In this week's top featured article Harry Fairhead shows how to work with IoT devices using the Raspberry Pi 5 and Gpio5. What's Gpio5? It is a new open source library written by Harry specifically to let the Pi 5 work directly with GPIO hardware. It is  based on the Pico SDK for the RP1 microprocessor, the chip that also powers the Pi 5. 

At the moment Coursera Plus has a special offer for new subscribers. If you love learning new skills or keeping your existing skills up to date, it's worth your immediate attention.

Blender Studio has released a free-to-play game on Steam that is designed not just to be fun to play, but as an example of what you can create in the games arena using just open source software.

GitHub Copilot Adventures is a repository that, through fun and educational play, teaches how to use Copilot effectively.

Google has updated Firebase Studio with new Agent modes, foundational support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Gemini CLI integration. 

Empirical research into whether access to AI-powered tools, primarily Cursor, reduces or lengthens the time taken to deal with routine software development tasks produced an unexpected result. Using AI tools increased task-completion time by 19%.

The July Tiobe index is out and it isn't particularly interesting until you notice that it confirms the standard model of programming -  code is written in Python and C and everything else is just noise.

Amazon has made major changes to AWS accounts that came into effect today. If you are new to AWS do the benefits of signing up to a Free plan outweigh the disadvantages and risks?

Codacy has released Guardrails, a new solution for securing AI-generated code directly in the IDE to prevent vulnerabilities in code completions from reaching Git.

Geany, the lightweight IDE, has been updated to add new themes and support for more file types and platform-native file selection dialogs. 

Akka has launched a new Akka Agentic Platform that can be used to build, operate, and evaluate any type of agentic AI system. The platform provides orchestration, memory, toolkits for agents, and streaming capabilities. 

Knee-related conditions such as osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis significantly impact mobility and also increase susceptibility to injuries, creating a cycle that leads to chronic pain, reduced function, and long-term disability. Now researchers have come up with an AI-powered wearable to analyse complex dynamic motion signals of the knee joint for accurate torque monitoring.

This extended version of the newsletter emailed to subscribers every Wednesday lists the week's news items, Book Review and additions to Book Watch and the week's two feature articles. This week Mike James explains how to use masks to work with bit patterns in Python and we look at the fascinating story behind the spreadsheet and how Mitch Kapor founded Lotus Development Corporation.

Last month in front of an enthusiastic audience at Y Combinator, Fei-Fei Li, often called the godmother of AI, talked to Diana Hu about spatial intelligence and why she considers it the next critical step for AI and essential for achieving Artificial General Intelligence.

MCP has taken the industry by storm just one year after its appearance. And now we have an MCP Summit, run by the trend setters themselves!

GNU Nano 8.5 has been released with improved text anchors and fine-tuned syntax coloring. GNU nano is a command line text editor for Unix and Linux that aims to be simple and easy to use.

In that same way Gemini can produce text, write poetry,  summarize an article, write code, and generate images, it can also generate robot actions with Gemini Robotics. Now, the new Gemini Robotics On-Device model eliminates the need for a network connection, and its full SDK allows roboticists to train robots with new tasks.

Just hot out of the oven, there's a new minor version release of the venerable programming language that is Perl.