Android Leftovers

• Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi lets Google's Android into its dashboards

• Google wins major Android deal with auto partnership Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi

• Bluestacks 4 released: Your Android apps on PC could run faster than your flagship phone

• 5 handy hidden features in the Gmail Android app

• Android Security Bulletin September 2018: What you need to know

• Google Family Link adds much-needed teen Android management

• Forget the iPhone XS – here are all the Android phones coming in October 2018

• BlueStacks, an Android emulator for PC, gets update with major performance upgrade

• Android Confidential: Why these 3 upcoming Android phones could put the iPhone XS to shame

• Exclusive: This is Android Pie with Samsung Experience 10 on the Samsung Galaxy S9+

• Google Is Testing A Floating Keyboard On Android

• Big Dolby donation to UCSF; Android cars are coming; OPEC supports Iran

Chrome OS 69 Finally Brings Linux Apps to Some Chromebooks, Night Light Feature

Chrome OS 69 is the first release of the Linux-based operating system that enables support for running Linux apps on Chromebooks. However, the Linux app support is still in development and it's presented to users in a beta form, available only on select devices due to hardware restrains. A complete list with the Chromebooks supporting Linux apps is available here. "While we would like to be able to bring this work to all Chromebooks, the required kernel and hardware features limit where we can deploy this," says Google in the blog announcement. "A lot of features we use had to be backported, and the further back we go, the more difficult & risky it is to do so. We don't want to compromise system stability and security here."

Raspberry Pi I/O add-on targets aquaponics and hydroponics

Upsilon is Kickstartering a “BioControle” I/O add-on board for the RPi 3 designed for aquaponics and hydroponics. The $89, open-spec add-on offers power-protected 12-bit ADC and DAC, 4x relays, servo outputs, and sensor and logical I/O. We knew it was only a matter of time before we covered a board from Luxembourg, and that time has come. Rodange, Luxembourg based Upsilon Engineering, which is led by embedded engineer Yann Leidwanger, has gone to Kickstarter to launch its BioControle add-on board for the Raspberry Pi 3. The board can be used as a general purpose I/O and DAQ add-on but is specifically designed as a control board for aquaponics and hydroponics gardening.

OSS Leftovers

• First results of the ROSIN project: Robotics Open-Source Software for Industry

  Open-Source Software for robots is a de-facto standard in academia, and its advantages can benefit industrial applications as well. The worldwide ROS-Industrial initiative has been using ROS, the Robot Operating System, to this end. In order to consolidate Europe’s expertise in advanced manufacturing, the H2020 project ROSIN supports EU’s strong role within ROS-Industrial. It will achieve this goal through three main actions on ROS: ensuring industrial-grade software quality; promoting new business-relevant applications through so-called Focused Technical Projects (FTPs); supporting educational activities for students and industry professionals on the one side conducting ROS-I trainings as well as and MOOCs and on the other hand by supporting education at third parties via Education Projects (EPs).

• Baidu To Launch World’s First Intelligent Vehicle Infrastructure Cooperative Systems Open Source Solution By End Of 2018

  Baidu Inc. has announced it will launch the Apollo Intelligent Vehicle Infrastructure Cooperative Systems (IVICS) open-source solution by the end of 2018, leveraging its capabilities in autonomous driving to bring together intelligent vehicles and infrastructure to form a “human-vehicle-roadway” interplay – an important step toward developing future intelligent transportation.

• Versity Open Sources Next Generation Archiving Filesystem

  The ScoutFS project was started in 2016 to address the rapidly growing demand for larger POSIX namespaces and faster metadata processing. The design goal for ScoutFS includes the ability to store up to one trillion files in a single namespace by efficiently distributing metadata handling across a scale out cluster of commodity compute nodes.

• Moving from Wordpress

• Epic Clock Clocks The Unix Epoch

  Admit it: when you first heard of the concept of the Unix Epoch, you sat down with a calculator to see when exactly 2³¹-1 seconds would be from midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Personally, I did that math right around the time my company hired contractors to put “Y2K Suspect” stickers on every piece of equipment that looked like it might have a computer in it, so the fact that the big day would come sometime in 2038 was both comforting and terrifying. [Forklift] is similarly entranced by the idea of the Unix Epoch and built a clock to display it, at least for the next 20 years or so. Accommodating the eventual maximum value of 2,147,483,647, plus the more practical ISO-8601 format, required a few more digits than the usual clock – sixteen to be exact. The blue seven-segment displays make an impression in the sleek wooden case, about which there is sadly no detail in the build log. But the internals are well documented, and include a GPS module and an RTC. The clock parses the NMEA time string from the satellites and syncs the RTC. There’s a brief video below of the clock in action.

• 3 top Python libraries for data science

  Python's many attractions—such as efficiency, code readability, and speed—have made it the go-to programming language for data science enthusiasts. Python is usually the preferred choice for data scientists and machine learning experts who want to escalate the functionalities of their applications. (For example, Andrey Bulezyuk used the Python programming language to create an amazing machine learning application.) Because of its extensive usage, Python has a huge number of libraries that make it easier for data scientists to complete complicated tasks without many coding hassles. Here are the top 3 Python libraries for data science; check them out if you want to kickstart your career in the field.

• PortableCL 1.2 Still Coming While POCL 1.3 Will Further Improve Open-Source OpenCL

  It's been a number of months since last having any major news to report on POCL, the "PortableCL" project providing a portable OpenCL/compute implementation that can run on CPUs, select GPUs, and other accelerators. POCL 1.1 from March remains the current stable release while POCL 1.2 has been in the release candidate stage. The POCL 1.2 release candidates began last month with a few highlights like LLVM 7.0 support, device-side printf support, and HWLOC 2.0 library support.