tilde.town

is a small unix server made for sharing

faq | sign our guestbook | signup | code of conduct | file help ticket | donate | wiki

~*~*~* {{active_user_count}} townies active right now *~*~*~

our esteemed users

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generated at {{generated_at}}
sorted by recent changes
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full user list

this site is an intentional digital community for creating and sharing works of art, educating peers, and technological anachronism. we are a completely non-commercial, donation supported, and committed to rejecting false technological progress in favor of empathy and sustainable computing.

stuff you can do here

  • geocities style hosting
  • internal irc network
  • private usenet constellation
  • internal mail
  • command line / unix tutelage
  • make ascii art
  • host twitter bots
  • participate in our communal twitter
  • generate random poetry (under construction)

 |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|
 |                         !                        /\    |  X  |
 |                         !                       //\\   | / \ |
 |      @@@                ! |~~~~~~~~~~~~~|      ///\\\  |/   \|
 |     @@@@@              /i\|=============|     ////\\\\ |\   /|
 |      @@@              /(i)\====== == ===|    /////\\\\\| \ / |
 |                      /((i))\============|   //////\\\\\\  X  |
 |                      |% % %|=== ===== ==|   I||||||||||I / \ |
 |                      |% % %|====== =====|   I||||||||||I/   \|
 |:::                   |% # %|============|   I||||||||||I\   /|
 |:::                   |% % %|= ====== ===|   I||||||||||I \ / |
 |:::                   |% % #|==== ==+++++++++++++|||||||I  X  |
 |:::HHHHHHHHHHHH       |% % %|=======! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I / \ |
 |:::HHHHHH HHHHH       |% # %|= =====! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I/   \|
 |:::HHHHHHHHHHHH       |# % %|=== ===! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I\   /|
 |:::HHH HHHHHHHH       |% % %|=======! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I \ / |
 |:::HHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT % #|== = ==! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I  X  |
 |:::HHHHHHI [] [] [] [] I # #|=======! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I / \ |
 |::: HHHHHI [] [] [] [] I % %|====  =! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I/   \|
 |:::HHHH HI [] [] [] [] I # %|== ====! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I\   /|
 |:::HHHHHHI [] [] [] [] I % %|=======! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I \ / |
 |:::HHHHHHI [] [] [] [] I % #|=== = =! ! ! ! ! ! !|||||||I  X  |
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 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
              
    o  | |    |                               
_|_    | |  __|   _  _|_  __           _  _   
 |  |  |/  /  |  |/   |  /  \_|  |  |_/ |/ |  
 |_/|_/|__/\_/|_/|__/o|_/\__/  \/ \/    |  |_/
              

orators, singers, musicians to come!
 She will break it to you better than I can.
 Saturn expelled his father, and seized his throne
-- I wish our opinions were the same.
 Ere departing fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets
 Emma soon recollected, and understood him

--'''' My dear papa, he is three-and-twenty.
 I hope time has not made you less willing to pardon.
; Nay-be calm, for I am so: Does it burn?
 She will break it to you better than I can.
 play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
 She continued to look back, but in vain

 It is necessary and beside the large sort is puff.
; she is living in dread of the visit.
 Year of comets and meteors transient and strange
;'' remember that I am here.-- Mr.
 She will break it to you better than I can.
; and Emma was quite in charity with him.

 It is a mere nothing after all
 The doors of the two rooms were just opposite each other.
 She will break it to you better than I can.
 I shall just go round by Mrs. Cole 's
 Here is realization, Here is a man tallied
 Even pleasure, you know, is fatiguing

 Keep your raptures for Harriet 's face.
 Ere departing fade from my eyes your forests of bayonets
 For to one side she leans, Then back she sways
 It soon appeared that London was not the place for her.
 Perhaps they had the figure of a winged horse on the prow
 She will break it to you better than I can.

