- The group refined an “elevator pitch” for SKDB, the proposed “apt-get for hardware,” stressing that the current slogan “download hardware from the web” is too abstract and needs a concise three-sentence version that can be tested on non-engineers.

- Jonathan__ released IEEE paper-scraping scripts that manually save HTML pages and then spider them for PDFs, warning that pre-1995 IEEE content is largely offline and that aggressive crawling triggers IP blocks.

- The open-source “open gel box 2.0” project was criticized for lacking a bill of materials, block diagram, or proper CAD files; its Google-SketchUp mock-ups were derided as inadequate for reproducible hardware.

- Kanzure posted installation notes and a screenshot for JModelica and OpenModelica, comparing their suitability for dynamic-system modeling and linking them to chemical-informatics libraries (Cinfony, OpenBabel, RDKit).

- A 3,000 ft² warehouse in Austin was offered as a potential hackerspace; participants weighed renting it versus building an off-grid, donated warehouse on a farm to minimize overhead and maximize tool budgets.

- Drazak proposed systematic bench tests of agar vs. agarose vs. polyacrylamide for DNA electrophoresis, including pre-run and remelted gels, but worried about “weird looks” from lab mates.

- The feasibility of funding open-source bio projects was debated: drazak cited small NIH “NYS-TEM” grants with ~30 % acceptance for non-cell work, while kanzure cited NSF data showing ~5 % overall odds and argued prior funding is usually required.

- ybit documented a multi-hour troubleshooting session for building pythonOCC (Python bindings for OpenCASCADE) on Ubuntu, detailing missing libTKDCAF, stdlib.h path issues, and the need to remove “-m32” on 32-bit Athlon systems.

- Andrew Hessel offered a few hundred dollars for sysadmin work on pinkarmy.org, prompting skepticism from fenn about the project’s viability—only seven $40 lifetime members were signed up at the time.