- The #hplusroadmap community is actively searching for a replacement to Google Groups for the diybio mailing list; Sympa hosted at diyhpl.us is the leading candidate, and a “mail2forum2sticky2wiki” pipeline with Jitsi integration is proposed as a turnkey package for labs and hackerspaces.

- Participants debated whether to store large binary image data directly in databases (leveraging modern ACID guarantees) or to keep only file-path references (to avoid query-latency penalties when data exceed RAM).

- Washington University’s “WiSee” project demonstrated whole-home gesture recognition using Wi-Fi Doppler shifts with six USRP-N210 SDRs (~$1,400 each) and GNU Radio, while Microsoft Research’s “SoundWave” achieved similar sensing with only laptop speakers and microphones, highlighting low-cost RF-based HCI possibilities.

- Paperbot retrieved paywalled research including a 1992 pyrrole-chemistry paper and a 2013 ACS Nano article on light-controlled graphene-elastin hydrogel actuators, plus a pediatric study archived at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/paperbot/2efd916f6bc56e67d729ed08f6dded40.txt.

- The channel revisited Alue (the-alue.org), an early collaborative-research platform that failed to gain traction despite its promising design, as a cautionary tale for open-science infrastructure.

- A side debate clarified the IEC standard “mebibyte” (1 024² bytes) versus disk manufacturers’ 1 000 × 1 024-byte “megabyte,” with a link to the Wikipedia article on binary prefixes.

- TechShop’s new radio partnership with Lowe’s was noted as evidence that mainstream hardware retail is courting the maker movement.