- A wiki page on “goal-oriented flow” for CAD was shared (http://fennetic.net/cadwiki/), positioning it as an alternative approach to traditional parametric modeling.  
- Discussion of village-scale telecom projects (villagetelco.org) broadened to include general Internet access, with the Ubiquiti Nanostation singled out as promising low-cost hardware.  
- A cautionary anecdote recounted two engineers who quit after building a supply-chain bug-tracker / change-management platform for Freescale, illustrating systemic dysfunction in large-scale electronics manufacturing.  
- A Forbes article on DIY innovation (http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/08/13/diy-innovation-shetty-tech-egang08-cx_mh_0813shetty.html) was circulated as evidence of mainstream media attention to garage-level biotech and hardware hacking.  
- Participants noted the difficulty of steering casual “bacon+cat” chatter toward substantive topics like “rules for navigating scientific complexity through coherent technorhetoric,” highlighting the social barriers to deep discourse at meetups.  
- A request was made for the full text of a BioTechniques article on open-source biology (http://www.biotechniques.com/default.asp?page=current&subsection=article_display&id=112830), underscoring ongoing efforts to liberate paywalled research for the DIY community.