MagPi – Raspberry Pi Magazine

Jaseman said:

We're running out of time for last minute edits now - so speak up before Issue 1 goes to print.

Just had a scan through the MagPi.  It looks really good; seems like a great deal of thought and effort has gone into it. A quick possible edit in the RacyPy article page12. It says 'The Racy Py image... ...it loads directly into memory and nothing is installed to memory.' I think it should probably say nothing is installed to disk or some such.

Keep up the good work.

budgieboy said:

Jaseman said:

We're running out of time for last minute edits now – so speak up before Issue 1 goes to print.

Just had a scan through the MagPi.  It looks really good; seems like a great deal of thought and effort has gone into it. A quick possible edit in the RacyPy article page12. It says 'The Racy Py image… …it loads directly into memory and nothing is installed to memory.' I think it should probably say nothing is installed to disk or some such.

Keep up the good work.

Yep that does sound better, or even "it loads directly into memory and nothing is installed."  I'd rewrote that at some point, probably at silly o'clock, good spot.

[Davespice]

Hi guys;

I am not sure if this is the kind of thing you might be looking to include for CAS but I would have thought kids would enjoy using a computer to make music.

Take a look at my latest blog post about Schism Tracker.

If you're interested, let me know and I'll put something together that you could use.

Cheers!

http://www.themagpi.com

Issue 1 of the MagPi has been released and can be found at our website listed above.

The MagPi is a free online community led magazine aimed at educating all levels of user, acting as a media to share projects and ideas.

All constructive comments are welcome.  Articles are now being accepted for issue 2.

Hope you all enjoy.

The MagPi team.

There should be a bottle of champaign to be broken off the side of http://www.themagpi.com !

It looks great! I've got a certain ICT class that seems to contain a few smarties, who seem to have enjoyed the challenge of trying to draw spirals using repeats and variables in logo and some of them have managed to make scrolling 2d platform games in Scratch.. I'm planning to print a few copies and put a link to it from from our VLE (moodle). Hopefully the technician and I will manage to get enough copies of the virtual box Debian, Genie, Pygame etc. working on the machines in my classroom by Wednesday so that I can give a copy to a kid and let them try the magazine activities or carry on with their Scratch projects. I'll let you know how we get on.

Thank you to everyone who has worked on this, and for all the helpful comments and corrections!

I hope everyone feels like we have listened where we can and I hope you all enjoy it.

re: music programs...that sounds excellent.  Some stuff like this would be great fun

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix (although the rest of the site isn't working, was lots of other programs on there)

re: ICT class.  I was thinking it would be good to get some articles submitted from school kids too.  What do you think?  Just an idea at the moment.  We would love feed back on the current stuff too and also ideas of what they would like to see.  All very useful stuff.

I am really pleased with the final product. It appears the link to the draft of the next issue is no longer! Can someone please put it here so we can watch (and maybe contribute) to its evolution?

mikezoe said:

I am really pleased with the final product. It appears the link to the draft of the next issue is no longer! Can someone please put it here so we can watch (and maybe contribute) to its evolution?

Yep we will repost it when it we get going on it, currently we are planning the next articles and researching for them (I hope stuff which everyone will find interesting).

Feel free to throw some ideas and suggestions into the mix, plus we have plenty of room on the team for more people.

By the way, I did a few test prints at the end of last week, the A5 booklet format looked really great (as long as you don"t mind smaller text, it is readable for most I think):



Keep passing the links around to your friends, your kids and local teachers, we want Issue 2 to be even better and we will welcome feed back and ideas.

Direct link to the pdf:

http://goo.gl/Xxqy6

erk!

I went to the website to print off some copies from the pdf and ... clicking on the PDF link.

Error 111 (net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED): Unknown error. (from chrome)

The webpage cannot be found  HTTP 404 (from IE)

Have we killed SkyDrive?

morphy_richards said:

erk!

I went to the website to print off some copies from the pdf and … clicking on the PDF link.

Error 111 (net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED): Unknown error. (from chrome)

The webpage cannot be found  HTTP 404 (from IE)

Have we killed SkyDrive?

It just worked for me (unless it has cached).

You can download directly from issuu too (if you create an account – you can "like" it too then!). http://issuu.com/themagpi/docs.....ue_1_final

Anyway, let me know if it keeps happening, and we"ll post some mirrors!

