March Week 2
Written by Editor   
Saturday, 20 March 2021

If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, our weekly digest summarizes the articles, book reviews, and news written each day by programmers, for programmers. This week we show how to use Python and Linux Drivers in a Raspberry Pi IoT project and, to mark the 40th anniversary of the ZX-81, we look at it and other UK Micros of the 1980s.

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IP2

March 11 - 17, 2021    

Featured Articles    

Pi IoT In Python Using Linux Drivers -The DHT22
Harry Fairhead & Mike James
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Linux drivers make working with devices so easy - assuming you know how. Here's how to get a Raspberry Pi to get data from the widely-used DHT22 Temperature Humidity Sensor. 


UK Micros of the 1980s
Historian
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Something special happened in the UK at the start of the 1980s and altered the  face of computing as we know it. You may think that all that ever happened in the past was Apple and IBM, but not so. In the UK there was an explosion of machines unlike any other before or since. To mark the 40th anniversary of the ZX-81 we look again at these remarkable micros.

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Programming News and Views 

Google Matches Apple's App Store Cut
17 Mar | Mike James

The headline news is that Google has cut, from July 1st, the percentage it takes from the Play Store to 15%, down from 30%, but only if you don't earn more than $1 million per year across all your apps. This matches the Apple App store terms announced in November 2020, but why has Google taken so long to follow suit?


Microsoft Launches Project Reunion Developer Preview
17 Mar | Kay Ewbank
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Microsoft has released a developer preview of Project Reunion, its initiative aimed at bringing the Windows development environment back to a coherent state.


DARPA Launches Plans For Fast FHE
16 Mar | Kay Ewbank
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the teams that will take part in its Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program. The program aims to develop an accelerator for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).


Track Open Source Vulnerabilities With Google's OSV
16 Mar | Nikos Vaggalis
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The Open-Source Vulnerabilities, OSV, database is a new, open source,  project from Google that goes beyond the current state of CVE tracking.



Google Boosts Opportunities For Job Seekers
15 Mar | Sue Gee
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Google has announced renewed efforts towards helping people without university degrees to prepare for and land jobs in the technology sector. These include expanding its employer consortium of companies that recognize Google Career Certificates and are eager to hire people who have earned them.



PyTorch 1.8 Improves FFT Support
15 Mar | Kay Ewbank
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PyTorch has been updated with improved support for FFTs, better distributed model training, new APIs, library updates, and support for ways to improve and scale your code for performance at both inference and training time.



Pi Day 2021 - Give Me Pi!
14 Mar | Mike James
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On this Pi Day I give you the search for Pi. No, not its numbers but what it means to computer science, which is a little different from what it means for mathematics. It's a matter of symbols, not numbers.



Insights Into Where Go Is Going
12 Mar | Janet Swift
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Results of the 2020 Go User Survey show a high level of satisfaction among users of the language as well as revealing that it is largely used in a work context and what it is mainly used for.



Chromebooks Adds Features For 10th Anniversary
12 Mar | Kay Ewbank
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Google has updated Chromebooks to recognize the 10th anniversary of the devices. There are updates to the built-in apps and a couple of new apps to improve usability.



Deno Adds WebGPU Support
11 Mar | Ian Elliot
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Deno, the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime from the creator of Node.js, has been updated in a new release that adds experimental support for WebGPU.



Dart 2.12 Released With FFI
11 Mar | Kay Ewbank
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Dart has been updated to provide smaller code size, faster type checks, better usability for type errors, and new language features to improve productivity when building user experiences.



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Books of the Week

If you want to purchase, or to know more about, any of the titles listed below from Amazon, click on the book jackets at the top of the right sidebar. If you do make Amazon purchases after this, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a source of revenue that enables us to continue posting.

Full Review 

 

Reviewer: Mike James  Rating: 4 out of 5
Verdict: This is a good book of its type and if you are of above average intelligence (aren't we all) and capable of seeing wood when there are a lot of trees about then you will like it a lot.

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More recently published books can be found in Book Watch Archive

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    Last Updated ( Saturday, 20 March 2021 )