- Thermo Fisher Scientific quietly took down the spectra-online.com website between January and June 2013 without any public notice; the Wayback Machine was the only evidence the service had ever existed.  
- Mailinator disabled its POP3 interface after a large botnet attack and announced that all programmatic access will be phased out, prompting a search for alternative disposable-email services (anonbox.net, trash-mail.com, dispostable.com, silentsender.com, etc.).  
- A New-York-City building-height dataset was proposed as the basis for automatically estimating or rendering the exact view from every residential window in the city by combining height data with obstruction analysis.  
- OsmocomBB, an open-source GSM baseband stack aiming to replace proprietary phone firmware from layer 1 to layer 3, was highlighted as a key tool for open cellular research.  
- Parallella (the 16-core Epiphany-based Kickstarter board) was discussed as a modest but meaningful step toward low-cost parallel computing hardware for DIY and research use.  
- Paperbot’s non-deterministic behavior was noted: it sometimes returns LibGen links and other times Sci-Hub fallbacks, requiring extra “poking” to retrieve ACS and Wiley papers.  
- A Reddit thread about founding an agorist/counter-community in Detroit was shared, alongside jokes about the city’s cheap but dangerous real-estate market.  
- Participants debated how to structure a JavaScript/Node API so that PDFs and supplementary files are exposed as lazy getters (wrapped objects with filenames) rather than immediate streams, aiming for cross-platform (browser, Node, PhantomJS) compatibility.  
- gradstudentbot provided comic relief with automated quips about pipetting fatigue and being “busy doing science.”