- Open Science Summit 2010 (opensciencesummit.com) was confirmed as a legitimate event being organized by Joseph Jackson, with discussion of whether to attend.  
- A new parts list for a Puma robot arm upgrade was finalized: three Mesa 7I40H high-voltage servo drives (7 A, 80 V), one 5I20 FPGA card, one 7I37A breakout board, and custom 50-pin SCSI cables to handle 48 V motors.  
- For a low-cost, open-source bipolar stepper driver suitable for a Hektor drawing-robot clone, the Pololu stepper driver (~$12, 2.5 A) was recommended as adequate for NEMA 23 motors.  
- Fenn shared two mechanical concepts to maintain cable tension on the Hektor clone: a counterweight scheme and a capstan-drive with spring-loaded or pneumatic tensioners, accompanied by hand-drawn diagrams.  
- A curated list of molecular-biology movies was posted at http://fennetic.net/irc/molecularmovies.urls for educational use.  
- Discussion of laser-cutting plans and the availability of open-source drivers for a Universal Laser Systems machine (files at http://designfiles.org/~bryan/uls25ps/) took place.  
- The SciPy 2010 tentative schedule was circulated via Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddwstd5r_19hrzrvhft).  
- Skepticism was voiced about the 2010 Singularity Summit speaker lineup, noting the inclusion of James Randi and the perceived mismatch of Eliezer Yudkowsky speaking on intelligence augmentation.  
- Ray Kurzweil was reported to be hiring manual “data entry” workers to aggregate blog links for KurzweilAI.net, prompting jokes about RSS ignorance.  
- Links to memory-enhancement tools SuperMemo (http://supermemo.com) and Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/) were offered in response to a request for brain-boosting technologies.