- A DIY laser micro-etcher is under construction that uses salvaged Blu-ray optical pickups for real-time focus feedback, aiming to cut 10–500 µm microfluidic channels in spin-coated silicone and ultimately produce a capillary gel-electrophoresis chip and a sub-$1 k DNA synthesizer.  
- NanoEngineer-1 (NE1), the open-source molecular CAD, was successfully ported to Ubuntu 12.04 by replacing deprecated Numeric with NumPy and PyQt3 with PyQt4; the patched code is on GitHub, but the tightly coupled OpenGL viewport is now seen as a candidate for a ground-up rewrite.  
- Participants debated the long-term fate of general-purpose CPUs/GPUs, with one camp predicting a shift to ultra-specialized accelerator chips once Moore’s law stalls and another arguing that abundant compute will favor simple, portable software renderers written in languages like Scheme.  
- MakerBot’s open-source credibility was questioned after the Tangibot clone controversy, illustrating the tension between commercial success and open-hardware ethics and prompting discussion of whether the company will abandon GPL releases.  
- The channel tracked Aaron Swartz’s expanding federal indictment for the JSTOR download, noted that two regulars had already been subpoenaed, and linked to the OKFestival live streams on open-access research.  
- A height-mapping routine for hobbyist CNC machines reached ±2 mil repeatability and now outputs continuously interpolated Z-height G-code, while an Ultimaker user demonstrated ~0.75 µm single-step spiral printing, pushing consumer 3-D printers toward micron-scale resolution.  
- Practical biohacking updates included new commits to the diyhpluswiki.git repo documenting a low-cost gel-electrophoresis power supply and links to BioStasis Labs, alongside nmz787’s draft bio recounting kitchen-lab sterile technique and the crowdfunded openSpectrometer project.