If you’ve not been closely watching our calendar, you might have missed Shelby’s DIY Paper Engineering class that’s this Saturday, December 5th. Shelby is a new member of the group and a frequent Craft Night attendee. Her day job is designing pop-up books and cards, and this class will be a two-hour introduction to making your own pop-up things.
You can get all of the details and sign up for the class at http://paperengineering.eventbrite.com/.
Yesterday Star Simpson, Billy Gordon, and Josh Gordonson (from MIT & Brooklyn Poly) came by to visit NYC Resistor. They told me of their crazy schemes and brilliant plans, and helped me eat a giant slice of strawberry cheesecake.
When I showed them my toy piano and the new sound-processing code I was messing around with, they immediately asked why I hadn’t plugged in a microphone. I swear I would’ve gotten around to it myself… someday.
singing and laughing with the toy piano from ranjit on Vimeo.
Thanks for visiting, guys – you’re welcome any time!
p.s. thanks to Isaac Schankler for help with the piano code; and we were both inspired by Peter Ablinger’s speaking piano.
Devon pulled out his amazing, hand-made chainmail dice bag Tuesday at NYCR and everyone immediately swarmed to check it out. Much like the mythical Turducken packs three meats in one, this amazing bag pulls together three geeky memes, D&D, DIY, and Ren faire chic, into what may be the greatest dice bag ever made.
Music: Arpanauts – Resistor Anthems – Eric Skiff download
If you were around Craft Night earlier this summer, you might have gotten interviewed by a nice TV producer who was working on a program called Physics of the Impossible where they’d explore how to implement “impossible” super powers using our current understanding of physics.
I just heard from the production company that the first five episodes are set to premiere on the Discovery Science Channel this December under the more pedestrian name Sci Fi Science. Here are the air dates if you want to setup your video recorders. All times are Eastern Standard Time, and it’s likely that the episodes will run a few times before going away forever.
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.