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Ren'Py, created by Tom Rothamel (@renpytom on Twitter), is an a open source tool for developing visual novels. Visual novels are the computer game equivalent of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel. Writing a basic game script is super simple and adding in game/programming logic (using variables, if statements, jumping to a different section of the script, etc.) is not very hard.

By making simple modifications to common Motorola phones, researchers in Berlin have shown they can block calls and text messages intended for nearby people connected to the same cellular network.

David Herrmann is on a coding spree this summer. His latest set of ten patches this week provide for device management support using systemd's logind service...

David Herrmann, the student developer working on DRM Render Nodes this summer and has been a longtime proponent of killing the Linux kernel console, has written at length about VT (virtual terminal) switching on Linux systems...

Will Intel and Nvidia join the HSA party, or insist on going it alone? Hot Chips At the annual Hot Chips symposium on high-performance chippery on Sunday, the assembled chipheads were led through a four-hour deep dive into the latest developments on marrying the power of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, DMA engines, codecs, and other accelerators through the development of an open source programming model.…

It was on this day twenty-two years ago that Linus Torvalds made the first public release of his Linux operating system. In celebrating the 22nd birthday, the Linux 3.11-rc7 kernel has been tagged...

Rob Clark has updated his Wiki-based documentation for the Freedreno driver project, the reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno/Snapdragon graphics support. The update includes detailing Qualcomm's A3xx shader instruction set...

As soon as Apple launched their Haswell-based MacBook Air I purchased the "ultrabook" for its long battery life, great build quality, and impressive design. However, running Linux on the 2013 MacBook Air has been a pain. It wasn't running cleanly but it looks like the major kernel booting problem comes down to a UEFI interaction issue...

Habey announced a 3.5-inch form-factor single board computer based on AMD’s quad- and dual-core G-Series SoCs, clocked as high as 2.0GHz. The Linux-friendly SBC provides HDMI, VGA, and LVDS display outputs, offers dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces, four USB ports, and six serial ports, expands via mini-PCIe, and optionally supports -40 to +85?C operation. Habey says [...]

The employees even had a code name for the practice – "Love-int" – meaning the gathering of intelligence on their partners... Last week it was disclosed that the NSA had broken privacy rules on nearly 3,000 occasions over a one-year period.

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

Software giant Microsoft is co-operating with US federal authorities in an investigation into alleged "illegal activity" by employees and business partners in Russia and Pakistan.

According to leaked internal documents from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) that Die Zeit obtained, IT experts figured out that Windows 8, the touch-screen enabled, super-duper, but sales-challenged Microsoft operating system is outright dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a built-in backdoor. Keys to that backdoor are likely accessible to the NSA – and in an unintended ironic twist, perhaps even to the Chinese.

Last week I had a chance to visit Chattanooga for several days and received an up close look at the maker and entrepreneurial culture of the city. Chattanooga is home to a municipal gigabit fiber installation, which reaches every home and business in a 600 square mile area. The city is positioning itself as a hub of digital innovation, and from where I sit they're doing quite a good job of that. Some of the smartest minds from other parts of the country are moving to Chattanooga because of the quality of life combined with structural community support for innovators.

The growing shortage of qualified programmers, computer scientists and software engineers is gathering significant attention in the media and popular press. Recent efforts from the non-profit organization Code.org have helped shine light on the problem—software is the defining industry of the 21st Century and the pool of skilled talent is slim. Conversely, for students who pursue software development the opportunity for employment is colossal: By the year 2020, it is estimated that there will be one million more programming jobs than available students.

China-based Ugoos announced a quad-core, HDMI-stick style mini-PC available for a special price of $65 (normally $100). The Ugoos UM2 is runs Android 4.2 on a quad-core Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 SoC, offers an HDMI port, WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.0, and provides dual USB 2.0 host ports for external peripheral connection. Like Rikomagic’s MK802IV HDMI [...]

Forcing all network traffic through Tor will hopefully reduce the chance of your anonymity being compromised by application-level issues that result in 'leaks'.

Thinking about launching a Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign to fund a custom Linux-powered SBC for powering your dream product? Gumstix says it has come up with a better way: find 50 collaborators, agree on a design, and have first articles of your custom SBC built and booting Linux in under three weeks. Sounds tempting, but [...]

Build systems are deeply siloed by development language and primarily rely on the '80s model of spelling out targets and instructions. But new tools, such as Gradle, that cater to polyglot apps and the needs of continuous delivery are finally emerging.

The City of Boston has teamed with edX to create BostonX. It will offer free online college courses throughout the city. And it will make MOOCs (massive open online courses) available at community colleges and libraries throughout the city. BostonX is still in its infancy but the city hopes to make MOOCs more available and accessible to residents and visitors. Boston's Mayor Thomas Menino envisions neighborhoods as "mini campuses" around the city. He believes that this will only increase the city's impact and standing on the nation and world as at the forefront of education.