- A new LibGen mirror (lib.free-college.org) was announced, and users noted that the official upload portal (libgen.org/librarian/) caps files at 200 MB, forcing consideration of downsampling a 338 MB OCR’d book scan.  
- The channel’s “paperbot” was shown to reliably fetch paywalled PDFs from ScienceDirect, Wiley, and AIP when given DOIs or URLs, providing a working open-science workaround to journal paywalls.  
- Participants estimated that academic page charges (~$500/page) are a negligible fraction of grant budgets compared with labor and reagents, yet still condemned Elsevier’s prestige-driven business model.  
- A Guardian article (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/25/filesharing-site-anti-piracy-honeypot-uploadertalk-user-data) warning that anti-piracy firms run honeypot file-sharing sites to harvest user data prompted security cautions for open-access activists.  
- Several spin-coating research papers—including one-dimensional models and ultrathin polymer-film studies—were located and shared with direct PDF links.  
- A brief critique of Python’s pip cited poor code quality (e.g., “f.close() return f.close()”) and floated the idea of a versioned, import-free module system to isolate dependencies.  
- kanzure is debugging open-source Python bindings for BRL-CAD (https://github.com/kanzure/python-brlcad) that auto-generate low-level wrappers (libwdb.py, libbu.py, etc.) by introspecting installed headers and shared libraries.  
- On Gentoo the bindings build for libbu but fail to create libwdb.py, causing ImportError in the example script (wdb_example.py) because the build process expects BRL-CAD in fixed upstream paths (/usr/brlcad/…).