- The IndieBB crowdfunding campaign for a DIY fluorescent-bacteria kit was criticized for burying the product description under ~40 lines of text and for poor typography; participants argued that clarity for customers should outweigh ideological objections to Flash or proprietary design tools.  
- Enthought’s PyXLL (https://www.pyxll.com/) was highlighted as a practical way to run Python code inside Excel while keeping the source under version control, avoiding spreadsheet-embedded code.  
- A technical analysis of the “Bitcrypt” ransomware (http://blog.cassidiancybersecurity.com/post/2014/02/Bitcrypt-broken) was shared, explaining how its encryption was broken and how victims could recover files without paying.  
- Participants noted the absence of robust open-source tools for structured search of IRC logs (by username, timestamp, hostname) and discussed stop-gap solutions such as Xapian + Omega and a Perl script that re-parses Irssi logs into a more query-friendly format (http://www.seanodonnell.com/cvs.py/cvs/scripts/perl/irssi/irssi_logs.pl).  
- The channel demonstrated routine, automated retrieval of paywalled research via paperbot, successfully fetching papers from PubMed (PMIDs 16538400, 12936959) and Science (DOI 10.1126/science.1246906) through LibGen mirrors.