• SparkFun’s 2010 “Free Day” turned into an accidental DDoS when $100 k of parts were claimed before noon, illustrating the early culture of crowdsourced hardware grabs and the fragility of e-commerce under viral load.  
• The SKDB project introduced an Octopart.py module that automatically scrapes distributor pricing and stock for resistors, screws, and other BOM items, moving open-source hardware toward fully automated supplier linking.  
• Chinese “shanzhai” markets were presented as a living open-hardware ecosystem; links to shanzai.com, openhw.org, and Qi-Hardware were shared as potential partners for low-cost, rapid iteration of open designs.  
• A debate over Marcin Jakubowski’s $2 k estimate for a 30 kW solar-turbine prototype revealed that the collector BOM alone costs ~$750, highlighting persistent cost-underestimation issues in open-source hardware documentation.  
• Austin Hackerspace is forming with two partially-built Cubespawn machines and a new workspace, while TechShop was criticized for a “pay-to-play” vibe, underscoring cultural tensions between commercial and community fabrication models.  
• DIY Drones will present low-cost UAV construction at ShmooCon 2010, with hexakopter multicopters noted as an accessible entry point for hobbyist autonomous flight.  
• Whole-brain emulation discussion praised the Blue Brain Project for encoding neuroscience literature into computational models, while IBM’s “cat-brain” ANN simulation was dismissed as hype; Henry Markram’s 2018 conscious-mind claim was met with skepticism.  
• SymPy’s inability to cleanly solve symbolic gear-meshing equations forced a fallback to Mathematica, illustrating current limitations of open-source symbolic math tools for mechanical design.