- Steve Mann’s 2000-era multi-spectral wearable glasses were praised as a concrete example of practical augmentation, letting users see residual heat footprints and recently-driven cars, contrasting sharply with the lifelogging debates dominating Hacker News at the time.  
- Participants explored low-cost thermal vision by sourcing InGaAs long-wave-IR sensors—retail ~US$3 k, surplus ~£1 k from Hamamatsu—and discussed hacking defective units to bring the price within hobbyist reach.  
- Portland State University’s $25 instant non-degree registration was highlighted as a frictionless way to obtain library proxy credentials that unlock IEEE Xplore, ACS, Nature, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and others; the temporary password appears only on the payment-confirmation page.  
- A parallel route via RIT’s ezproxy.rit.edu was confirmed to grant access to IEEE, Wiley, ACS, AIP, Elsevier and Ingenta, giving open-access advocates two reliable institutional backdoors to expensive literature.  
- Technical discussion turned to scaling TCP: Urban Airship’s 37 k Python/eventlet sockets and Linux kernel tweaks for 500 k+ connections were dissected, along with warnings that aggressive TCP keep-alives break on mobile carriers.  
- The economics of graduate school were weighed—$20 k/year tuition for wet-lab access versus a $60 k/year remote Python job that could fund home chemistry—illustrating the tension between institutional resources and self-funded research.