# Summary of IRC Conversation (June 21, 2015)

* Discussion about microfluidic lab equipment design, with fenn proposing a method to transform glass slides into 96-well plates by gluing grids of walls/wells on top, potentially allowing for up to 144 million oligos per plate with 20-micron spot sizes.

* Conversation about DNA synthesis technology, including debates about the optimal scope for a DNA synthesizer project, with kanzure expressing concern about scope creep: "as the scope increases the probability of the project being successful goes down."

* Technical discussion about DNA assembly methods, noting that Gibson assembly has been reliably used to join up to 6 DNA fragments, while the M. laboratorium project combined approximately 5,000 oligos through a hierarchical synthesis involving plasmids and yeast recombination.

* Critique of lab equipment pricing, with CaptHindsight noting that companies like Cole-Parmer sell equipment at "10-100x the price it could be," linking to GTCR (a private equity firm that purchased Cole-Parmer).

* Reference to home-built scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) equipment, with a link to http://dberard.com/home-built-stm/electronics/ and a note that "open air STMs are not too complex."

* Brief mention of "Legolas" high-precision robots available in kit form, and discussion of Vault (vaultproject.io), a tool for securely accessing and controlling secrets like API keys, passwords, and certificates.

* Discussion about IPv6 adoption challenges, with reference to a 13-year-old article by Daniel J. Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html) highlighting ongoing compatibility issues between IPv4 and IPv6.