Iffy Books | 404 S. 20th St., PHL

🎹 Pico MP3 Sampler Workshop
2025-05-02 15:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Create your own digital audio sampler using a Pi Pico clone board! This project requires some soldering. It’s recommended for folks who have soldered once or twice before, but beginners are welcome too. For the programming portion, you can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers. Here’s a link to the workshop materials.
You’ll need to buy a kit for $16.95 to complete this project. We’re suggesting a $10–30 donation for the workshop.
Here’s what’s included in the kit:
• RP2040/Pi Pico board
• wood block w/ pilot holes
• 3.5mm stereo jack w/ screw terminals
• 2×4 push button keypad
• 2 push button switches
• 10 screws
• tiny screwdriver
• 20 header pins
• 4.7 uF capacitor
• 9 port to port jumper wires
• 2 port to stripped jumper wires
• 1″ stripped wire
• 3″ tie wire
• 8 plastic spacer rings
• micro USB cable w/ data
Register
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

💻 Philly 2600 Meetup
2025-05-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
> The Philly 2600 meeting is a monthly gathering of local hackers, phreaks, nerds, geeks, activists, tinkerers, developers, infosec professionals, and other interesting people.

🐧 Linux Lab: How to Transfer a Large File
2025-05-04 10:30 - 12:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
The first Sunday morning of every month we’ll host a drop-in event for Linux beginners. No registration needed. Stay tuned for details!
Photo CC-BY-SA Mark Dickson

✏️ The Writing Room
2025-05-06 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-05-13 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-05-20 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-05-27 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-06-03 17:00 - 19:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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.

💻 Make Your First Website
2025-05-07 18:00 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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!
You can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers. We’re suggesting a $10–$25 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!

📡 Meshtastic 101
2025-05-08 12:00 - 13:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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!

🎹 Pico MP3 Sampler Workshop
2025-05-09 15:00 - 17:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Create your own digital audio sampler using a Pi Pico clone board! This project requires some soldering. It’s recommended for folks who have soldered once or twice before, but beginners are welcome too. For the programming portion, you can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers.
You’ll need to buy a kit for $16.95 to complete this project. We’re suggesting a $10–30 donation for the workshop.
Here’s what’s included in the kit:
• RP2040/Pi Pico board
• wood block w/ pilot holes
• 3.5mm stereo jack w/ screw terminals
• 2×4 push button keypad
• 2 push button switches
• 10 screws
• tiny screwdriver
• 20 header pins
• 4.7 uF capacitor
• 9 port to port jumper wires
• 2 port to stripped jumper wires
• 1″ stripped wire
• 3″ tie wire
• 8 plastic spacer rings
• micro USB cable w/ data
Register
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

🎹 Pico MP3 Sampler Workshop
2025-05-10 10:00 - 12:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Create your own digital audio sampler using a Pi Pico clone board! This project requires some soldering. It’s recommended for folks who have soldered once or twice before, but beginners are welcome too. For the programming portion, you can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers.
You’ll need to buy a kit for $16.95 to complete this project. We’re suggesting a $10–25 donation for the workshop.
➡️ Instructions & example code
Here’s what’s included in the kit:
• RP2040/Pi Pico board
• wood block w/ pilot holes
• 3.5mm stereo jack w/ screw terminals
• 2×4 push button keypad
• 2 push button switches
• 10 screws
• tiny screwdriver
• 20 header pins
• 4.7 uF capacitor
• 9 port to port jumper wires
• 2 port to stripped jumper wires
• 1″ stripped wire
• 3″ tie wire
• 8 plastic spacer rings
• micro USB cable w/ data
Register
Registration for this event is now closed. We'll offer it again soon!

⚙️ Neo-Luddite Reading Group: 'Why We Fear AI' by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer
2025-05-14 18:30 - 20:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
➡️ 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.

