🏠 I̶n̶d̶i̶e̶W̶e̶b̶ ̶H̶o̶m̶e̶b̶r̶e̶w̶ ̶W̶e̶b̶s̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶C̶l̶u̶b̶ ̶(canceled this month!)
2025-09-07 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
The Homebrew Website Club is canceled this month! See y’all on October 5th.
Homebrew Website Club is a growing world-wide network of meetups for everyone who wants to take back their web experience from social media silos, and own their online identities & content, or just want support with blogging!

✏️ The Writing Room
2025-09-09 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-09-16 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-09-23 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-09-30 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-10-07 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-10-14 17:00 - 19:30
Come co-work with other writers in three 40-minute units of silent writing. Writers and projects of any type welcome. 10-minute breaks and accountability check-ins between units. BYO coffee, water, computer chargers, notepads, etc.

🎲 Pico Game Timer & Dice Workshop
2025-09-11 14:30 - 16:30
11Learn to make a programmable game timer and dice with a Pi Pico microcontroller! First you’ll solder six LEDs, two switches, and a vibration motor to the board’s GPIO pins. Then you’ll install and customize the CircuitPython code that makes it work. No experience needed!
You’ll need to buy a kit for $9 to complete this project. Here’s what’s included:
• RP2040/Pi Pico Board
• 6 LED lights
• vibration motor
• 2 push button switches
• 4 screws
• 4 spacers
• wood base
Instructions
Starter code
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

⚙️ Neo-Luddite Reading Group: 'Small Is Beautiful' by E. F. Schumacher (moved to Thursday)
2025-09-11 18:30 - 20:30
Join us Thursday, September 11th at 6:30 p.m. ET for a discussion on Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher.
➡️ Virtual Meetup Link
Discord: Email neoluddite@victorgom.es for an invite!
Full schedule: victorgom.es/neoluddite
If you’re joining for the first time, I’d suggest you read this before anything else for brief context: What the Luddites Really Fought Against by Richard Conniff.The only expectation is that you read the chapter(s) of the book that’s listed for that meeting. You’re still welcome to participate if you haven’t done the readings as long as you are mindful. For each chapter, I’ve also noted some optional readings for context, so I’d suggest checking those out rather than reading ahead in the book. And remember, if you ever find yourself struggling with any of the readings or concepts, reach out! Either directly to me over email or to the entire group over discord.

☀️ Solar Music Synth Workshop
2025-09-12 12:00 - 13:00, 2025-09-26 12:00 - 13:00
Join us and build a tiny solar-powered square wave generator on a breadboard. No soldering required! The workshop is free to attend, but you’ll need to purchase a kit for $12.50 to complete the project.
Here’s a link to the how-to zine we’ll use.
And here’s a diagram of the oscillator circuit we’ll build:

Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

⚡️ Beginner Soldering: Flashing LED Circuit
2025-09-12 13:00 - 14:00, 2025-09-26 13:00 - 14:00
In this workshop you’ll learn the basics of soldering by building a tiny oscillator circuit with two transistors and two LED lights. No previous experience needed!
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. Sorry.
Here's a link to future workshops in this series!

🚂 Model Internet Club
2025-09-13 10:30 - 12:30, 2025-10-11 10:30 - 12:30
The Model Internet Club is back! Join us every third Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. for an informal meetup focused on building small-scale computer networks.
No registration needed for this event! If we run out of space we can expand into our back yard area.

👁️ Intelligence History Reading Group: 'The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century' by Tim Weiner (2nd half)
2025-09-17 19:00 - 20:30
Join us Wednesday, September 17th at 7 p.m. for a discussion on the second half of The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner (2025).
🎧 Get the audiobook on Libro.fm
At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn’t being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA’s officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.
Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets—Moscow, Beijing, Tehran—while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.
From Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, The Mission tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror—and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance.
A masterpiece of reporting, The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, the top spymaster, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top operations officers who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.

📻 FM Transmitter Soldering Class
2025-09-19 17:30 - 19:30
Come out and get some soldering practice! This time we’re assembling a short-range FM transmitter kit with a built-in mic and a 1/8″ audio input jack.
This project is recommended for folks who have soldered at least once or twice before. If you’re brand new to soldering, we recommend taking a beginner class first.
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

• Transmission Distance: 5-50m
• Transmission Frequency: 88-108MHz
• Audio Input: -15dB (max)
• Operating Voltage: DC 2.7V-3.3V
• Operating Current: 5-15mA

📡 Meshtastic 101
2025-09-20 10:30 - 12:00
Join us for an introduction to Meshtastic, an application that lets you send private text messages over the air using pocket-sized LoRa radio transceivers. We’ll show you how to flash the latest Meshtastic firmware to the device, customize the settings, and start chatting with your friends.
Here’s a link to our zine on LoRa + Meshtastic.
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

🪐 Speculative Futures Reading Group: 'Hum' by Helen Phillips
2025-09-24 19:00 - 20:30
The Speculative Futures Reading Group meets on the last Wednesday of every month at 7 p.m.!
🎧 Get the audiobook on Libro.fm

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called ‘hums,’ May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance cams.
Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.
Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.

