Welcome to mind dump, the page where I will write something down that I'm thinking of because I need to stop thinking about it but I don't want to forget it
Later on I'm going to make this more of a hub type page, but for right now I just need to extract one topic that's stuck on my mind, as well as a plethora of associated websites and links.
ctrl-c.club, and whatever a pubnix is
I recently discovered a site called ctrl-c.club. It's pretty cool. They have a linux server, And you can request an account on this server. There are seemingly many things to do once such an account is obtained, and I found it fascinating, So I joined. And I am learning a lot lmao. First things first, how do we log in? You don't log in through a web browser, no, you're going to use Command Prompt (or some other CLI) in order to ssh into the server. once you log in, there really IS a ton of stuff to do. My favorite feature so far is the forum. type "iris" into the command prompt and you'll be met with a long list of topics, each with a topic id. You can type in any id to view all the replies to said topic. Or you can send a c [for compose] to write your own forum post. Its really simple... yet confusing. As someone who is used to seeing forums on webpages, with buttons to click and text boxes to type on, interacting with a forum ENTIRELY through command prompt is so fascinating and complicated and intriguing and confusing and fun! There's no buttons to click, only commands to send.
Then there's IRC. Honestly, it took me an embarassingly long time to figure out how to join the IRC chat, but 2 weeks, 2 clients and some random configuration mashing later, I was able to join, and I met a fellow member of the club! I really enjoyed talking to them. Its really slower paced than your average discord server, but its been so fun to talk on the IRC now that I have it figured out.
I guess another thing worth mentioning is that you can play games on the server. NETHACK IS SO COOL!!! I just wish I could figure out how to change the movement controls to numpad... Surprisingly, theres even more games on the server, that I've yet to try. I'm excited to try out more stuff on the server and meet more people from it ^-^
If any of this has sounded cool to you, I reccommend you take a look at Their FAQ and maybe even join...
OK, but what's a pubnix? In all honesty, I don't feel qualified to answer that question... But I'm gonna try. Pubnix means a 'Public Access Unix System' -Basically it's a computer available to many people to utilize remotely. I.. don't really know the history of these services very well, but they seem to have been around for a while. skylab.org seems to have been around since 1997, although I'm not sure if it is the first, it's definitely a great example of an original pubnix, and it seems they're still operating today! tilde.club is certainly one of the most popular. It originated in 2014, and many sites, including ctrl-c.club, have taken inspiration from it. I've also found that tilde.club has a generally really nice looking site, and I like their PSA on VPNs
Anyways, regarding sites that have taken inspiration from tilde.club, there are a good bunch of them! tildeverse.orgIs a sort of group composed of many of these tilde.club inspired pubnixes. They also host the IRC networks for many of them. I havent joined any others, but I think it's worth mentioning that cosmic.voyage looks EXTREMELY COOL. I also found tilderadio during my explorations, and it has been rather delightful to listen to.
In conclusion, I mostly wanted to get all of this off of my head because I've been having the feeling of having too many tabs open inside my brain for the past few hours and I also feel like this information is worth sharing, so enjoy!