Tune in for an afternoon of 8-bit music and rambling hosted by NO CARRIER (Don Miller). Enjoy the sounds of classic and modern music created and played on the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), Game Boy, Commodore 64, Amiga, and more! Discover the local chip music scene with interviews and live performances by Alex Mauer, Animal Style, and Cheap Dinosaurs. Philly chip enthusiast Bucky will be on hand to play some of his favorite tunes and interview the artists on their influences and most memorable chiptunes. Can't get enough? Prepare yourself for 8static, the monthly chip party starting in January brought to you by the Hacktory. Our own Brana will be here to discuss this exciting new event!

http://www.nexusphiladelphia.org/nexusradio.html for more info.

The Open Hack was packed this month, overflowing with great projects and interesting discussions. For those of you who didn't make it, you'll have to accept that your life will forever be missing something.

Mindy turned The Hacktory into a recording studio to do some impromptu interviews for her secret project (which in some way involves world domination, I'm sure.) Lots of newcomers brought all kinds of new projects-- from torn apart routers and custom software to work on the 3-d printer, there was activity in every corner of the space.

See you next year-- January 11th is the next Open Hack.

After the great success of 8static at DesignPhiladelphia we decided to make it a monthly event. So expect some cool chiptunes in 2009.

We start off in January with a pretty exciting lineup with music by 8GB, Anamanaguchi, Animalstyle and Rhinostrich and visuals by VBLANK and NO CARRIER. We also have lineups for February and March up on the 8static website so check them out - there's some pretty awesome artists coming up. You'll also find a couple of posts from this years Blip Festival that just keeps getting better. To get a sense of the atmosphere at Blip take a look at some of the pics I took between jumping around to chiptunes. Blip on and see you at 8static!

Phew. I just finished setting up and executing a Hackerspaces.org call-in.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to someone at HackME about what TheHacktory is doing, and how we can get hackerspaces working together. We agreed to call each other on Nov 30th (today) to catch up and talk about what our spaces were doing. In a stroke of genius, we decided to invite other hacker spaces, expected that either HacDC or NYC Resistor would want to get in our our call. It was a matters of hours before Nick Farr had told everyone he could get his hands on about it, and then Astria setup a page for it on Hackerspaces.org, and we made it an official hackerspaces.org event.

Despite all of that, when the call time came I was still expecting 10-12 people from 3-6 spaces. Instead we had 35 different calls into the party line, with a max of 26 people on the call at one time. We had 16! (that is 16*wh00t* not 16-factorial) hackerspaces give a 5 minute intro and update about their space. That is 80 minutes of hackers ranting about what they love, and what they make. It was seriously impressive. It was intense, and awesome, and I can't wait to have the next one at the end of December.

This Saturday, come check out our chiptune favorites playing at the afterparty for the videogame convention.  Visuals by no carrier, and music by animal syle, cheap dinosaurs, the oneups, and ultraball.  

Place: Philadelphia convention center

Time: 6PM, Saturday, November 22, 2008

For more info visit http://www.videogame.net/vgxpo/attendees/bands.html

THE ONEUPS

Sent here from outer space to learn all video game music and play it
for you live in the case of an alien attack causing all recorded game
music to be erased. With its funky stylings, the band is ready to
replay the classics for you: Castlevania, Mario, Zelda, ToeJam &
Earl - even King Arthur's World. See the band live for a truly nerdy
experience.

It was the beginning of the month, so it was time for another Open Hack, our Saturday free-for-all open house. Despite the rain and the shortened hours due to some access problems, we had a good turnout-- new visitors and regulars dropped by to share their projects.

Jim brought by his modified GPS-a-sketch with some visualization modifications; it's clear that Wil's hackable GPS can be the basis for lots of interesting projects. Time will tell what others have put together.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone has next month! As Far would say, hack on.