The MagPi Magazine www.themagpi.com

You've made a great start here, and it looks as if you're headed for excellence. I'm reminded of the very best of the '80s computer mags - good, solid information, attractively presented.

Good luck. I'm looking forward to issue 2.

[liz]

I've just (somewhat belatedly - sorry, it's been a hell of a week) put a post up on the front page about The MagPi, which we're all very excited about. Thanks to Ash, Jaseman, Meltwater and all the other contributors from everyone here at the Foundation!

That was an AWESOME READ.

GREAT JOB.

I look forward to reading more issues.

liz said:

I've just (somewhat belatedly - sorry, it's been a hell of a week) put a post up on the front page about The MagPi, which we're all very excited about. Thanks to Ash, Jaseman, Meltwater and all the other contributors from everyone here at the Foundation!

Not to worry Liz - you just got back from Cali.  I'm heading there myself next Saturday.  The number of views just went through the roof.  We had around 2000 views during the week, but since your post on the front page - it shot up to around 11,000!

It's at times like this when I just hope my Python programs didn't have any errors in them.  We made a couple of small mistakes (Yes the Java logo - sorry about that).  We did have the magazine in draft available for comment, for about a month and a half, and nobody picked up on that mistake.  I almost did use the other logo, but when it said it was 'unofficial' on Wikipedia, I went back to Google and typed java script logo into the image search - and the little tea cup was there.  I don't think it's the end of the world.  I'll make sure that a correction goes into issue 2.

Thank you all for your very kind words - and the not so kind ones too - Its all good!

I read the magazine on my raspberry Pi great but I wanted a copy on my iPad as well to show people etc will there be a iPad version anytime soon apple not jail break thanks

Keep up the great content

I'm planning to bring back an iPad from Beverly Hills (They are cheaper over there).  So once I have that, I will do my best to make the magazine more iPad-friendly.

Hi All

In answer to some of your emails, please find the draft for issue 2 at

http://www.issuu.com/themagpi 

We are now accepting articles for this issue, all welcome!

Thanks

Ash Stone said:

Hi All

In answer to some of your emails, please find the draft for issue 2 at

http://www.issuu.com/themagpi 

Page not found. Hopefully a temporary error.

Congrats on issue 1. I tried messing about converting the PDF version to epub, as a few people had asked for it, but the results were horrible. What software are you using to produce the originals?

The link is http://issuu.com/themagpi

Just to say, people should start switching over to our shiny new website soon! It looks similar to themagpi.wordpress.com.

I read the magazine on my ipad.

You can just open the pdf in ibooks. Won"t give you the exact same functionality as an epub, but still works good.

Imo a true ipad version would be cool, but hardly needed.

Maybe we can accommodate both - I'll have to find out more about the epub format.

Just to say, if you want an easy way to download the magazine, you can also use bittorrent!

themagpi-issue1.pdf.torrent

Please help seed!

Very interesting article!

We are currently in talks with a guy who will try to get the format working to read well on the kindle also.

Watch this space.

[gsh]

Just like to note that GordonH is not me!

Also, I was wondering whether the MagPi magazine would like to run a question / answer article from Broadcom.

Pretty much I can answer any of the questions about the 2835, architecture, power, peripherals, speeds, over/under clocking, GPU, video codecs, cameras, display support

All that jazz...  Guess you'll just need a list of questions!

Gordon

I was wondering whether the MagPi magazine would like to run a question / answer article from Broadcom.

We would love to!  I'm not sure any of us are qualified enough to know what are the right questions to ask however!  We are planning to do a dissection article - no we're not cutting up a raspberry pi (Perish the thought!), but a diagram pointing out what different parts of the board are and do.  I think if you could provide us with some of the general specs and limitations, this would be extremely helpful to include with that.  I suppose the more in-depth questions would depend upon the project you were doing - but just a fairly broad description would be a great start.  Any sort of information which is going to help people with their hardware projects would be fantastic.  I think if you put out some taster info, our readers will be the ones that come back and start asking the questions.

You'll notice by looking at what we have done so far, we are introducing the information at a nice easy pace, because we are really targeting the absolute beginners.  We don't want to scare them with too much technical information at this stage.  The people that are already experts won't really need our magazine just yet, and they will do their own research into whatever particular discipline they are studying.

Has anyone created a PDF or other format file that can be edited, based on the MagPi template?

gsh said:

Gordon

Thank you for your offer, I've PM'd you, I'll be very pleased to get as much info as we can.

Jim Manley said:

Has anyone created a PDF or other format file that can be edited, based on the MagPi template?

Not that I know of.  We could do with one though, even a publisher version would be handy.

Thank you for all the comments recieved so far.

We appreciate and read all sent, and in response are pleased to announce the launch of our official HTML only MagPi site.

Check it out at http://www.themagpi.com

Thanks

The MagPi team

Fantastic Start Guys, that is just the sort of level for educational use. I'd personally love to see this on the news-stands in glossy format to subscribe to. My kids would pick it up and read it, but they haven't got into the whole online reading thing (yet)

Not that I mean to over-complicate the demands placed on you guys, but I'd also like to add my +1 for an epub version. I tend to read in the bath which means using a cheap Kobo I picked up in Asda. I know it's not as layout friendly as a pdf but it is a more portable format (than the Portable Document Format, ironically).

We would love to see the same (although perhaps not in the bath).

Hopefully we get someone on board who will work on that, the door is open. We did have someone who was interested a while back so will get Ash to follow that up.

