Given the off-grid mentality that often comes with solar power enthusiasts, hosting on a computer in a different city sort of puts you back on-grid. I like to imagine that the maintainer is also talking to their friends about mesh networking.

For a hobby, sure. Its fun and novel while a few documents sitting on S3 is boring. But from a practical and environmental standpoint, it's purely worse. The OP link is currently dead while I've never seen github pages down after years of using it.

As hobbies go, I think it's practical. There are applications where handling things in the cloud just isn't an option. Many of them are also cases where you don't have reliable power.

From a practical standpoint Open-Source software is often also a hard sell, if you ignore the value of the gained freedom. This linked project isn't much different from someone running Gentoo with Libreboot and a custom kernel. Is it necessary or practical? Maybe not. Environmentally friendly to recompile everything? Nope. But that person probably learned a lot in the process and had some fun with it.

> I've never seen github pages down after years of using it.

Sure, though with those services the actual uptime doesn't exceed the user account's lifetime.

Given the amount of useful information provided by this website, it would be most efficient to write “Battery: 95%” and “* battery level may be incorrect” on a sheet of paper and “host” it in a drawer somewhere.