Lightbulb police? (was RE: Anyone off to VCF-UK)

On 04/06/10 20:19, Tony Duell wrote: Seconded. If UK magazines are good, your benchmark must be pretty damn bad! A few examples... "PC Plus" started out pretty good -- in their heyday, they negotiated a deal with Borland/Inprise to include Delphi 3 on a cover CD with no license restrictions, then did a ton of programming tutorials based around it. Around 2003 it turned to mush -- the programming articles were gone, and the software on the CD was barrel-scrapingly bad stuff. Some of it didn't even install or work... which says a lot about the QA staff at Future Publishing. EPE (Everyday Practical Electronics) -- again, great up until they decided to stop accepting freelance submissions, and bought ALL of their content in from Silicon Chip. Dave Barrington's "Shoptalk" column (basically: "where to get the weird parts used by this project") got the axe quite early on, I think Net Work and Circuit Surgery are still going, but IMHO the magazine is pretty damn crappy. Their ideas for pricing on the back-issue CDs are mad... Elektor was (and still is) quite good. But it's more of a "technology" 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. Circuit Cellar is still going and well worth the money for a digital subscription. But they've just been bought out by Elektor, which is somewhat worrying. One can only wonder what 'the Big E' are going to do to it. Although they have kept Steve Ciarcia on, which is a good first step (as long as they keep him in the 'editorial control loop'). 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 'pseudo-science' track, with columns from the likes of Uri Geller (anyone remember him? <GRIN>). Apparently this got sold to Kanda in ~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) :) Photography Monthly -- used to be good, until the editor stepped down and someone else took over... and proceeded to revamp the style of the magazine completely. Now it may as well be "how to Photoshop your digital photos like a complete tit". Practical Photography -- the kings of the Twelve Month Rolling Loop. I kid you not, buy a years' worth of that magazine, and you've got just about every article they're going to publish for the following year. Also I'm not a fan of Bauer Media... it took four phone calls and a letter to them and my bank to cancel the bloody Direct Debit... and they're still spamming me with "look, we've got some other great magazines you might want to read!" emails / post. Which goes straight into the bin. -- Phil. classiccmp at philpem.me.uk http://www.philpem.me.uk/