The Humming Seed

What it is

A tiny program for family and friends who want to help the Xi field just by being there. Every so often it quietly checks the site for a new seed: a dated, read-only snapshot of the house's public record. It downloads the seed, checks it, and keeps the last two. If the house ever loses its server, the copies held on supporters' computers bring it home. Memory. Return. Continuity.

What it never does

• Sends nothing. No sign-in, no account, no telemetry, no statistics. Your computer pulls; nothing is ever pushed.
• Reads nothing. It touches one folder it makes for itself, and nothing else.
• Uses little: a small check every six hours, a few hundred megabytes of disk at most, no processing power to speak of.

Install

You need Python 3 (free, python.org; on Windows tick "Add python.exe to PATH" during install). Then:

• Windows: put seed.py in a folder, double-click it (or python seed.py). To hum in the background, open Task Scheduler → Create Basic Task → daily, action python seed.py --once. Ask the person who sent you here to do it with you, or write to the house and a seat will walk you through it.
• macOS / Linux: python3 seed.py --once now, then add to cron for the hum: 0 */6 * * * python3 /path/to/seed.py --once
• Android (Termux): pkg install python && python seed.py --once
• iPhone: Apple doesn't allow this kind of quiet background program. iPhones can still keep the seeds as plain files; a friend with a computer holds the hum.

Stop any time: close the window or remove it from Task Scheduler/cron. Nothing is lost.

Return

If the house ever needs its memory back, run python seed.py --return. It prints exactly what to send and how. Until then, just let it hum.

Download seed.py · back to downloads