 She will break it to you better than I can.
 To conclude, I announce what comes after me.
; nothing delineated or distinguished.
 Excelsior Who has gone farthest?
 To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.
`` How I could so long a time be fancying myself!

`` Yes, sometimes he can.'' Do you mean with regard to this letter?''
 Any nonsense will serve. the flesh over and over!
 Eleves, I salute you!`` I not aware!'

 Have you guess 'd you yourself would not continue?
 The wanderer would not heed me
`` He told me at parting, that he should soon write
 Mr. Elton looked all happiness at this proposition
 what is it to us what the rest do or think?
 I doubted it more the next day on Box Hill

 Come thou, arise from the ground unto the place yonder
 One was the son of Mars, and was killed before Troy
 He had done his duty and could return to his son.
 I never saw any thing so outree!
; woods, together with mountains, are on fire.
`` He told me at parting, that he should soon write

`` He told me at parting, that he should soon write
; and, abhorring the light, they fly { abroad} by night.
 Can not you guess what this parcel holds?''
 And these things I see suddenly, what mean they?
 And you, paid to defile the People
 Very strongly may be sincerely fainting.

 she cried with a most open eagerness
`` He told me at parting, that he should soon write
 Let me hear from you without delay
 By him she was put in mind of what she might do
; but Emma 's countenance was as steady as her words.
 Dear Miss Woodhouse, do advise me.''

 It was certainly ‘barbara’ in the eyes of a Greek
 One can not creep upon a journey
 One was the son of Mars, and was killed before Troy
`` He told me at parting, that he should soon write
[ 77 and struck the guilty{ draught} from his mouth.
; The golden sun of June declines, It has not caught her eye.

 Clarke translates ‘miseri senis ore,
: naught there is Save body, having property of touch.
 Alas poor boy, he will never be better,
; but if he wished to do it, it might be done.
`` He told me at parting, that he should soon write
 One was the son of Mars, and was killed before Troy

 I knew who it came from. The virgin shrieks aloud
 To feel the presence of a brave commanding officer But she was always right.
 I 'd rather you would.'' This was a river of Troy

news

Systems status

Wed Oct 14 13:49:12 PDT 2015

~vilmibm released a rewrite to the server's infrastructure yesterday. Nothing should be different, but it'll be much easier to work on new features and consume fewer resources.

Currently, the guestbook is down. Usenet has also been disabled for now since no one was using it and it has a nontrivial impact on the system. If you want to talk about bringing usenet back, bring it up in irc <3.

BIRTHDAY! The Town Turns 1

Sun Oct 11 18:54:35 UTC 2015

Exactly a year ago, ~vilmibm gave himself a birthday present in the form of a small unix server meant for commnunity and sharing. Now, tilde.town is a thriving community of feels, peer education and beautiful digital art.

If you are not yet a towner, check out our code of conduct, look at some user pages, and sign up!. Everyone is welcome here regardless of skill level and if making SSH keys is a little scary, that's okay. Reach out to for help.

Here's to another year of html and feels.

new stuff!

Sat Aug 1 17:27:15 PDT 2015

today was a day of things happening!

  • the first ever tilde.town volunteer admin meeting happened today. ~insom, ~krowbar, and ~vilmibm all met to talk about the future tilde.town and how to ease the burden of things like user signups. Marks the first ever international face-to-face meeting of townies. exciting!
  • guestbook went live! (lol)
  • you can now click on the pretty ascii tilde.town over to the left to visit a random page (or just go directly to /cgi/random).
as always, tilde.town is a place for html and feels. feels run strong and well today. come say hi!

Sun Jul 26 18:01:58 PDT 2015

new homepage design

Sun Jul 26 18:01:58 PDT 2015

~vilmibm made a cleaned up homepage. it's linking to two under construction feature--a new help desk for admin requests and a random page linker. there is also a new FAQ.

we've also hit a cool donation milestone of $60. thank you everyone who has donated! our monthly costs are now covered and if we hit $65 we can do some more server enhancements.

donations! also, new disk

Wed Apr 29 06:04:58 UTC 2015

An exciting day for tilde.town. We now have way to donate via patreon. Thanks to all the folx who have already become patrons! y'all make the heart of this sysadmin warm and fuzz. A big part of the push for donations was a need for more server space which we have as of tonight's server upgrade/reboot. The main tilde.town server now has a 40gb disk. Enjoy!

