5 Jun
2010
5 Jun
'10
3:12 a.m.
Elektor was (and still is) quite good. But it's
more of a "technology"
I stopped reading ELektor when many of the more interesting 'projects'
depended on buying a pre-soldered module. Building the thing is part of
the fun...
magazine now than the project-oriented magazine that
it (and EPE for
that matter) used to be. They have recently released a DVD with all the
articles from 1990 to 1999 on, which is a nice step -- not up to the
degree of CCi's "here's every issue we ever published" archive, but
still better than EPE's "if it's more than 3 years old it doesn't
exist"
attitude.
The problem with older elektor projects is that often the firmware is now
totally unobtainable. You can no longer buy the pre-programemd chip (in
some cases the 'blank; chip is hard to find anyway), they won't release a
dump of it, and even if you can find somebody who's built the project,
PALs and microcontrollers will be copy-protected :-(
Circuit Cellar is still going and well worth the money
for a digital
With the demise of the 'Borders' book shop chain over here, Circuit
Cellar is impossible to find across the counter.
Anyway, I stopped reading it when it was obvious that every project
involved a microcontroller. There is a lot more to electronics than that.
The old "Electronics: The Maplin Magazine",
aka "Electronics and Music
Maker" and "Electronics and Beyond" was actually pretty good. It always
seemed to me it was more of a sideline for Maplin's -- something to push
their project kits. Post-1999, it took a rather odd route down the
Virtually all the kits appeared in 'Electronics' at one time or another.
It was quite a good idea. You got to see what was involved in building
them, and what 'extra' components (case, connectors, etc) had to be added
to the kit to make it useable. And on several occasions, I worked out a
useful modification to the kit anf bought both the kit and the bits ot do
the mod at the same time.
'pseudo-science' track, with columns from the
likes of Uri Geller
That's after I stopped reading it...
(anyone remember him? <GRIN>). Apparently this
got sold to Kanda in
Yes, he was a conjuror (and that's the polite version).
~2001, and was (quite quickly) run into the ground.
Let's see... what else is there...
Amateur Photographer.. can't say a bad word about this. The price is
right at least, and it gives me something to read at work on my lunch
break (AP is published weekly) :)
I stopped reading AP when the editor changed some years ago. Roger Hicks
no longer wrote an article every week, it almost totally dropped film
photography, and the answers to readers questions were misleading to say
the least (I seem to remember them perpetrating ythe myth that the focal
lenght of the lens affrcts perspective). Oh, and the 'classic camera'
articles became only 2 pages long., although even before that they were
somewhat lacking in accuracy.
I don't read a computing mag at all. I don't read a modern electronics
mag either,
What I do read is :
Model Engineer, and Model Engineer's Workshop (the latter is more
interesting to me, being more on workshop techniques, the former being
mostly about making steam engines, but you do get useful information from
it, which is why I read it).
Radio Bygones and the Radiophile. 2 Magazines on vintage valve radio. The
former has more on militry/amateur radio, the latter is almost all
domestic sets, but I prefer the style of the latter.
Clocks. What it says, a magazine on mechancial clocks, mostly antiques.
Rouughly 50% historical info (which doesn't interest me greatly) and 50%
restoration/design/repair techniques (which does).
-tony