be low tech and low maintenance.
jdiff · 4h ago
Necessity is the mother of invention, and as I understand it from their writing, life on the sea is a constant maintenance battle against when the "ground" underneath your feet is trying to pull you in at every step, from corroding everything holding you together to the isolation driving extensive planning and maintenance for self sufficiency projects.
aosaigh · 2h ago
This is a fascinating website which I look forward to exploring a bit more, along with the authors personal sites.
Are there any other off-grid low-tech sites/projects/sites like this?
I remember another interesting site that was being run off solar posted here on HN that went down when the batteries went out.
I recently got my basic cruising sailing license. And I also enjoy hacking on low-power, low-end salvaged computers that are repairable with a minimal set of tools and a manual. I'm hoping one day my tech journey will lead me to spending more time aboard and working on projects in this space.
I'll defer to Occam's Razor: they probably had enough money at the outset that they don't have to worry about consistent month-to-month income.
That's not meant to be a diss. Though, given their politics, I could understand if they took it that way.
kilpikaarna · 5h ago
Unsure about the day-to-day situation, I imagine by now they make enough off of the stuff they put out as 100r that combined with very low expenses it's sustainable or close to. In past blog posts they mention taking on contract work for boat repairs.
smikhanov · 4h ago
Yeah, when you take the rent and many of the temptations of the big city lifestyle out of consideration, the cost of living gets surprisingly low.
munificent · 2h ago
And kids.
jgon · 3h ago
I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their stuff. Just trying to answer your question.
Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41131181 - Aug 2024 (488 comments)
Gimballed Stove - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39733829 - March 2024 (12 comments)
Weathering Software Winter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654 - Jan 2023 (28 comments)
Internet in Paradise (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080305 - July 2022 (18 comments)
Artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31410838 - May 2022 (1 comment)
Off the Grid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30031472 - Jan 2022 (118 comments)
Busy Doing Nothing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26760803 - April 2021 (6 comments)
Working Off-Grid Efficiently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723819 - Jan 2021 (142 comments)
North Pacific Logbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24489257 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)
(I omitted threads about their software projects, even though those are super interesting: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: https://bsky.app/profile/r.whal.ing/post/3lpyrm4vrqs2d
And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaI_TuISSJE&t=446s
(I love the Dwarf Fortress background for this video, it absolutely nails the vibe)
It's somewhat strange to me that their tech journey is so narrative and ends up with a VM stack, rather than any kind of salvaged / repurposed hard tech. But then again, I'm probably on the forth side of the spectrum.
https://jodavaho.io/posts/rabbits-or-forth.html
I love reading the Hundred Rabbits blog but I view it as sort of an artistic endeavor in addition to pure tech. Indeed, my idea of "low tech" would be 16-bit systems or early 32-bit stuff like 386 and 486 PCs, etc. These machines are surprisingly capable even in 2025 with the right applications. They can be repaired seemingly indefinitely with a soldering iron and spare caps.
- HN can be read at gopher://hngopher.com
- irc -> bitlbee.org to chat with anyone, even IRC with TLS itself. Kirc will run on any potato.
- a high end 486 it's needed to play MP3's. Either that or burn your favourites into CD's.
- sc-im+gnuplot/emacs' ses+gnulot
- srln+slrnpull
- telescope/sacc can do gopher fine. gemini can be stalled.
- sfeed+links to read news. Altough gmane.io and gwene.io can relay mail lists and RSS feeds as NNTP groups and then your might slrn will just read all news happily in a 486 (or less).
- translate -> simply translate
- Reuters -> http://neuters.de
* http://theoldnet.com/
* http://68k.news/
* http://weather.maniac.com/
Anyway, if they do mention it, is it not a very far cry from the situation everywhere else? Youtubers begging, screaming, shouting, seducing, murmuring, doing the bug-eyes, repeating, cloying, getting emotionally heavy and forceful, for subscriptions, likes, and comments? Interspersed with violent sudden shifts to advertising products, etc.
So it was a bit of a surprise to hear it mentioned like it might be bad. Are you surprised that the suggestions are so gentle? Or what
It's a good first step in that direction, the first attempt at permacomputing good enough to criticize.
