- A distributed scraping effort was launched to liberate ~80 000 material-property datasheets from MatWeb (designworld.matweb.com); the site enforces a hard 100-page IP ban, prompting experiments with Tor, Privoxy, and the NEWNYM signal to rotate exit IPs every few requests.  
- Participants debated the legal status of the dataset—whether mere aggregation of manufacturer-supplied numbers can be copyrighted—and weighed the ethics of circumventing rate limits versus the value of open materials data for automated engineering tools.  
- Tor’s control-port interface (127.0.0.1:9051) was explored to force new circuits on demand; the group documented the exact telnet sequence (“AUTHENTICATE\nsignal NEWNYM\nquit”) and noted that many exit nodes were already black-listed by MatWeb.  
- A new wiki page (http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Matweb) was created to coordinate chunk assignments and share wget snippets; the full 2.3 GB corpus is intended to seed open-source CAD/CAM material-selection engines.  
- Links to additional open repositories were posted, including the free-registration DEL repository (http://repository.designengineeringlab.org/) and a fiber-optic bioreactor design reference added to http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Bioreactors.  
- Discussion of educational bottlenecks led to proposals for richer lecture markup—combining MathML, LaTeX, OCW metadata, and metamath.org content—so that automated agents could guide students through dense, ambiguous calculus and engineering lectures.  
- Nostalgic detours covered early-2000s “master hacker” culture on Angelfire/Tripod/Geocities, the loss of old Zip-disk archives, and the challenge of creating modern “entry points” to get children hooked on bits, bytes, and open science rather than mere 1337 hax.  
- A Google Tech Talk and the amateur-balloon “Team Prometheus” N-Prize effort (http://sites.google.com/site/teamprometheusnprize/) were mentioned as upcoming events worth attending or mocking, respectively.