Read the Feb 2026 Folk newsletter

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Summary from February:

• Daniel Pipkin’s Inktober-like month-long challenge for the community to build prompt-based Folk programs

• Omar added a new Python FFI

  • Basic image segmentation and text detection and handwriting detection demos

• Editor now supports selection, copy, paste, and undo

• Working on post-calibration refinement step to be able to reliably get accurate calibration

• Andrés built a sound wheel that can roll around and make sounds

• Experiments with Expect construct to add hard, imperative statement dependency to programs

• stdout and stderr redirection and program index Web page: cleans up terminal output and makes programs more individually debuggable and monitorable

• Hamish Todd gave a talk about his experiments with 3D interaction and projection:

Want to come by and see the latest Folk updates?

RSVP here for the next open house, on the evening of Monday, March 30th, at our new studio in Williamsburg:

RSVP for the March 30 Folk open house

Read the Jan 2026 Folk newsletter

In December, we officially formed a nonprofit for Folk. We’re trying to get more serious about fundraising — we’d love for you to sponsor us so we can keep doing this work:

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Summary from January:

• Omar visited China, showed off pink gadget1, brought back some inspiring gadgets, started on some PCB design

• Daniel Pipkin and Mason Jones experimented with dual-tag quads

• Daniel Pipkin fixed ESC/POS receipt printer support for folk2

• Esben Sørig contributed camera setup fixes, including extending timeouts for Logitech C270 support and fixing aspect ratios on /calibrate

• Andrés and Brian worked on the shape library for highlighting objects

• Omar began integrating TrOCR and CRAFT for live handwriting recognition on the table

• Hosted an small open house where visitors used a new Folk introductory booklet

Want to come by and see the latest Folk updates?

RSVP here for the next open house, on the evening of Thursday, February 26, at our studio in East Williamsburg:

RSVP for the Feb 26 Folk open house

Read the Dec 2025 Folk newsletter

By the way — we’d love to have your support if you can sponsor us on GitHub Sponsors (now tax-deductible):

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Now that folk2 is merged, we’re planning on doing a lot more public demos and events this year (both online and in-person).

Summary from December:

• Folk is now officially a 501(c)3 nonprofit to support long-term development

• folk2 has been merged into the main branch, so it’s now the default version of Folk that people will install and encounter

  • Threw a folk2 launch party with a live merge, demo systems, and a couple talks about Folk’s future

  • Massive last-minute performance improvement for camera slices by using Vulkan Memory Allocator (fixes fragmentation that would slow down the system over time)

• Fixed a major statement reuse bug that was causing the “Added tag” pileups for the last few months and would make the editor freeze frequently

• New interactive /setup page for configuring cameras and projectors at runtime

  • Expose and keep the compressed JPEG camera frame so we can stream faster

  • HtmlWhen construct and other web endpoint API conveniences

• Andrés demoed the Folk gadget to interaction design masters students at SVA

• Mason Jones refactored the editor code to make it work better when zoomed way in/out, line numbers not jump around, fix viewport cutoff bug

• with /…options/ experiment to try to make the options more explicit in the When

• /quads experiment to show off the 3D perception of the system

• New pink gadget1 that supports trigger button, dual cameras, other features from gadget2

Want to come by and see the latest Folk updates?

RSVP here for the next open house, on the evening of Thursday, January 29, at our studio in East Williamsburg:

RSVP for the Jan 29 Folk open house

We’ve published the Folk Computer newsletter for November 2025:

Read the Nov 2025 Folk newsletter

Summary from November:

• Mason Jones made a new editor system that can edit existing pages, zoom, scroll

• Mason making an experimental new Tcl interpreter

• Andrés gave a talk about Folk to students at Parsons

• We got another new, more powerful folk-hex computer — excited to try doing new kinds of recognition on it.

  • Installed a new camera and got calibration to be much more accurate

  • Omar experimenting with TrOCR for handwriting recognition

• Omar’s been working on a new mini-gadget for his personal use with stereo Pi cameras

• Memory leak and -atomically statement leak debugging on folk2

• Omar working on /setup page to configure cameras & projectors at runtime, interactively

  • Improvements to web handler API after lessons learned from the open house

RSVP here for the folk2 launch party:

RSVP for the folk2 Launch Party

Read the Oct 2025 Folk newsletter

We’re planning a launch party for folk2 on the evening of Friday, December 12, so save the date. Would love to have all our friends and colleagues come by and meet. More details soon.