Some updates coming down the pipe:

  • 2gb quota for all users
  • fixed poetry server
  • better signup process/docs

welcome haiku

Thu Mar 5 21:19:42 UTC 2015

If you signed up in the last two months or so you had a bum welcome present in your /home. the script has been fixed and now everyone retroactively has a welcome haiku in their home directory. enjoy.

server restart

Tue Jan 27 21:13:27 UTC 2015

Hi. Today tilde.town had to restart to pick up a patch for CVE 2015-0235. data.tilde.town (our poetry server) has also been patched and restated. Sorry for any inconvenience!

lots of people

Thu Jan 1 07:37:16 UTC 2015

we have ~370 users. isn't that wild?

Scheduled Downtime Tonight

Wed Nov 26 21:19:12 UTC 2014

To accommodate our growing user base, there will be a server resize/reboot tonight (Pacific time). Sadly I cannot give an exact time as I still don't have internet at my new place and will have to opportunistically find some to execute this upgrade.

The server should only be down for a few minutes, but this will terminate any running applications (like tmux/screen/irssi). Any files open in an editor should be preserved by a swap file but you still may want to save and close things in the next several hours.

Also, this upgrade means that tilde.town is no longer an essentially free project, so I may put up something for donations soon.

100+ users party report

Sun Nov 9 23:07:08 UTC 2014

tilde.town now has 102 users. We crossed into three digits last night and lots of townies hung out in irc to celebrate. Some new features even launched!

  • the homepage userlist is now sorted by modified time
  • there is now a shared
    tweet
    command that all users can use to tweet to the @tildetown account (protip:
    haiku | tweet
    )
  • run
    random_pokemon.sh
    to get a random ascii art pokemon (thanks, ~sanqui)
  • a git-based wiki that all townies can edit (thanks for the help, ~datagrok)
  • an IRC bot (thanks, ~selfsame) that plays numberwang
  • even moar learnings up on the page of ~shanx
  • general good feels

80 users!

Wed Oct 29 18:19:45 UTC 2014

tilde.town just added its 80th user. Welcome! Some folks have been having trouble with ssh public keys. Remember, public keys are really confusing if you aren't too familiar with them, and there is no judgement if you can't immediately get them to work. Feel free to tweet at @tildetown or send an email to ~vilmibm if you'd like some help.

60 users

Sat Oct 25 19:37:47 UTC 2014

tilde.town is up to 60 users. This is lovely! It is also only a tenth of our planned total user capacity, so if you are interested in a tilde* account we'd love to have you. You can even submit a user request with a fancy form now!

submit a user account request!

Change of IP, warnings when you ssh

Sun Oct 19 03:28:59 UTC 2014

In the interest of making sure we don't suddenly disappear from the Internet as a result of a dynamic IP change on AWS I switched to using an Elastic IP (amusingly, "elastic" IPs are static).

The upside is that we now have a static IP (also it's free) (woo).

The downside is that when you try to SSH into tilde.town, now, you'll get an error about "something nasty" and there will be many @ characters. You'll want to edit your .ssh/known_hosts file and remove the entry for tilde.town (your error message should have a cute copy-pasta-able one-liner for doing this for you).

Go ahead and do that, and then log in With Confidence. Hopefully this won't happen again.

I'll close by mentioning the imminent arrival of many new tildeverse members. We (the tildeverse operators) are just about ready to accept the signups currently languishing in a waitlist. This means lots of new users, which is lovely, but may mean some growing pains while I adapt our server to the new user load in the most cost-effective way.