- Siemens’ Open Manufacturing Backbone (OMB) was highlighted as a proposed open, globally-scalable platform for third-party digital-manufacturing applications, with discussion noting its reliance on the Process Specification Language (PSL) and links to introductory PSL material (Conrad Bock’s slides and an openmanufacturing Google Groups thread).

- Participants surveyed the state of open-source CAD/CAM: BRL-CAD and Blender were the main 3-D options despite “awful interfaces”; QCAD/Inkscape for 2-D; and nascent projects such as Wildcat-CAD, FreeCAD, and Archimedes were mentioned, while proprietary SolidWorks remained the practical fallback for serious tube-frame vehicle design.

- bkero (an OSL/Google intern) requested open-source hardware donations to build an open-source car/jet, illustrating ongoing community desire for fully open personal fabrication.

- A new Google Group, openmanufacturing-dev, was created to host strictly technical development discussions after repeated requests from Smari and others; skepticism was voiced that it would stay free of philosophical chatter.

- The first Afghanistan Fab Lab was announced (fablab.af), accompanied by immediate concerns about disorganized file dumps lacking metadata and wiki spam, prompting calls for minimal curation and an auto-updating Flickr “fablab” image widget for the landing page.

- Lumus Optical’s lightweight near-eye display was shared as a promising, non-dorky augmented-reality component, with speculation about stereo capability.

- An arXiv paper (0812.0644) on evolutionary vs. civilizational optimization and a Scribd document on “artificial initiation of fusion explosions in giant planets” were briefly circulated as provocative weekend reading.

- Autodesk University 2008 (Las Vegas) student updates and the complete resignation of the WTA (World Transhumanist Association) board were noted as additional news items.