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Google today unveiled a $35 HDMI stick-style device that wirelessly beams content from the Chrome browser of a desktop, laptop, or mobile computer to an HDTV. The Chromecast beaming technology initially supports content from Netflix, YouTube, and Google Play, and the controlling Chrome browser needs to be running on recent versions of Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS, and Chrome OS.

A Linux Foundation executive revealed that the 2014 Toyota Lexus IS is the second major automobile to offer an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system based on Linux. Meanwhile, ABI Research projects that Linux will quickly grow to represent 20 percent of automotive computers by 2018, pulling closer to Microsoft behind industry-leading QNX.

Indie videogame designer Nick Liow launched the Open Game Art Bundle in June this year. It was a simple idea: independent videogame designers contribute game assets—animations, soundtracks, character designs—and customers can pay any price they want to access them. Nick describes it as a sort of cross between Kickstarter and Humble Bundle, and like Humble Indie Bundle, the income is split between the developers themselves and charities (including Creative Commons). But there was one big twist: if the bundle reached its goal of $10,000 by July 15, all assets would become public domain under the CC0 public domain declaration.

Red Pitaya has launched a Kickstarter campaign to build an open source Linux-based measurement and control single-board computer. The $359 Red Pitaya, which can replace thousands of dollars worth of test equipment, will initially ship with smartphone apps for oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, waveform generator, frequency response analyzer, and PID controller functions.

The Linux Foundation announced the schedule for its LinuxCon North America conference, to be held in New Orleans on Sept. 16-18. LinuxCon features luminaries including Linus Torvalds, Google’s Chris DiBona, and Valve’s Gabe Newell, as well as dozens of presentations on all things Linux. LinuxCon is the Linux Foundation’s major public conference, and the flipside to its invitation-only Linux Collaboration Summit, which was held in April.

We plan our features, write our elegant and efficient code, and test it to make sure it does everything the customer would want. Then, after the application ships and everyone involved pats each other on the back for a job well done, we start getting reports — sometimes within days, sometimes much later on — that there is something wrong with the application. It lets people harvest personal data, or exposes the customer to compromise, or worse yet, it is wormable and can be used to attack other devices with the app on them. It appears we have forgotten to include some simple, easily integrated security development practices.

This past week saw all kinds of developments on the Linux Planet. We witnessed an ongoing discussion about civility in Linux kernel development, Slackware turned 20 years old and Mark Shuttleworth launched (yet another) phone effort.

It appears (and evidently its "developer" is admitting it) that the exFAT Linux kernel module was based upon source-code found from a Samsung developer for their exFAT driver. The code likely leaked out of Samsung accidentally by a developer pushing their Linux kernel source tree externally to GitHub when it should have been made private.

No longer content to live under Google's shadow, Samsung has announced its first-ever developer conference, to take place in San Francisco in October. It's no secret that Samsung has been the leading supplier of Android devices for some time now – by a wide margin. According to one study, fully 94.7 per cent of all profits in the Android device market went to the South Korean firm in the first quarter of 2013. Yet so far, the main event for Android developers each year has been the Chocolate Factory's Google I/O conference, also held in San Francisco. The event routinely sells out months in advance, with tickets running out mere minutes after online registration begins.

Canonical launched the first smartphone running its mobile version of Ubuntu on Indiegogo, with a funding goal of $32 million. The Ubuntu Edge will ship in May 2014 with dual-boot Android support, a full Ubuntu desktop in docking mode, a 4.5-inch 1280 x 720 display, 128GB of storage, and the “fastest available multicore processor.”

In many cases, scientific research takes you into totally new areas of knowledge, never before explored by others. This means the computational work you need to do may be totally new as well. Although typically such code development still happens in C or FORTRAN, Python is growing in popularity. This is especially true in physics.

BitTorrent released a beta version of a new Linux- and Android-ready peer-to-peer file sync package. BitTorrent Sync currently operates on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs and laptops, Android smartphones and tablets, and an evolving list of Linux-based devices, including the Raspberry Pi and numerous NAS products, enabling on-the-go, secure uploads and sync from mobile to storage devices, as well as M2M/IoT scenarios.

A Phoronix reader has shared two NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver "hacks" he's written for overriding some functionality of the NVIDIA binary blob for GeForce hardware.

I recently spoke with Larry Cooperman, director of OpenCourseWare at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Larry also serves on the boards of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and the African Virtual University. I asked Larry about UC Irvine’s new OpenChem project.

With Apple's OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" having better OpenGL performance and in compliance with OpenGL 4.1 rather than being GL3-limited as with existing OS X releases, new benchmarks were carried out at Phoronix to see how well Apple's OpenGL driver stack on the current OS X 10.9 developer preview compared to Ubuntu Linux when testing the Intel graphics driver.

In the fall of 2010, I asked the biology class I teach at Western Carolina University for volunteers to help map the campus. Three years later, dozens of students have participated in learning how to use aerial photography and cartography techniques created by Public Lab.

When Microsoft announced back in January that its flagship development tools Visual Studio and Team Foundation Service would play nicely with Git, it was a sign that the tool and its online manifestation GitHub had become part of the programming furniture. Many supporters chalk that status up as a win for all things open source. Others are less certain GitHub's always helping, because many projects on the site use highly contestable licenses.

Raspberry Pi embedded development firm Geekroo has surpassed its Kickstarter funding goal for a Mini-ITX board and case that extends the RPi into a full-fledged computer (SBC). The Fairywren is equipped with a 24-pin ATX power supply connector, a four-port USB hub, a 2.5-inch HDD bay, a serial port, an IR remote module, GPIO breakout, and sockets for a built-in XBee radio and Arduino Uno boards.

I never thought how a simple photograph at a family birthday could capture the essence of an open education until my niece recently turned one year old.

But Torvalds, who founded the popular Linux kernel project in the mid-1990s, wasn't taking this lying down, claiming today's demands of "professionalism" promote passive-aggressive "fake politeness" used by tie-wearing back-stabbers. “You are in a position of power. Stop verbally abusing your developers,” Sharp hit back at Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) - the nerve-centre of the open-source system's development.