100 Top Tips: Microsoft Excel
Power up your Microsoft Excel skills with this powerful pocket-sized book of tips that will save you time and help you learn more from your spreadsheets.
21 December 2012
I’ve been buried in writing Raspberry Pi for Dummies over the last few months, so I’ve been spending most of my time playing with the Raspberry Pi but I’ve had no time to blog about it. I’m very much looking forward to blogging about my experience writing the book, and some of the tips I’ve picked up, in January.
But first, I wanted to blog about a Kickstarter project that The MagPi is running (link no longer available). The MagPi is a free magazine about the Raspberry Pi, packed with practical programming projects you can try. When I first started reading computer magazines in the 1980s, they were packed with listings and hints to help you write your own programs. Given that today’s computer culture is all about using software, it’s hard for some people to imagine a time when computer owners would be routinely exposed to programming in this way. The Raspberry Pi aims to tackle this culture, of course, and make programming accessible to us all once more, and The MagPi is a great resource in helping people to make the most of that.
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform, a way for organisations and individuals to raise funds from lots of people making small investments. Those who invest don’t get a return on their money, but they do get rewards, which vary depending on how much they invest.
The MagPi Kickstarter project aims to raise funds to make the magazine available in print, starting with the 8 issues published in 2012, and then hopefully setting a precedent to enable the magazine to appear in print in 2013. The magazine is available online for free, but there’s something special about having a print magazine, including the fact that anything that has a presence in the physical world is more likely to be read and shared around (this is an idea I might expand upon in a future blog post about ebooks versus print books).
The rewards available start at a pack of stickers for £5 and the most popular reward (by a long way) is a set of printed magazines for 2012, a binder and a set of stickers (for £25).
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