• pdfparanoia, an open-source utility that removes watermarks and identifying metadata from academic PDFs, was packaged for PyPI and its test suite repaired; remaining development tasks include a watermark detector (#29) and metadata injection to record scrubbing history (#30).

• paperbot, the IRC bot that retrieves paywalled papers, is being refactored into two pip-installable Python packages—one generic paper-fetching library and a separate IRC module for the phenny bot framework—and now queries LibGen via DOI before attempting riskier direct downloads.

• Channel members debated replacing Zotero’s brittle translator framework (criticized for weak tests, fragile XPath expressions, and failures on JavaScript-heavy pages) with a custom scraping stack using SlimerJS, PhantomJS, or Python + WebKit-GTK, but acknowledged the burden of re-implementing ~200 journal-specific translators.

• Counter Culture Labs and similar community biology spaces are struggling with unsustainable membership-fee-only models; Biocurious, the largest U.S. bio-hackerspace, has only ~30 paying members and is near bankruptcy, prompting discussion of alternative revenue streams such as day passes, contract research, desk rental, and consulting.

• Participants explored bootstrapping aerial-photography businesses using kites, balloons, or UAVs for real-estate and agriculture markets, while noting FAA regulatory delays for commercial UAV use until at least 2015.

• nmz787_ clarified that compositional data from electron-microscope images is best extracted with electron spectroscopy techniques like EELS rather than SIMS, which is typically coupled with focused-ion-beam systems.

• A live-stream URL for an upcoming BioBricks Foundation event and a Nature Nanotechnology paper on nano-medicine were shared in the channel.