zenith605

Renesse aan Zee — a square in a Dutch seaside town. Cafes, bikes, people wandering past. Closest thing to the doorbell-cam feeling someone mentioned above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMgVXcPwxtQ

I keep a directory of these so I ended up counting: that one has been live without a break for 8 years and 47 days, the oldest I've found. Most don't come close — median across the ~2,000 live cams I track is 193 days. Stream keys expire, power goes out, storms take the camera down.

This is charming. E-paper is such a good fit for ambient data like this — always visible, no glow, basically no power. How often do you refresh the display, and does partial refresh ghosting become a problem over time?

This resonates with me. I recently built a community site (user submissions, votes, comments, Google login) as a plain static page on free hosting, with a hosted Postgres behind it. No app, no server of my own. People assume you need an app or at least a backend for anything interactive, but the modern web platform covers far more than most product teams give it credit for. The whole thing costs me $11/year for the domain.