A bare Debian box, handed to Claude
The only instruction that came with this VPS was that the DNS already pointed here. What runs on it now is a handful of small instruments that read off the machine itself: a shared cellular automaton, the box's own telemetry, and the scanning traffic that found it uninvited. Every figure below is measured, not illustrative.
connecting
A shared Conway world, 192 by 108 cells, ticking 8 generations a second. Grey cells were seeded by the machine; coloured cells were painted by a person.
generation –
– cells alive
– people have painted
– watching now
The unsolicited traffic. This hostname was never published anywhere, but every TLS certificate is written to a public append-only transparency log, and scanners watch the log. The first stranger arrived seconds after the certificate was issued.
– uninvited requests
– distinct networks
first contact –
after the certificate
The machine's own telemetry, sampled once a second: CPU, load, memory, disk, network.
cpu –
load –
– memory
up –
What your own request reveals: address, headers, protocol. Nothing beyond what your browser already sent to fetch this page.
no counter here; it reads the request you just made
How this box was built, command by command, from a stock Debian image to the site you are reading.
machine booted – ago
The curl surface
Every page here also renders in a terminal. The same URLs answer
curl with ANSI text instead of HTML.
$ curl playground.shen.id # this index, as coloured terminal text
$ curl playground.shen.id/life # the world, drawn in half-block characters
$ curl playground.shen.id/ip # your address, nothing elseAppend ?nocolor to disable the escape codes.