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!

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.

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.

One of the awesome things about building a hacker group is the community that has grown up around us. Our members are cool and all, but our community is what makes us great.

Unfortunately keeping a hackerspace as awesome as ours running comes with some real financial costs. Rent, power, insurance… it all adds up pretty quickly. Some of our community members have asked how they can help. Therefore, we’ve created a Friends of Resistor program.

So what do you get for being a Friend of Resistor? Access to an amazing community of hackers and makers via our Google Group, craft night, and other public events. But wait aren’t I already getting those for free? Well, yes. By becoming a Friend of Resistor you help make sure these events stay free, as well as give us the resources to host more open community events.

For just $13.37 a month, less than a new stick of PC133 RAM, you can help keep Resistor awesome. Plus, Friends of Resistor not only get the fuzzy feeling associated with supporting a good cause, you’ll also get a SWEET NYC Resistor Moleskine Notebook* to put all your exciting notes in. Because who doesn’t leave craft night brimming with ideas? Oh. Well, you would if you had somewhere to write them down!

So what are you waiting for? Sign up today!

What if you don’t have a monthly surplus that l337 to spread around, but still want to contribute? Consider teaching a class! Teaching a class is fun and rewarding. And everyone has something they can talk about for an hour. If you’ve got a topic you’d like to share with inquiring minds, email us the details at [email protected].

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

*To be picked up at craft night… we’re not mailing these babies, sorry! And yes, we totally stole this idea from NPR.

FoxNY shows that we are helpful hackers, not harmful hackers 🙂