“Blix and Glimmer take the reader on a deeply engaging, funny, and provocative tour through our deepest anxieties and darkest fantasies of an AI-dominated future. Why We Fear AI offers profound insight into how AI and capitalism today work in mutually reinforcing lockstep to deskill and devalue humans, and what it will take to wake up from our worst AI nightmares and build a better world.”
—Shannon Vallor, author of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than the technology of the future.
Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans off the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From professors to billionaires, from artists to fraudsters, from journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination.
Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.
Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fears about AI reflect different economic realities—from venture capitalists, to engineers, to artists, to warehouse workers. Truly understanding the potential impacts of AI means confronting capitalism and class, power and exploitation, in concrete terms. Only then can we fight the real threats to our lives, livelihoods, and the planet, instead of tilting at nightmare windmills.
Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of capitalism and its violent ways of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of insecure gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalists may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one in which our labor, knowledge, and technologies serve the people rather than capital.

About THE AUTHORS
Hagen Blix is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy.
Ingeborg Glimmer is a tech worker and industry researcher in Germany working on machine learning.
PRAISE

“In this highly thoughtful book, Blix and Glimmer delve deeply into the histories of AI, capitalism and neoliberal bureaucracy. The result is disturbing and unsettling, a provocative launchpad for resisting the apparent truths of AI that businesses and governments are so keen to impose on us.” —Nick Couldry, coauthor of Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Excerpt
Are AIs soon going to be all-powerful? Is the Terminator here, is the Matrix coming? Should we be ready to nuke the data centers in humanity’s last stand against rogue AIs? Perhaps the questions are simply ludicrous to some, but to others they have real urgency. Certainly, the fears they raise resonate with many people. It is up to all of us what we make of this, to understand the power of such stories. We must come up with our own interpretations that make sense out of our own experiences of capitalism and the ways in which it shapes technology. If we let those who profit from the status quo tell us what the stories are about, and shape the narrative, we risk tilting at windmills or even strengthening the very powers that already exploit us, that already profit from oppression, and that have already set us on a path towards climate catastrophe. With or without AI, those powers are already spelling doom. If we’re concerned with the battle for the future, we must be ready to fight, not imaginary future AI overlords, but the capitalist structure that already produces the things we fear.

📚 Capital Reading Group
2025-05-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Join us on the first and third Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. for a reading group on Capital by Karl Marx. We’ll post the sections we’re covering before each meeting.
We’ll be reading Paul Reitter’s recent translation (Princeton University Press, 2024).

🎹 Pico MP3 Sampler Workshop
2025-05-16 15:00 - 17:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Create your own digital audio sampler using a Pi Pico clone board! This project requires some soldering. It’s recommended for folks who have soldered once or twice before, but beginners are welcome too. For the programming portion, you can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers.
You’ll need to buy a kit for $16.95 to complete this project. We’re suggesting a $10–30 donation for the workshop.
Here’s what’s included in the kit:
• RP2040/Pi Pico board
• wood block w/ pilot holes
• 3.5mm stereo jack w/ screw terminals
• 2×4 push button keypad
• 2 push button switches
• 10 screws
• tiny screwdriver
• 20 header pins
• 4.7 uF capacitor
• 9 port to port jumper wires
• 2 port to stripped jumper wires
• 1″ stripped wire
• 3″ tie wire
• 8 plastic spacer rings
• micro USB cable w/ data
No registration needed for this one!

🚂 Model Internet Club
2025-05-18 10:30 - 12:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
The Model Internet Club is back! Join us every third Sunday 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.

💾☀️ Permacomputing + Solarpunk Meetup
2025-05-21 18:30 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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)

💻 Make Your First Website
2025-05-22 18:00 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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!
You can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers. We’re suggesting a $10–$25 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!

👻 Wi-Fi Tricks with Ghost ESP
2025-05-23 15:00 - 16:30, 2025-05-23 17:00 - 18:30, 2025-05-24 10:30 - 12:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
If you’re interested in learning about wi-fi and Bluetooth networking but you can’t afford a Flipper Zero, this workshop is for you! Ghost ESP is a network analysis/testing tool that can run on a low-cost ESP32 microcontroller, as well as variants including the ESP32-C3. Ghost ESP offers wi-fi scanning, custom SSID beacons, captive portal mode, BLE scanning, and even deauth attacks (for demo/testing purposes).
It’s super easy to get started! In this workshop we’ll install Ghost ESP on our ESP32 & ESP32-C3 devices using the ESPressoFlash web flasher. Then we’ll interact with Ghost ESP using the Ghost ESP web serial console or the Arduino IDE.
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!

