Date: Friday, 17th of July 2026
Time: 11:00-17:00 CEST
Duration: 6 hours
Entrance: Free, including coffee/tea/snacks/little lunch
Location: Varia
Participation: is limited, to join please send an email to info@varia.zone with [homemade computer club session 4] in the subject.

The Homemade Computer Club is a gathering space for those curious about computers. The club is open to all levels of computer expertise and experience to come together to imagine what a computer might be if it weren’t a purely consumer product. If you’re an expert or an amateur, we would like to invite you to join the Homemade Computer Club to communally make sense of what should be computed and how. As part of Varia’s programme theme of Seasonal Computing, the Homemade Computer Club wants to look towards modes of computing as they are done within reason/season. Computing that is frugal, and computing that is communal. Through a series of meet-ups, presentations and mini-workshops, we will engage with unconventional computing methods that will help us imagine computing differently.

For our fourth session, we will be looking at networks. Thanks to the internet, we’re always connected all the time everywhere. But what does it mean to be connected? What does a connection look like? Most of use infrastructure made by governments or businesses to connect, but this means we usually have no access to it. What if we could connect a different way? What would we be able to do if we could bypass all this closed-infrastructure and start connecting on a peer-to-peer level?

During this session we will explore Reticulum, a relatively new method of communicating that can span many devices i.e WiFi, Ethernet and LoRa (Long Range Radio). Together with Knooflook/Bug, we’ll spend the day figuring out what Reticulum is, how we can use it and maybe even implementing it somewhere!