News

Linux On Windows - Microsoft On How It Works   Wednesday 27 April

The ability to use Ubuntu's user side interface under Windows is perhaps the biggest open source surprise this year. Now Microsoft is explaining how it works.

Apple's Revamped Developer Portal   Wednesday 27 April

Apple has updated its developer web portal adding a new section entitled "Making Great Apps for the App Store" aimed at helping developers grow their businesses and reach more users with their apps. 

Android On Chromebooks About To Happen?   Tuesday 26 April

A new message may start to appear on your Chromebook in the near future.It good news for Android devs as what it really means is Android on any desktop or notebook running the Chrome browser.

NVIDIA's Neural Network Drives A Car   Tuesday 26 April

NVIDIA has moved into AI in a big way, both with hardware and software. Now it has implemented an end-to-end neural network approach to driving a car. This is a much bigger breakthrough than winning at Go and raises fundamental questions of what sort of systems we are willing to accept driving cars for us. 

Smash The Code Make An Impression With CodinGame   Tuesday 26 April

A new CodinGame Contest opens on Saturday April 30th. The aim of Smash The Code is to program an autonomous bot and send it fight other players' bots. Another aim for many contestants is to be noticed by companies who are looking to hire devs or are offering internships and apprenticeships. 

Raspberry Pi Camera Upgraded To 8 Megapixels   Monday 25 April

The Raspberry Pi isn't just a low cost reasonably powerful CPU, it also has video processing abilities and an easy-connect, low-cost video camera which has just been upgraded to 8 Megapixels for the same cost, $25. 

Microsoft R Programming Course on edX   Monday 25 April

An R Programming course from Microsoft, in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark, started last week on the edX platform. If you want to get up to speed programming in R there's still time to catch up.

Firebird Database Version 3.0 Released   Monday 25 April

The latest version of the open-source Firebird SQL relational database has been released with a unified server architecture, improved support for SMP and multiple-core hardware platforms. 

Deep Learning On Babbage's Analytical Engine   Sunday 24 April

Speculating on what might have happened if Babbage had built his Analytical Engine is fun, but did you ever think that a Victorian computer could implement a neural network and learn to read handwritten digits? Well it can and it's not a joke. 

Antbo Your Cuddly Robot Ant   Saturday 23 April

Social robots are all the rage, educational robots more so. Hence, perhaps, the idea of Antbo - your social educational ant robot. So if you missed out on robot dogs, cats and seals why not cuddle a metal ant.

Chromium OS For Raspberry Pi Reaches 0.5   Friday 22 April

Don't be too put off by the 0.5 version number. This is a project worth taking notice of. A version of Chromium for the Raspberry Pi opens up some interesting possibilities.

Get On The Machine Learning Bandwagon With Google   Friday 22 April

You can't help but notice the surge of interest in anything to do with machine learning. Now Google has launched a series of videos presenting machine learning recipes. And this adds to an existing heap of resources. 

Chromium Bug Tracker Now Open Source   Thursday 21 April

Chromium is Google's open source browser, which shares much of its core browser code with Chrome, Google's proprietary product. Now Monorail, the Chromium bug tracker, has been made open source. 

Zip Tests Quantum Mechanics   Thursday 21 April

If you know a little about quantum mechanics, or computer science, then the idea that there is anything about it that can be tested using the familiar zip compression algorithm will seem as strange as the theory.

The Core

How To Create A Viral Mobile Game   Monday 25 April

Don't we all dream of a hit game? The reality is all too often different, but it can be done. Here we find out how from Eugeny Butakov, creator of the successful mobile game, Psebay. 

Getting Started With C/C++ On The Micro:bit   Thursday 21 April

Anyone who wants to use the BBC micro:bit to its full potential as an IoT device needs to look outside the coding environments provided by its own website. As an mbed device, however, the micro:bit  is capable of being programmed in C/C++. Here we look at how to use the mbed online compiler for a simple demo program.