- A new Python project, pyconfd (https://github.com/kanzure/pyconfd), was introduced as a lightweight alternative to confd for generating configuration files from etcd/Consul data without the need for polling or sleeps.  
- Discussion highlighted that neither etcd nor Consul provide native event-driven hooks, forcing tools like confd to rely on polling; etcd’s ?wait=true long-poll option was noted as a partial workaround.  
- Participants criticized confd for requiring every watched key to be declared in its own config and for poor handling of multi-source data, motivating the simpler Python approach.  
- DriveDroid, an Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.softwarebakery.drivedroid), was shared as a method to turn any phone into a bootable USB peripheral for live operating-system deployment.  
- A collection of Pokémon reverse-engineering utilities in Python (https://github.com/kanzure/pokemon-reverse-engineering-tools) was referenced, with the caveat that many scripts are of uneven quality.  
- A Bitcoin pull request (#4622) was linked as “mundane esoterica,” suggesting ongoing scrutiny of low-level protocol changes.  
- Brief, dark humor arose around the first U.S. Ebola case—an American doctor evacuated from Liberia—followed by immediate self-correction about quarantine standards.