Many of these might be more powerful than your 90s workstation, but if someone's scavenging technology they're more likely to find a Chromebook than a Sun.
As for what you're more likely to find in usable shape in a hypothetical collapse scenario, it probably depends on what kind of scenario you're talking about. Certainly vastly more Chromebooks exist than Suns, but the Chromebook's SSD only has a few months of data retention, so you probably won't be able to get it to boot if it's been sitting around unpowered for many years. All the Sun SPARCs are going to be in non-working order because their IDPROM batteries will have died, but some older 68000-family Suns like the 3/60 I theoretically still have are probably okay, because their IDPROMs are actually PROM rather than battery-backed RAM.
(Of course you also have to worry about capacitors drying out.)
What's vastly more common than Chromebooks, Suns, or GBAs, though, are Flash-based microcontrollers like the AVR family and 48MHz members of the STM32 family. (You can probably salvage a couple out of the drone that blew up your parents.) And those will probably still be in working order, unlike anything SSD-based. I don't think Uxn is a good fit for those chips.
In a multiple-centuries sort of collapse scenario you also need to worry about the retention time of the NOR Flash in these microcontrollers. Hopefully if they lose their memory you'll still be able to rewrite it, but if the manufacturers used Flash to implement some supposedly-read-only memory, they might not bother to mention it.
In the collapse scenario we're actually in at the moment, GBAs, Nintendo DSs, and Chromebooks are all immensely more expensive than such microcontrollers.
Ooh, I like this phrase.
http://found.ward.bay.wiki.org/view/good-enough-to-criticize
> Alan Kay described the Macintosh as the first personal computer good enough to be criticized. It was a serious step toward Kay's Dynabook. Not perfect, but in the right direction. In this 2017 interview Kay explains how he came to his vision and how it has been completely lost in mobile devices since.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
While I think the implicit equation of Uxn with the 128KiB Macintosh is reasonable, the implicit comparison of me to Alan Kay is not.
UXN once tweaked it can run stuff like Oquonie.
BTW, a properly set Emacs can double as a great legacy platform too; from IRC to whatever (Bitlbee<>IRC), Web browsing, email, gopher and gemini browser with elpher (and the Gemini proxy gemini://gemi.dev), epub reading, music and video (Emacs' emms, but mpv+yt-dlp can be set to play stuff at 480p/720@30FPS), Usenet client, RSS, Elisp itself, M-x calc and Gnuplot, PDF viewer (pdf-tools), Org-Mode+Hyperbole to expand your brain like nothing, sokoban gaming, Tetris, ZMachine text adventures with Malyon, MUDs, trace routers from OpenStreetMap with osm.el ...
For stucking I/O:
Usenet->slrnpull+GNUS.
Mail->Mu4e+mu.
People doesn't know that today computers from 2003 can do wonders and access far more services than they would think.
Once you can do TLS 1.3 'fast' enough (P4 w/ SSE2), you can do anything from IRC, email, gopher, gemini, usenet and rss from proxies and terminal or Emacs clients.
https://100r.co/site/north_pacific_logbook.html
But, I love the write-up here on why the sailboat, and why UXN, because those two things are complementary when you are living in a sailboat and are thinking intimately about your power consumption.
https://100r.co/site/why_a_boat.html
https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
Seeing Devine at StrangeLoop last year was a treat (and took a lot of mental energy!)
Tech with a focus on sustainability and creation.
Love their work!
From my experience, achieving provider independence boils down to: own your stack, work offline-first, test failure modes constantly.
Been trying to get a setup going with NixOS + local AI + custom CLI tools for development work, and I never would have thought to pursue this sort of thing if I hadn't found these people. Great stuff!
Oh and ORCA is a LOT of fun! Give it a shot if you're into sounddesign, or generative electronic music stuff: https://100r.co/site/orca.html
Are there any other off-grid low-tech sites/projects/sites like this?
I remember another interesting site that was being run off solar posted here on HN that went down when the batteries went out.
1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
100r and https://screenl.es and dynamicland are huge inspirations.
I'll defer to Occam's Razor: they probably had enough money at the outset that they don't have to worry about consistent month-to-month income.
That's not meant to be a diss. Though, given their politics, I could understand if they took it that way.