Summary from October:

• Omar posted this fun video of the gadget’s selection outline interacting with / reflecting off of a cup:

• folk2 pull request continuing to be under review, but very close to merging

  • -atomically mostly working now; better animation program, less blinking

• Mason Jones applied his Hold! -save to printing programs & to calibration state

  • Omar added editor persistence, so system crashes/restarts won’t destroy the program you’re working on. Nice for confidence when people visit and try to write programs

• Mike Subelsky added a miniaudio subsystem

• Set up a new folk-hex system to replace the old folk0; was a good test of the folk2 install process and instructions and of different GPU drivers

• Daniel Pipkin successfully built a gadget; Omar and Daniel successfully configured the AnyBeam projectors in their gadgets to not auto-rotate or auto-keystone, so hopefully we can calibrate them a lot better now

Our next Folk open house will be in the evening on Monday, November 24. Come by to see the latest (much faster) folk2 and Folk gadget.

The open house will be at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. RSVP here:

RSVP for the Nov 24 Folk open house

Read the Sep 2025 Folk newsletter

Our next Folk open house will be in the evening on Thursday, October 30. Come by to see the latest (much faster) folk2 and Folk gadget!

The open house will be at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. RSVP here:

RSVP for the Oct 30 Folk open house

Summary from September:

• folk2 pull request still under review; many of us are running it by default now (including at Hex House), so feels very close to just merging

  • Trying a new -atomically construct in folk2 that creates an ‘atomic transaction’ out of everything downstream; hoping to fix all the remaining blinking, especially with highly dynamic animations and camera slice

  • Optimized points-at (by removing synchronous db call from critical path) and camera-slice (by merging GPU calls)

• Mason Jones wrote some overview notes about the folk2 trie and database

• Mason added new Subscribe and Notify constructs to folk2 to handle ‘events’ like printing and keypresses (we’ve wanted this for years!)

• Mason added Hold! -save (which we’ve also been talking about for years), so you can persist statements onto disk and they’ll survive across system restart

• Mike Subelsky did a unix-commands.folk revamp/port for folk2

• Mason working on porting his ‘code views’ branch (editor improvements) to folk2

• Some gadget work:

  • Finally used Nord-Lock washers to secure projector bolt to keep it from swiveling

  • Tried (and, so far, failed) to turn off auto-keystone and auto-rotate on AnyBeam projector to get it to calibrate more solidly

Read the Aug 2025 Folk newsletter

Summary from August:

• folk2 pull request under review; Mason Jones fixed some race conditions and safety bugs; now feels much more solid

  • Deployed more tactics to deal with blinking/glitches: canvas display list settlement, single-buffer canvases, destructor set inheritance into collected results

  • Ported some features/demos we were missing from folk1: points-at, titles, music, animation, circle, line, global drawing improvements

  • as of Saturday, folk2 is now the default system on the Folk installation at Hex House!

• Rob Fielding built a slide presentation system in Folk using cards

• Mason type system proposal

• New installation at the Fractal space in Brooklyn; Hamish Todd experiments in Cambridge, UK; Mike Subelsky installation in Baltimore

• Gadget documentation updates as Daniel Pipkin builds a gadget and tries to get the exact parts

  • Trying to figure out a way to fasten the projector better so it doesn’t wiggle/swivel

• Andrés in Taiwan and Japan: demo with Ultimems projector company; Akiya makerspace visit

Our next Folk open house will be all afternoon (come cowork with us, or hack on something in Folk if you want) and early evening on Friday, September 26, 2025.

The open house will be at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. RSVP here:

RSVP for the Sept 26 Folk open house

See you —

Read the July 2025 Folk newsletter

Summary from July:

• Huge progress on folk2: calibration fully working, lots of blink bugs fixed, started porting camera-slice functionality

  • Pull request finally created! — Mason Jones starting to review (please test on your system too if you have a second!)

• Rob Fielding created vim port to Folk

• Daniel Pipkin working on building a gadget for himself

• Recurse Center Localhost talk:

  • Made a lot of small fixes to the gadget (including publishing the designs on GitHub) & printed a new one for this talk (we actually brought two different gadgets to the talk):

RSVP for our next Folk open house, in the afternoon on Saturday, August 30, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Aug 30 open house

See you —

Read the June 2025 newsletter

Some work from June:

• New utility programs: current git branch, code views, Mason Jones’ GitHub gist tool

• More beating against why calibration is inaccurate on folk2; some calibration quality-of-life improvements like live refresh working better & better-tuned exposure slider

• Gadget improvements: more stable projector in new revision, more reliable Wi-Fi, figured out a decent routine to calibrate

