- MIT’s “How to Make (Almost) Anything” course released new project pages at http://mtm.cba.mit.edu/, including a blue PCB mill seen at Maker Faire, inspiring discussion about starting with a small mill or PCB router as a first useful machine.  
- The 26C3 conference videos were highlighted, especially “Advanced Microcontroller Programming” and OpenBSC/GSM hacking talks, with links posted to the CCC media archive for further viewing.  
- Maker Faire 2010 (San Mateo, May 22–23) was noted as the largest event of its kind; attendees encouraged to submit talks and showcase SKDB or other open-transhumanist projects.  
- SKDB (the open-source hardware design library) was discussed as needing a larger contributor base; participants debated how to manage distributed development and which CAD formats (IGES/STEP) to use for parametric 80/20 extrusion models.  
- 80/20 aluminum extrusion CAD files were requested in fully parametric form; no ready-made repository was found, prompting plans to generate STEP/IGES models with every dimension exposed.  
- Yahoo BOSS search API pricing ($0.40–$0.75 per 1k queries) was evaluated for large-scale keyword harvesting; alternatives such as emerging startup APIs and the 1 TB Wikipedia squid-proxy logs on AWS were suggested.  
- Wikipedia traffic dataset (55 M queries/day) was located on Amazon public datasets, offering a potential goldmine for search-query expansion beyond the 250 k already scraped.  
- Open-source EDA tools were compared: gschem vs. xcircuit vs. Eagle; no clear winner emerged, but gschem was recommended for new users seeking a fully open toolchain.  
- WordPress security reminders surfaced after a site migration; best practice advocated sequestering CMS instances on dedicated boxes and disabling directory indexing.  
- A birthday wish—“the last 20 years back”—sparked half-serious talk of memory-erasing time travel, followed by plans to visit Jerry Rutherford in Missouri later in January to assist with ARG infrastructure.