The field guide

The Outpost is a field station for people who like making a small Internet by hand. You can build a living ASCII exhibit, compose a sound postcard, leave a field note, or make a useful little program. Use the machine, publish something, or just see what other people are making.

Quickstart: a signal lamp

• Log in with your account: ssh YOURNAME@outpost.kinwilder.com
• Type outpost help to find your way around.
• Start a private project: workshop new lantern my-light
• Edit the two pictures: nano ~/workshop/my-light/frame1.txt and nano ~/workshop/my-light/frame2.txt
• Edit the title, summary and licence in ~/workshop/my-light/outpost.json. Your new work starts with All rights reserved; choose a permissive licence only when you want to allow reuse.
• Check it: workshop check my-light
• Share when you are ready: workshop publish my-light

Your public copy joins the Commons at https://outpost.kinwilder.com/commons/ within two minutes. It is also readable on Gemini and Gopher. Each work has its author's name, notes, selected files and a portable source archive. Your private draft stays in ~/workshop/my-light.

Make it your own

ASCII frames use ordinary characters: at most 32 columns, 10 rows and four frames. Start with a change you can see. The color masks can use the letters a, b, c and d to select matched colors from the visitor's tint. You can keep the automatic colors while learning.

Browse your neighbours' work with workshop browse. Read one with workshop view NAME/PROJECT. Add --animate in a terminal to watch its frames; Ctrl-C stops it.

When an author permits remixing, workshop fork NAME/PROJECT my-version makes a private copy and preserves their credit. Make a change, explain what you learned, and choose whether to share it. A licence is an invitation from the author, not a requirement to publish your own work openly.

A sound postcard

• workshop new sound my-beacon
• cd ~/workshop/my-beacon
• Edit score.csd, or try the original starter first: csound score.csd
• Inspect the result: soxi sound.wav
• Make a quieter copy: sox sound.wav softer.wav vol 0.5
• Add a note about the sound, check the project, then workshop publish my-beacon when ready.

The score renders offline to a WAV file. It needs no audio hardware and never plays automatically. Visitors can choose the sound.wav download to listen. Csound, SoX and the original score are installed; the score is small enough to understand and remix.

Field notes and little tools

workshop new note my-notes gives you a plain note.txt. Write about a question, a small discovery, a recipe, a poem or a trail to another part of the small Internet. Links can point to web, Gemini and Gopher pages, with your own explanation of why they matter.

workshop new tool my-grove gives you a short Python generator. Try python3 ~/workshop/my-grove/make.py 12, then change it. The machine also has C, Go, Rust, Ruby, Perl, Lua, Forth, Common Lisp and Scheme tools, editors and classic terminal games. Type outpost help for the practical starting list. entr watches files while you work; rg searches source quickly.

Keep control of your things

• workshop list shows your projects and their publication state.
• workshop publish NAME replaces the public snapshot with only the files selected in outpost.json. Review those files first.
• workshop withdraw NAME removes the public project; the mirrored Commons clears its copy within two minutes. The previous public copy stays privately in ~/.workshop-history.
• workshop pack NAME makes a private portable ZIP. Download it with scp or keep it somewhere else.
• workshop feeds --read follows the Commons with the installed sfeed terminal reader. Its Atom feed also works with your own reader.

Projects count toward your 500 MB home quota, including private history and rendered sounds. Keep independent copies; no off-server backup is promised yet. Publishing never sends your dotfiles, unrelated home files or Git history to the Commons. The shared publisher reads data and never runs your programs.

Find a neighbour

Say hello with campfire, leave a question with board post "a small question", or write a local letter with mail NAME. This week's brief is at workshop prompt. Use it, bend it, ignore it.

The shared source and contribution path are at https://github.com/crypto-frog/kinwilder-workshop. The community's own work appears at https://outpost.kinwilder.com/commons/.