• Justin Liang set up a system at ITP Camp and ran a workshop: made some fun triangle and whiteboard programs with other Campers

• Mason’s Folk.js interop bugfix; Justin’s Linux user permissions fix

• A cozy and creative open house & some visits from friends Paul and Ehmry

RSVP for our next Folk open house, in the evening on Thursday, July 31, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the July 31 open house

See you —

The May newsletter talks about work from the last month, including:

• New Folk interpreter: adapting stuff to render-to-texture per program, especially the editor; got calibration to run all the way through, now trying to make it as accurate as on folk1; rebased onto current Jim Tcl upstream

• Small fixes: Mason text options; Andrés keyboard installation process documentation

• Mason’s work on making already-printed pages editable, new scrollable editor

• A lot of fundraising / grant-writing stuff (let us know if you have advice!)

• Kelin and Dan and Monique visits; SenseScape event at Microsoft Garage; Kelli Anderson’s pop-up book class visit; SVA Programmable Space launch; open house

Read the May 2025 Folk newsletter

RSVP for our next Folk open house, in the evening on Monday, June 30, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the June 30 Folk open house

See you —

Read the Apr 2025 Folk newsletter

Funding has been limited recently — we'd really appreciate it if you sponsor Folk on GitHub Sponsors! We put all our code and setup instructions (plus these monthly newsletters) online for free for everyone, so your support helps a lot.

Sponsor Folk on GitHub Sponsors

We’ll be set up at Rhizome World on this Sunday, May 4 (at 161 Water Street in the Financial District). Feel free to say hello; we’re going to be running a Folk Computer workshop there at noon.

Some work from April:

• New Folk interpreter: finished render-to-texture implementation; memory leak hunt; working on fixing up calibration; removed cache

• Experiments with dual-camera calibration and tag tracking (partly to projection-map unknown QR codes in gadget)

• Tweaks to gadget to try to stabilize the projector and not block its image

• Rob Fielding re-enabled blob detection, added Wishes for sub-regions & highlighting regions, and improved the text drawing API — all great ergonomic and capability improvements

• aci-d club tour and open house

RSVP for our next Folk open house, in the afternoon on Saturday, May 31, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the May 31 Folk open house

(inspired by the aci-d club event, we’re going to try doing a more formal talk in the second half of the open house.)

See you —

Read the Mar 2025 Folk newsletter

Some highlights:

• New self-contained animation binder to make the animation demo more approachable & show some paper-craft

• QR scanner program for the handheld Folk gadget: press trigger button to scan QR code and project what it points to

• folk2 performance work to hopefully cut database traffic by a lot (80% or more) and make the system that much faster: rendering page-specific graphics on offscreen textures and using page-space coordinates; doing recollect natively in C

• A new program/booklet that walks you through how to build an origami frog

• We’ve made lots of progress on video embed; playback is now starting to work

• Added grouping to run a list of programs even if they’re not visible, to help with table overcrowding

RSVP for our next Folk open house, in the evening on Sunday, April 27, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Apr 27 Folk open house

See you —

Read the Feb 2025 Folk newsletter

Some highlights:

• Added a back panel to the handheld Folk gadget, so it feels much more like a complete device. Got a new narrower-angle camera, now trying to calibrate with that

• Tag stabilization — this makes editing code much easier and faster (removes editor jitter), and you can opt into it for any other tag also

• Lots of folk2 progress: new thread management policy that checks for I/O-boundness, reconciled repos so folk2 now is a real branch on the main Folk repo, per-thread Tcl object caching, better source tracking, etc

• Small stuff: reduced camera and projector buffers to reduce latency, exposure slider inline in calibration UI, bidirectional web & tabletop editor

• Andrés’s talk from October of last year, at Causal Islands in Berlin, is now up on YouTube!

• SynergyMill meetup in Greenville, South Carolina; guest lecture at a class at Columbia GSAPP; had a lively open house here in New York, including people from the Fractal Tech group in NYC who are setting up Folk

RSVP for the next Folk open house, in the evening on Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Mar 26 open house

See you —

Read the Jan 2025 Folk newsletter

Some highlights:

• Prototype of new handheld Folk gadget that uses off-the-shelf AnyBeam projector; working trigger button interaction

• RFID localization: fixed networking between in-band radio and PC, so we can continuously stream rounds without crashing

• Small stuff: crop to region of interest of camera image; smoothing experiment; handwriting recognition plans; clarified calibration instructions