💾☀️ Permacomputing + Solarpunk Meetup (moved to 9/29!)
2025-09-29 18:30 - 20:00
The Permacomputing + Solarpunk meetup is every other third Wednesday at Iffy Books! You can join us in person (404 S. 20th St., PHL) or remotely via Jitsi Meet.
➡️ Virtual meetup link
From Permacomputing.net: Permacomputing is a more sustainable approach to computer and network technology inspired by permaculture. Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. In a time where computing epitomizes industrial waste, permacomputing encourages a more sustainable approach, maximizing hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focussing on the use of already available computational resources. We do this because humans are part of nature and technology is an extension of humans, and we acknowledge that technology has been used to harm nature. We want to find out how we can practice good relations with the Earth by learning from ecological systems to leverage and re-center existing technologies and practices. We are also interested in investigating what a permacomputing way of life could be, and what sort of transformative computational culture and aesthetics it could bring forward. If you want to know more, please start reading about what is permacomputing in essence, and then dive into its principles.
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture by Mansoux, Howell, Barok, and Heikkilä (2023)

🙂 DC215 Meetup: Serialization Vulnerabilities with Razdex
2025-10-01 18:00 - 20:00
Microsoft announced that the BinaryFormatter class is insecure and cannot be made secure, but how bad can it be?
How about a remote code execution exploit?
Join us at DC215 where you’ll see a demo of this attack and how it’s also exposed through JSON and Newtonsoft.
Demos and code samples are in C#, but this exploit is possible in any insecure deserialization process. By the end of this talk, you’ll know what to look for in your code and how to prevent it. If you’re a red teamer or pen tester you’ll add another attack vector to your toolkit.
Here’s the Meetup link.

🖼️ Block Printing Workshop
2025-10-02 17:30 - 20:30
Join us on Thursday, October 2nd from 5:30–8:30 p.m. and learn the basics of block printing. We’ll use Speedy Carve blocks to create designs, then we’ll make prints using a manual press. Thanks to Bryn for putting it together!
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. Sorry.
Here's a link to future workshops in this series!

Photo CC-BY mosmanlibrary

💻 Philly 2600 Meetup
2025-10-03 18:00 - 20:00
> The Philly 2600 meeting is a monthly gathering of local hackers, phreaks, nerds, geeks, activists, tinkerers, developers, infosec professionals, and other interesting people.

🏠 IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club
2025-10-05 18:00 - 20:00
Homebrew Website Club is a growing world-wide network of meetups for everyone who wants to take back their web experience from social media silos, and own their online identities & content, or just want support with blogging!

🚧 Make Your First Website
2025-10-08 18:00 - 20:00
Make a home page like it’s 1999! Join us at Iffy Books for a new workshop called Make Your First Website, led by Ragman a.k.a. Richard Green. You’ll learn the basics of HTML and create a static site on the free hosting service Neocities. No experience necessary!
Please bring a laptop if you have one. We’re suggesting a $5–$20 donation for this workshop, no one turned away for lack of funds.
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!
This workshop is now full. We'll offer it again soon!

⚙️ Neo-Luddite Reading Group: 'Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth' by Timothée Parrique
2025-10-09 18:30 - 20:30
➡️ Virtual Meetup Link
Discord: Email neoluddite@victorgom.es for an invite!
Full schedule: victorgom.es/neoluddite
If you’re joining for the first time, I’d suggest you read this before anything else for brief context: What the Luddites Really Fought Against by Richard Conniff.The only expectation is that you read the chapter(s) of the book that’s listed for that meeting. You’re still welcome to participate if you haven’t done the readings as long as you are mindful. For each chapter, I’ve also noted some optional readings for context, so I’d suggest checking those out rather than reading ahead in the book. And remember, if you ever find yourself struggling with any of the readings or concepts, reach out! Either directly to me over email or to the entire group over discord.

☀️ Solar Music Synth Workshop
2025-10-10 12:00 - 13:00
Join us and build a tiny solar-powered square wave generator on a breadboard. No soldering required! The workshop is free to attend, but you’ll need to purchase a kit for $12.50 to complete the project.
Here’s a link to the how-to zine we’ll use.
And here’s a diagram of the oscillator circuit we’ll build:

Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!
This workshop is now full. We'll offer it again soon!

⚡️ Beginner Soldering: Flashing LED Circuit
2025-10-10 13:00 - 14:00
In this workshop you’ll learn the basics of soldering by building a tiny oscillator circuit with two transistors and two LED lights. No previous experience needed!
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. Sorry.
Here's a link to future workshops in this series!
This workshop is now full. We'll offer it again soon!

👁️ Intelligence History Reading Group: 'The Fort Bragg Cartel' by Seth Harp
2025-10-15 19:00 - 20:30
On Wednesday, October 15th at 7 p.m. we’ll meet to discuss The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp (2025). We’ll cover the whole book.
🎧 Get the audiobook on Libro.fm

🚫 USB Data Blocker Soldering Class
2025-10-16 17:30 - 18:30
Charging your phone in a public place can be stressful. What if someone is collecting your metadata for marketing purposes? What if they’re copying your files or installing malware? A USB data blocker can help! It’s a little adapter with the data terminals left disconnected, so you can charge your phone anywhere without fear.
This is a relatively quick soldering project, perfect for total beginners. We’ll have soldering irons and supplies to share.
Register:
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!
This workshop is now full. We'll offer it again soon!
