Low Tech Electronics Faire

March 17, 2025

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Low Tech Electronics Faire, a two-day event at Temple University in Philly. I led an HTML Journal Workshop, in which we crafted homepages on the web according to a simple spec created by m15o. As you can see in the screenshot above, my example website from the workshop also included cutting-edge graphic design motifs such as the Wingdings and Papyrus fonts.

I had a great time at the faire, though it was a bit of a whirlwind. I had some great conversations with a bunch of people, met some internet friends IRL, built a tiny handmade speaker, learned about programming primitive computer games in BASIC, and purchased a LoRa mesh radio node from the Iffy Books table. I also enjoyed the art exhibition and talk series, especially Lori Emerson's talk about her book, Other Networks. Andrei also came and taught a workshop on video synthesis. Unfortunately we had to miss some of the live performances, since we were quite tired by that point and had a long trip home ahead of us, but I heard they were great as well.

The Electronics Faire is a yearly event organized by Hannah Tardie, who also manages the Charles Library Makerspace at Temple. They did an amazing job putting everything together, with support from the other library staff and student volunteers. Thanks to everyone involved for an excellent array of programming and serendipitous convergence. I hope I can come back again next year!

I didn't take any photos at all during the event, which is probably a testament to how busy I was having a good time and not looking at my phone. There might be some photos shared from the volunteer photographers I saw (some of who were shooting on film!) If they send me any of that documentation, I'll add them to this post.

EDIT 2025-03-21: As promised, here are some photos from the event! The first one of my workshop was shot on film by Calvin Leon. The rest were shot digitally by various people.