• Open house

RSVP for the next Folk open house, in the evening on Monday, February 24, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Feb 24 open house

See you —

Read the Dec 2024 Folk newsletter

Some highlights:

• Andrés got multiple video frames loading

• Omar working on the next revision of the handheld Folk gadget (such that we’ll be able to make more of them, have stereo vision and better calibration)

• New parallel evaluator: performance visualization (using Tracy) and improvements/bugfixes (lots of lock removal and memory leak fixes)

• RFID localization progress: working on getting in-band to run continuously and report live data to PC (for eventual localization)

• Open house:

RSVP for the next Folk open house, in the evening on Wednesday, January 29, 2025, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Jan 29 Folk open house

See you —

Read the Nov 2024 Folk newsletter

Some highlights:

• Omar almost has the new Folk language/database ready to test/review/merge, which should be hugely faster and smoother (and is a cleaner, more unified design)

• Portable gadget projects

  • Ad-hoc Wi-Fi, focus/exposure adjustments

  • New design with more fixed camera so it stays calibrated, maybe trigger button, maybe speaker, probably battery also

  • Developing another new design that’ll use off-the-shelf parts so you can get your own

• System UI improvements: /programs endpoint, feedback when you hit Print key (was nice during open house)

RSVP for the next Folk open house, at noon on Sunday, December 15, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Dec 15 Folk open house

See you —

• Andrés and Omar have given various presentations this month (Causal Islands, South Park Commons, Lux podcast), and Daniel Pipkin showed Folk off at the Ink & Switch unconference in LA

• Daniel’s daily Folktober programs from the start of the month

• Andrés’s work-in-progress desksaver

• Set up the cat printer with the gadget; printing programs onto playing cards

• Gadget improvements: prototype battery system, much faster tracking, fix off-edge crash and (mostly) memory leak crash; it’s starting to really feel like a computational flashlight:

• New Folk lamp set up by Paul at the Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group

• RFID progress: in-band now can go for more than 1 round, starting on out-of-band again to get to localization

Read the Oct 2024 Folk newsletter

RSVP for the next Folk open house, on the evening of Wednesday, November 20, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Nov 20 Folk open house

See you —

• Andrés will be giving a keynote talk on Friday at Causal Islands in Berlin, so we’ve been preparing for that (livestream tickets are available)

• SuperCollider paper piano that Andrés and Arcade and Jessie made at Recurse Center

• We built a second handheld Folk gadget (that Andrés will use in Berlin) and put the design up on GitHub

  • We switched to libcamera and wide-angle Pi camera, which works so we finally calibrated the gadgets to actually projection-map programs (like any other Folk system)

• Work on new Folk evaluator (sysmon thread pool manager, workqueue viewing, experiments with sustain to prevent blinking)

• Many little additions and demos: dashed lines, bar chart, Daniel’s hand-tracking work, Naveen’s Bezier curve, C++ support

Read the Sep 2024 Folk newsletter

RSVP for the next Folk open house, on the night of Monday, October 21, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Oct 21 Folk open house

See you —

If you enjoy following our progress and want us to continue, definitely consider sponsoring us:

Sponsor Folk on GitHub Sponsors

(our first goal is to cover our studio rent with sponsorships!)

The Folk Computer newsletter for August 2024 is now out, including:

• Portable Folk gadget now has pretty stable hardware (Pi 5, wires) and chassis; been showing it off. Still need to calibrate it to work with physical programs

• 3D calibration is merged! it’s now the default in main and works on all our normal systems — still a lot of follow-up work to do, though (table refinement, documentation, performance)

• Some progress on new & faster Folk evaluator (process-pool management, reactive semantics)

• A ‘precision die’ that our friend Azlen Elza made using cardstock

• Lots and lots of new systems and visitors (South Carolina, Fractal, etc)

Read the Aug 2024 Folk newsletter

RSVP for the next Folk open house, on the night of Saturday, September 28, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Sep 28 Folk open house

See you —

• Demos: Jessie Grusen’s audio system at Recurse Center; s-ol bekic’s augmented brainstorming session in Milan; Andrés’s containers and shaders

• 3D calibration: pull request is now out and ready to test; better-documented step-by-step UI; accuracy improvements; ability to specify default and per-tag geometry

• New evaluator: working stack traces! starting to port keyboard/editor as a stress test

• Big July open house & other visitors in town for Malleable Computing

Read the July 2024 Folk newsletter

RSVP for the next Folk open house, on the night of Sunday, August 18, at our studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn:

RSVP for the Aug 18 Folk open house

See you —