Hack Manhattan

Bring your latest project and connect with local makers, creators, artists and more and learn about starting your own maker journey!

Whether it's woodworking or electronics, programming or craftwork, Hack Manhattan is a makerspace where people come together to learn through doing, because making stuff is fun!

Come share and listen to musical projects/performances, comedy, poetry, etc at Hack Manhattan!

All types of acts are welcome. feel free to bring any gear you need. We will provide a speaker setup and 2 mics.

This group will learn about system administration topics with hands-on collaborative learning on a homelab setup of four Dell servers. A description of this session's plan in down below.
We’ll deploy components like LDAP(authentication), Ansible (Infrastructure as Code), NextCloud (file storage), OpenStack (Cloud computing), OpenTofu (IaC Terraform fork), containerization and other open source software. We also intend to explore clustering, certainly high-availability and possibly compute clustering.

We've setup the hardware, installed the OS, and established procedures and documentation standards. Now we're starting to work in small groups or individually on projects. An under-construction list of project ideas is at https://wiki.hackmanhattan.com/Project_Ideas.

We have room for a few new people. Sign up to this event, come and do the exercise, and you're in.

Join the Hack Manhattan Discord and say hello. DM me there with your email address so I can sign you up for a wiki account.

Please bring a laptop if you can. We'll have a limited number of machines available you can use.

THIS READING

On Monday 7/20/26, I (Tom) would like to get a bit of exposure to Michel de Montaigne, the famous 16th-century French essayist, who was so influential on later writing. I've chosen his essay "Of Cannibals". Shakespeare, in writing THE TEMPEST, drew rather brazenly on this essay, via the Florio translation:

Montaigne:
"[It is a nation that] hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters... no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle... no use of wine, corn, or metal."

Shakespeare:

| "I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries / Execute all things; for no kind of traffic / Would I admit; no name of magistrate; / Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, / And use of service, none; contract, succession, / Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; / No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; / No occupation; all men idle, all..." |

You can find "Of Cannibals" at:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3600/pg3600-images.html#link2HCH0030

IF YOU ARE NEW...
At these Zoom meetings, we take turns reading aloud, paragraph by paragraph if it's a prose work, speech by speech if it's a play. (That is, we don't assign parts.) If it's a poem, we make a decision based on the poetic form.

If you have not read with us before, RSVP on the Meetup.com page and click that you will attend online. Then please log into the zoom call by 7. If you are not on the RSVP list or you arrive too late, you will not be allowed in.

CURRENT SHAKESPEARE-NIGHT SCHEDULE
We generally read one work on the first and third Mondays and another work on the second and fourth Mondays.

• On the first and third Mondays of each month, Tom Frenkel will host.
• On the second and fourth Mondays of each month, Peter Shenkin will host.
• On the fifth Monday of a month (if there is one), we sometimes hold an "open mic", where participants are encouraged to sing a song, tell a joke, read a poem, or whatever. Sometimes we continue reading a work. And sometimes we take a vacation.

GENERAL INFORMATION
If you RSVP "Yes" to a Meetup, the Zoom link will be visible on the meetup.com event page.

We often have an informal discussion preceding and following the reading.

FUTURE READINGS

• 1st and 3rd Mondays: TBD
• 2nd and 4th Mondays: TBD
• 5th Mondays: Next is 31 Aug 2026: TBD.