25.05.00 A PC powered by current from a potato and serving Web pages. On Linux. It was a tale too good to be true.

‘Welcome to the world's first vegetable powered web server,’ declared the home page of the SpudServer. And at least three big Web based news services - including the BBC and Slashdot - took the bait.

Working on the same principle as the potato powered digital clock, they reported, the spudserver was a stripped down low power consumption PC serving web pages to the world. Due to memory limitations and the necessity of minimising load, it was only serving a couple of pages.

Ananova went as far as interviewing the inventors, who said, 'we considered using hamster wheels but we think that would probably be cruel to hamsters. They are probably unreliable too - you would need loads of hamsters to make sure you always had power.' The BBC, meanwhile, went to the trouble of researching and explaining how it would work chemically.

As for us at Ninfo... would we have fallen for a story so obviously full of holes? Nah, course not. Unless we wanted to.,,,

http://totl.net/Spud/ - intro page
http://152.78.65.48:2300/ - spud-driven HTTP
http://152.78.65.48:2300/pic.jpg - a picture of the SpudServer, served from itself. Er, no spud in sight though…