The MagPi - Issue 21

Welcome to Issue 21 of The MagPi - the premier Raspberry Pi magazine for beginners, experts, Pi-fanatics and the merely Pi-curious.

To mark the Raspberry Pi’s second birthday, Issue 21 has a MagPi exclusive four page interview with Eben Upton reviewing the past two years and what the future holds for this credit card sized beauty.

Also in this issue, Jacob, a young Raspberry Pi enthusiast, describes how he made his Raspberry Pi portable, we have more from Project Curacao plus ModMyPi give us a demo on motion sensing. We feature a great article on using the command line to troubleshoot network issues, take an in-depth look at turning your Raspberry Pi into an internet radio device, show you how to use a Raspberry Pi with a weather station and also feature how to remotely manage your home saltwater aquarium.

If that wasn’t enough, Issue 21 concludes with a classic game by heading deep beneath the earth, to the realm of the Dwarven Heartland, in the hope of finding gold in the text adventure “Stronghold of the Dwarven Lords”.

And as always, the MagPi keeps you up to date with some of the latest Raspberry Pi goodies available for purchase, upcoming events, great competition prizes from PCSL and two new book reviews.

About The MagPi - from The MagPi themselves!

What we make
We produce a magazine with the intent to help and offer advice to users of the Raspberry Pi. This started out as a simple idea on the well known forums, with a few of us getting together and deciding on a loose outline of what we wanted to achieve.

Over time many have joined and left the team, each bringing their own contribution and ideas to the final piece.

If you had asked us six months ago whether we thought the magazine would be half a year down the line, we would not have been sure. We are now able to offer printed copies, competitions, our own branded Raspberry Pi case, and stable mirrors on a website not entirely made in flash.

Where does the money go?
There are certain administrative costs that go toward producing a reliable magazine, and printing magazines is certainly not free. We get a small amount of money from every copy sold – and this, along with donations and advertising revenue, goes towards funding the entire production team. We also hope to be able to offer more competitions, and better product testing.

You can help
Any donation is very gratefully received. However, you don’t have to put money into this to help us along – time is also one of our limiting factors. If you think you can be of any use in the general production, drop us an email.

The future
We had no idea how successful the magazine would be. Give us another six months, and there should be some real progress made. We are forever receiving requests for more formats, and this is definitely something we are looking into. Translations to other languages would be another great step.