🎸 T̶h̶r̶a̶s̶h̶ ̶B̶o̶t̶ ̶W̶o̶r̶k̶s̶h̶o̶p̶ (Saturday!)
2025-05-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
This workshop has been postponed ’til Saturday the 31st. Sorry for the inconvenience!

🪐 Speculative Futures Reading Group: 'Piranesi' by Susanna Clarke
2025-05-28 19:00 - 20:30
The Speculative Futures Reading Group meets on the last Wednesday of every month at 7 p.m.

❤️ Soldering Practice: LED Heart Board
2025-05-29 12:00 - 13:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Come out and get some soldering practice! This time we’re making a heart-shaped board with 22 LEDs, using an oscillator circuit to dim and brighten them at the speed you choose.
This project is ideal for folks who have soldered at least once before. Beginners are welcome to join us, but it may take you more than one session to finish. Working with a friend is encouraged!
The kit you’ll need to complete this project costs $5.50. We’re suggesting a $10–25 donation for the class, no one turned away for lack of funds.
➡️ Link to instructions
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!

🔥 Solder & Gab
2025-05-29 16:30 - 18:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Join us every other Thursday from 4:30 to ̶7̶:̶0̶0̶ ̶p̶.̶m̶. 6:30 p.m. for a social soldering session at Iffy Books! Everyone’s welcome, from dabblers to experts. Bring a project you’ve been meaning to work on, or pick a beginner kit off the shelf and get started. We’ll have a dozen or so soldering irons available to share.
No registration needed for now! We’re suggesting a $5–$10 donation for materials.

🎵 C̶a̶s̶s̶e̶t̶t̶e̶ ̶M̶i̶x̶t̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶S̶e̶s̶s̶i̶o̶n̶ (canceled)
2025-05-30 11:00 - 12:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
̶B̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶l̶i̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶n̶e̶/̶c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶w̶e̶’̶l̶l̶ ̶h̶e̶l̶p̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶o̶r̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶u̶d̶i̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶s̶e̶t̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶p̶e̶.̶ ̶W̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶p̶l̶e̶n̶t̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶a̶p̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶h̶a̶r̶e̶!̶
Something came up and we had to cancel this one. We apologize for the inconvenience!

📡 Meshtastic 101
2025-05-30 15:00 - 17:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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!
This workshop is now full. We'll offer it again soon!

🎸 Thrash Bot Workshop
2025-05-31 10:30 - 12:00, 2025-06-04 11:15 - 12:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
We’re making guitar-playing robots with Pi Pico microcontrollers and 360° servo motors! We’ll provide soldering irons and supplies.
To complete this workshop you’ll need to buy a kit for $10. Here’s what’s included:
• RP2040/Pi Pico board
• 360° servo motor w/ attachments & screws
• tiny screwdriver
• micro USB cable w/data
• 6 header pins
• guitar string (11″)
• twist tie wire (5″)
• pattern for cardboard stand
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!

🔁 Cassette Tape Loop Workshop
2025-06-04 10:00 - 11:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Learn to make physical audio loops with used cassette tapes! No experience needed.
For the workshop we’ll be using cassettes with screws in the corners, which are easier to take apart but less common than the ones fastened with glue. We’ll have regular cassette tapes for $1 each if you want to keep experimenting at home.
Register:

Step 1: Choose a used cassette tape.
Step 2: Rewind the tape and record a minute or two of music, your voice, and/or percussion sounds. Then eject it.
Step 3: At the bottom of the cassette there’s a small area where the magnetic tape is exposed. Use a paperclip or pencil to pull the tape out an inch or so, then cut the tape with scissors. The recording you just made is now on the smaller spool, while the bigger spool contains whatever was originally on the tape.
Step 4: If you’re using a glued-together cassette (no screws), carefully separate the plastic shells using a pry tool. Ask the instructor for help. If you have a cassette with screws, use a tiny screwdriver to unscrew all four corners.
Step 5: Print and assemble tape loop template.
Step 6: Cut several 9″–10″ lengths of cassette tape.
Step 7: Wrap a length of tape around your template tube and attach the ends with a tiny drop of superglue. To avoid using too much glue, you may want to apply it using the tip of a needle.
Step 8: Put your loop into a cassette shell and screw the corners together.
Step 9: Load the tape into a tape player and press play!