Doesn't the Kobo support pdf zooming, unlike the Kindle?

Absolutely BRILLIANT!
Just received my Pi today.
Would not have got anywhere without Issue 2 (draft) of your brilliant mag.

Many thanks

[rurwin]

Brilliant second issue. Your style seems to have settled down a little, which is a good thing. It is very difficult to read on the Issuu site, but fine when downloaded. Can you allow Issuu to show a single page at a time? Here are some brickbats on the draft:

The Question on the Resize partitions page: It may not be a good idea theoretically to run sudo on GUI programs, but it wont be a problem in this case. The question is worded badly anyway since it reads as if running any GUI program from the command-line is bad and that is very definitely not the case.

Some or many laptops which have built-in SD card slots seem to have a problem writing images to them. I have no idea how widespread this is or if it affects gpartd or a live Linux CD. I have a feeling it might. I know I failed to write an image on my Windows 7 Dell laptop when it worked fine when using an external card reader.

How to start a graphical interface:
There is a spurious power icon in the picture that should appear in the text.

Super-powers:
There's an xkcd strip that explains this better than a thousand words: http://xkcd.com/149/
I have no idea if you would be allowed to use it, but there's no harm in asking.

Stop the press Exclusive interviews: horrible colours

Pisection: The 2V5 regulator is labeled as ADC reference. Maybe it is right, but there is no accessible ADC (analogue to digital converter) on the RaspPi (maybe it's for the composite video or something). Might be less confusing to omit the ADC reference reference.

Computer Music: Horrible green colour for stuff to type in. You haven't used this style elsewhere, and if you decide to use it you need to darken it.

In Control: The article is incomplete. (I assume you know this)
No indication how wires would be connected to the GPIO pins. Crocodile clips might be the best bet.
Most resistors these days have five colour bands, not four. A 1K resistor would be brown-black-black-brown---red, meaning 1-0-0-x10---1%. The diagram shows brown-black-red---gold, meaning 1-0-x100---5%. The problem is of course that just describing that is another page.
I haven't seen a Tandy in ages; Maplin would be a better bet. Those breadboards are ubiquitous.
It's a long article, it's going to be longer and it could profitably be longer still. Might it be a better idea to just use an LED and resistor and get to switches next month? You could "test" the LED by connecting it to 3V3 and then move it to an output pin and drive it from Python.

Command-line clinic: The "above example" assumes nothing about the hard-drive name. Was this an example that got changed?

Debian: This is the only article that references running a VM. Does it need to?
Have you considered standardising on a Python IDE?

Scratch Patch: I assume this is a place-holder?

Python Pit: The music-ruled paper is anachronistic and text on it is difficult to read. At least kill the bold and consider using a monospaced font. YMMV

Letters: Wow! I got published!

Some good points raised there.

Brilliant second issue. Your style seems to have settled down a little, which is a good thing.

The problem is that the magazine is made up of individual contributions, I think it will improve as each contributor tries to make their contribution fit in with the overall design. However I think some suggested guidelines about what font to use for body text and listings etc would help tidy things up a bit.

Stop the press Exclusive interviews: horrible colours

I agree the colour would be a bit better toned down.

Computer Music: Horrible green colour for stuff to type in. You haven't used this style elsewhere, and if you decide to use it you need to darken it.

Agreed, I think it would be easier to read if Dave made the green a bit darker to give it more contrast from the background.

In Control: The article is incomplete. (I assume you know this)
No indication how wires would be connected to the GPIO pins. Crocodile clips might be the best bet.

The article suggests female-male jumper wires, I'm not sure about crocodile clips might cause a short.

Most resistors these days have five colour bands, not four. A 1K resistor would be brown-black-black-brown---red, meaning 1-0-0-x10---1%. The diagram shows brown-black-red---gold, meaning 1-0-x100---5%. The problem is of course that just describing that is another page.

I think the solution would be to add the resistor number i.e R1, R2 and R3 to the illustration so that the reader isn't relying on the colours in the illustration.

I haven't seen a Tandy in ages; Maplin would be a better bet. Those breadboards are ubiquitous.

The trouble is that the breadboards are often slightly different, some have two power rails at the top and bottom for example, places like Maplin don't seem to be consistent, having different versions depending on what Chinese supplier has the cheapest deal that month.

It's a long article, it's going to be longer and it could profitably be longer still. Might it be a better idea to just use an LED and resistor and get to switches next month? You could "test" the LED by connecting it to 3V3 and then move it to an output pin and drive it from Python.

It is surprising how quickly these things expand, like you said about the resistors that would add another page to the article. The idea is to start with the LED being connected to the switch and then in the next article separate them so that you can for example flash the LED 3 times after the switch is pressed.

Debian: This is the only article that references running a VM. Does it need to?
Have you considered standardising on a Python IDE?

I think Jaseman is using a VM as he doesn't have the Pi yet, but you are right the instructions apply just as well to a real machine. As for a standard IDE I was wondering the same and asked the question in the Python forum is the foundation has a recommended editor/IDE that will be used for tutorials but no answer yet.

Python Pit: The music-ruled paper is anachronistic and text on it is difficult to read. At least kill the bold and consider using a monospaced font. YMMV

The listing paper is quite a nice nostalgic thing for people of a certain age, it seems quite readable to me but perhaps if the listing paper background was made a bit lighter it would give greater contrast for the text.