Update, here is a mirror (I"ll get it added to the site at some point):

http://goo.gl/Fnkny

the link from theissu worked. It could well be our weird school network and useless 10mb connection that's causing the problem here in that case

meltwater said:

re: ICT class.  I was thinking it would be good to get some articles submitted from school kids too.  What do you think?  Just an idea at the moment.  We would love feed back on the current stuff too and also ideas of what they would like to see.  All very useful stuff.

I was wondering ... could we make a kind of anonymous "ask the experts" type form that could live on the website. That would allow kids to practice safe internet use by posting technical questions without providing personal information such as email addresses and names etc. (I dont know what kind of hosting package http://www.themagpi.com lives on)

morphy_richards said:

meltwater said:

re: ICT class.  I was thinking it would be good to get some articles submitted from school kids too.  What do you think?  Just an idea at the moment.  We would love feed back on the current stuff too and also ideas of what they would like to see.  All very useful stuff.

I was wondering ... could we make a kind of anonymous "ask the experts" type form that could live on the website. That would allow kids to practice safe internet use by posting technical questions without providing personal information such as email addresses and names etc. (I dont know what kind of hosting package http://www.themagpi.com lives on)

We can look into it, can't see that being impossible (although I'll rule out a free-call 24 hour hotline right now...!).

Anyone is free to email, editor@themagpi.com, and we won't be collecting any addresses (and will never publish them) for any reason and we don't mind what you name yourself (PG13 of course).

We would like to include a "letters" section in the next issue, we have yet to work out the details on how it'll work.  I expect we can reply directly and if worth publishing (and the person is happy with that) the question can be adapted for the section.

It would also be great to see some photos of people using their raspberry pi's too (again be clear if you are happy about it being published or not, and everyone involved is happy with that), even photos of your set-ups would be great.

morphy_richards said:

erk!

I went to the website to print off some copies from the pdf and ... clicking on the PDF link.

Error 111 (net::ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED): Unknown error. (from chrome)

The webpage cannot be found  HTTP 404 (from IE)

Have we killed SkyDrive?

Just for the record - We have 3 alternatives to downloading from issuu at the moment:

http://goo.gl/T6V7C - fotopanda Server

http://goo.gl/Fnkny - Dropbox

http://goo.gl/Xxqy6 - Skydrive

We've had 413 clicks on the skydrive one, 6 on dropbox and 3 on fotopanda.  As far as I know - the skydrive is holding up at the moment.

mikezoe said:

I am really pleased with the final product. It appears the link to the draft of the next issue is no longer! Can someone please put it here so we can watch (and maybe contribute) to its evolution?

I shall start putting together the first template for Issue 2 draft soon... Just been a bit busy with the real world today!  I shall keep you informed.

Sadly the IT technician didn't get time to help me today so I won't have any of the virtual box installations working for tomorrow.  I have got few copies of themagpi printed off. I'm going to give some to them to take home instead and play with on their own computers and we can also try out the scratch patch as we have got Scratch.

Well done to all in producing this! Hope to be able to help in the future.

We look forward to hearing the results.

fastkat, email us and we can talk about what you would like to write about etc.  We are looking for more people to join the team!

Excellent!

I enjoyed reading it.

Now just waiting to hear from RS in South Africa when I can move from the waiting list to "ordered"

I have just printed the magazine out. It looks great!

All the hard work from the editorial team has definitely been worthwhile.

I particularly like how the coding examples are on a line-printer style background!

I gave some out today and told everyone the url… It was consumed readily be a number of students. Some tried the dizzy cat and my classroom was quite noisy for a while. A few seemed to be absorbing the Virtual Box tutorial and a number seemed to indicate positively that they would try to try this on their computers at home.

Typical teenagers response when I asked 'what do you think of it?'

"yer is alrite"

But it did seem to go down well. I see them again next week and then we'll find out what they have been up to.

morphy_richards said:

Some tried the dizzy cat and my classroom was quite noisy for a while.

LOL - Sorry about that!

This site is making me hungry lol

Really like what you did for a first issue!

Thank god for using the printer at work though, I'm too cheap to use up that much color ink at home and I don't think it would look nearly as good in grayscale.

One small nitpicky thing, on page 19, Java and it's icon are above a description of JavaScript.  Despite the similar names these are 2 very different beasties.

Now to go home and try some stuff out on my virtual Pi.  (waiting impatiently for the real thing)

Thanks!

Very good first edition.  I really like the way the programs are displayed.

Back in the 80's doing O Level Computer Science,my class was set the task of writing a name, address and phone number database in Basic which could be interrogated with partially completed information.  The prefix of the phone number would show each number and contact which shared the prefix.

I think a program like this in Python would be a good example to use in future issues.

Keep up the good work everyone