If you’d been planning on coming to Resistor this Thursday after filling your belly full of bird or tofurkey, stay at home! We’re not going to be there. We will resume Craft Night on December 3rd!
Thanks everyone who came out to Intro to Algorithms this past Sunday, we had way more turnout that I was expecting! About 15 people in all.
We'll be picking up the course again this week on Sunday at 5. It's OK if you missed last week, just watch lecture 1 at home and take a look over the homework / reading assignments.
We've started a Google Group to further the discussion of the class materials: NYCResistor: Compsci. This group is open to everyone, including folks who aren't coming to the in-person classes but are watching the material at home.
See you on Sunday!
Have you checked the NYCR Class list lately? No? You’re seriously missing out. We have a ton of new classes as well as some old favorites. Here’s a sampling of some upcoming classes:
Blender 101: User Interface and Basic Modeling – Nov 21
Learn to use Blender, a free 3D modeling program, to model just about anything. Use your completed models in your own programs, create new objects for games, or send them over to a Makerbot to be printed in real life.
Hack Classic Nintendo Games – Nov 28
Hack around with your favorite NES games using emulators. This class will teach the basics of 8-bit computing, memory addressing, explanation of buffer overflows and how memory works. And what better way to learn those things?
Radio and Antenna Design 2 dates! Nov 28 or Nov 29!
Foxx D’Gamma leads a discussion all about radio waves and how to design antennas to work with radio systems. There’s lots of useful information here whether you’re getting into ham radio or you’re trying to improve the range on your 2.4GHz WiFi router.
Beginning PHP Dec 5
Our intro PHP course is back! Get started writing dynamic content for the web, or just pick up what you need to know to start hacking away at your favorite CMS (WordPress, anyone?). No prior programming experience necessary!
Code Your Own Spam Filter Dec 6
This class is a gentle introduction to the document classification techniques used in spam filters, news sites, and language detectors. We’ll cover simple parsing, feature selection, and naive bayesian classification. By the end of the class, you’ll have written your own Twitter spam (or interestingness or happiness or annoyingness) filter, and have the code and tools to develop your own projects.
PS, tired of missing out on awesome classes because they fill up before you know about them? Add the NYC Resistor Class RSS feed to your reader, and get the scoop on classes right as they’re posted.
Charles picked up the robot arm Kurt was getting rid of tonight. Thanks, Kurt! It’s beautiful. We took it apart, and took pictures.
We’re excited to promote The Parts and Crafts Collective! Kids and young adults are the future and we love knowing they’ll be exposed to hardware hacking with William Macfarlane and his team of super teachers. The Parts and Crafts Collective is hosting kids classes around NYC, check out their eventbrite page for details and registration.
Ever wanted to purify your own DNA? Well, come by this Wednesday night and try it!
On November 18th at 7PM a bunch of us biopunks from DIYbio NYC will be hosting a DNA extraction party at the NYC Resistor space. Hopefully this will be the start of a beautiful friendship (bioborgs, anyone?)
Everyone who shows up will get to make DNA from their very own cheek cells, and take it home with them in the form of a cheesy necklace if so desired. All we ask is that you bring your enthusiasm, and perhaps a tasty post-experiment snack.
One of the awesome things about building a hacker group is the community that has grown up around us. Our members are cool and all, but our community is what makes us great.
Unfortunately keeping a hackerspace as awesome as ours running comes with some real financial costs. Rent, power, insurance… it all adds up pretty quickly. Some of our community members have asked how they can help. Therefore, we’ve created a Friends of Resistor program.
So what do you get for being a Friend of Resistor? Access to an amazing community of hackers and makers via our Google Group, craft night, and other public events. But wait aren’t I already getting those for free? Well, yes. By becoming a Friend of Resistor you help make sure these events stay free, as well as give us the resources to host more open community events.
For just $13.37 a month, less than a new stick of PC133 RAM, you can help keep Resistor awesome. Plus, Friends of Resistor not only get the fuzzy feeling associated with supporting a good cause, you’ll also get a SWEET NYC Resistor Moleskine Notebook* to put all your exciting notes in. Because who doesn’t leave craft night brimming with ideas? Oh. Well, you would if you had somewhere to write them down!
So what are you waiting for? Sign up today!
What if you don’t have a monthly surplus that l337 to spread around, but still want to contribute? Consider teaching a class! Teaching a class is fun and rewarding. And everyone has something they can talk about for an hour. If you’ve got a topic you’d like to share with inquiring minds, email us the details at [email protected].
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
*To be picked up at craft night… we’re not mailing these babies, sorry! And yes, we totally stole this idea from NPR.
What’re you doing Sunday evening? Nothing? Come down to NYC Resistor where starting this weekend we’ll be working through the Introduction to Algorithms course available through MIT’s OpenCourseWare project. What’s OpenCourseWare?
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.
We’ll start at 5pm and the lectures run about an hour and a half. The time may shift a bit each week due to other classes happening at the space, but we’ll post it on the calendar well in advance. The class uses the text “Introduction to Algorithms” which you may want to pick up or borrow from a friend. We’ll try to scrounge up a couple copies to have on hand.
This event series is totally free to attend, but if you enjoy it please consider donating to the MIT OpenCourseWare project!
This week we’ll be watching Session 1: Introduction – Analysis of Algorithms, Insertion Sort, Mergesort
FoxNY shows that we are helpful hackers, not harmful hackers 🙂
Take our vacuform machine class Nov. 16th and create your own machine to make custom shapes like the one above, modelled around the Conga 5090 system.
If you’ve ever wanted to create a quick one sided mold, a nice case for your latest electronics project, a handle for that raygun, or a body for that RC robot that’s lurking around the garage you’ve probably wanted to use the magical powers of vacuum forming. In this class we’ll put together our own vacuum forming jigs using laser cut parts (provided with the class) and learn to use them. We’ll use some heat guns and the assistance of a shop vac to get everything working and we’ll all come back with awesome little plastic replicas that will impress even the most discerning IRC channel. Everyone will take back their own vacuum forming jig but will need a vacuum cleaner and a heat gun to operate it at home.
Sunday, November 15, 2009 from 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Class + Material fee is $120 (which is very cheap for a vacuform machine)
Sign up here