- A Hackaday FPGA-based persistence-of-vision (POV) toy was extended with UART capability; the build uses only red LEDs and the developer released a gist showing how to parse and display a 5×7 font directly inside the FPGA (https://hackaday.com/2018/09/06/fpga-pov-toy-gets-customized/, https://gist.github.com/nmz787/6a9681d93fd67e4b58ffb5caab257b82).  
- Participants proposed turning the POV display into a Benham-disk illusion experiment by swapping in white LEDs and modulating their drive waveform to evoke apparent colors without a DAC—using a parallel unmodulated LED as a brightness reference.  
- Discussion of NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) concluded that any hardware security module supporting Bitcoin’s secp256k1 curve is ineligible for certification, because the program mandates exclusive use of NIST-approved curves; approval of secp256k1 would require NIST to add it (similar to the ongoing process for curve25519).  
- A Medium essay arguing that life-extension research should be deferred until “state oppression” is solved was circulated and criticized as an anti-transhumanist “cancer” (https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/the-misguided-idiots-quest-for-immortality-bb4c9e74457e).  
- Additional links shared: an NES game size-optimization talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM), a Hacker News thread on the same topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929608), and a blog post on re-imagining Bitcoin cold storage with timelocks (http://web.archive.org/web/20180503151920/https://blog.sldx.com/re-imagining-cold-storage-with-timelocks-1f293bfe421f).