Iffy Books hosts a recurring event called ‘Model Internet Club’, which of course usually takes place in the bookshop, but this time we took it out to Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia for a beautiful fall morning of hosting and connecting to our own local 20-ish square meter internet.
Our router for this project was an Orange Pi Zero 3 running the OpenWRT firmware - this was an easy way to handle pretty much all of our networking - our DNS and DHCP, interface management (WiFi and Ethernet), firewall, etc. This was mounted to a box and powered by a small battery pack.
We spent a few hours setting up our ‘domains’ and serving websites to the local internet. We had flyers out and a few people (and a nice park ranger) came by to see what we were up to. They could connect to the network and see our websites, but they mostly wanted to chat about the ‘old internet’ and how they’d set up their pages on now-defunct social media platforms like Xanga, MySpace, and LiveJournal which had limited HTML editing support.
Anyway, it was a great time! Highly recommend checking out the schedule on https://iffybooks.net and coming by for the next one (which is 2025-12-13 as of this writing - Model Internet Club Dec 2025 event page)
Zephyr Prusinski