"There’s a huge geek scene in Philly," says Smith, citing not only the Hacktory, but Chiptunes, Make Philly, Ignite Philly, iSepta.org and video game competitions.

Thank you Liz Spikol for the nice writeup in this week's Philadelphia Weekly Lit Gloss column. Geek on.

Click here for the article in Philadelphia Weekly.

Click here for the video in Philadelphia Weekly.

080808 in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties on (you guessed it) August 8th!

From 7pm to 11pm A slew of 8 bit goodness will be pouring out of the park at N3rd & Poplar St. Music on Gameboy, NES & things from your childhood that you never imagined.

8GB, Animal Style, Auto Da Fe, Nullsleep, Cheap Dinasaurs, and MinusBaby - yes six acts! Visuals by No Carrier and our own resident artist (alright it's me) VBLANK! It's free! Bring a picnic din-din!

More info at www.no-carrier.com or www.waitforvblank.com

yeah, yeah.. I'll remind you.

greetings from The Last Hope. We are rocking the hackerspace village here, doing on the spot screen printing of our two designs. We've go through about 50 shirts, which means 50 people walking around with The Hacktory logo on their shirt/laptop-bag/sticker/whatever. Yesterday we drew a great crowd with NO CARRIER and ANIMAL STYLE setup at our booth before their show last night. We had some great stuff running off hacked Nintendos, and people were loving it.

I spoke this morning on Community Fabrication, and I'll be on a panel later today about hacker spaces. Of the 6 ot 7 hackerspaces listed in the villlage, us and NYCResistor are the only ones that are manned and active. In short, we are rocking, and wish (more of) you were here.

or WE'D UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE BETTER IF WE HAD 3.14159 FINGERS.

Austrian art-hackers MONOCHROM is in NYC for The Last HOPE this weekend, and when they are done there going to come invade Philly with their media hoaxing, billboard liberators, cocktail mixing robots and sexy androids.

The highlight of their visit is going to be a show @ PIFAS (1712 N 2nd St.) on Tuesday July 22 starting at 7:30pm. Illegal Public Art in 5 Minutes or Less or WE'D UNDERSTAND THE UNIVERSE BETTER IF WE HAD 3.14159 FINGERS. Admission to the show is by donation ($5-10 suggested). Be there or be 3.14159. (The suqares will all be at the Arduino Dnager Shield class.

July 22 - 7:30pm @ PIFAS - 1712 N 2nd St.
[ 2nd + Cecil B Moore - Berks stop on the EL ]
($5-10 donation suggested)

More cool stuff in Philly: On July 17th (6-8pm), The Philadelphia Future Salon is organizing an interesting panel discussion on the future of media, with panelists Peter Decherney and Ariella Furman. The event is free but you need to RSVP (follow the The Philadelphia Future Salon link). Location: 1835 Market Street, 15th Floor, at the office of Buchanan, Ingersoll & Rooney.

In Zagreb I hooked up with Marcell and his happy crew of hackers at the MAMA. G33koscope is an event, pictured above, that they sponsor that explores the cultural aspects of the hacking and geek culture. They also organize a weekly exchange of skills that fills up a room with people hacking away on their projects and helping each other. Kind of like Indy Hall, Philly Startup Hackathons, or our own Open Hack.

They maintain a space of around 4000sqft that is used as a public access internet cafe, conference room, and general hacking space. The cool thing is that they also get politically active in anti corruption and urban planning campaigns.

We have much to learn from this group, and I hope we get to do a joint event one of these days.