benev

I wrote a piece for Linux Voice on how bitcoin works a couple of years ago. It's obviously focused on this particular blockchain, not the principal in general and it's a couple of years old now. I tried to give a good overview for techincal people : https://www.linuxvoice.com/bitcoin/

It's usually a bad idea to run email from a home internet connection because it massively increases the chances of your mail being marked as spam. The hardest part of running a mail server is making sure your mail gets through spam filters, and the IP is critical to this.

Here in the UK we do have pretty regular problems with the water supply, to the point that hosepipe use is sometimes regulated. There's even a website you can check to see if there's currently a hosepipe ban: http://www.hosepipeban.org.uk/hosepipe-ban-current-situation...

It does rain a lot here, but there's also issues with the size of the reservoirs and the amount of water being drawn.

Warning: Shameless self promotion.

LinuxVoice magazine is available for free nine months after publication. The issues can be found here: http://www.linuxvoice.com/creative-commons-issues/

Quite a bit of our content is about programming and tech in general, so you may find something you like even if you're not a Linux user.

I believe that a common method of insulating mud-built buildings in cooler climates is mixing straw with the mud. There's probably some method of incorporating something similar either inside the bags or as an external layer. This wouldn't have to be straw, it could be something longer lasting with similar thermal properties.

I ran a Tor exit node for about nine months and only ever had two complaints sent to me. Both were for people performing some form of hacking through my exit node. I responded to both with a form letter, and that was that. Granted it was a low bandwidth exit node.

I hear US-based nodes get more legal attention because of the DMCA, but I can't comment on that as mine was based in Romania as well.

And when I visit two or more clients in the same day, how many shirts would I end up carrying?

Carry two shirts, one for cycling in and one for working. Before getting on your bike, change into your cycling shirt, then switch at the other end. The one for cycling obviously doesn't need to be ironed.

I cycle commute in a hilly city (Bristol, UK), and I think you're just a little inexperienced at cycling for work.

I can cycle hard and sweat, or I can cycle gently and sweat very little. We don't have a shower in the office, but I don't cycle too hard to work, and change shirt when I get in. It's not a problem. On the way home, I cycle hard and have a shower.

I can stay completely dry when cycling by simply carrying waterproofs. I just make it routine to always have these. It's true that these make it a little sweatier, but a change of clothes solves this problem.

Cycling isn't going to be suitable for every journey. However, 15% is quite a small target when you think about all the little trips people need. Things like cheap electric cars can be useful for the remaining 85%.

We use Paypal, Stripe, GoCardless (UK only I think), and Bitpay.

Although we are obviously aware of Paypal's mood swings, we haven't been the victim of any. So far all of the above have worked well for us. They've all been easy to integrate.

That's CC-BY-SA by the way. You can reuse it as long as you attribute it to us, and release any of your changes under an open licese.

In the UK you can get a bike for comparable prices (here's an £80 mountain bike). Again, they'll fall apart aftera few months though. The cheapest decent bike? Hmm, personally, I'd guess around £300, but I haven't done enough research to know for sure.

The first couple of issues were sort of hacked together in such a way that makes conversion to HTML (for ePub) a little awkward.

We got our act together by issue 3, so for this one on, it should be possible (and from issue 6 onwards, we already have the ePub for subscribers, so we'll release these as well when the issue goes CC).

one of the mag's founder's here.

It's about a year ago that we launched the crowdfunding campaign to create Linux Voice. I know quite a few people from Hacker News supported us. Thanks!

It's been a long year, but I'm ridiculously proud that we've made it, and we're able to release this first issue as promised (keep checking back because there'll be a new one every month).

Let me know if you've got any questions about the mag, or what's happened in the last twelve months.

Basically what happened is that we changed our wordpress theme, and it turns out that the new one puts a bit more pressure on our server than the old one. We used to be able to handle a top spot on hacker news, but this time our server died on us.

We decided to switch to cloudflare to mitigate some of the load. This requires changing DNS settings, and it seems that for some people, there's been a gap when they haven't been able to access the page. This is of course a little unfortunate. However, it does mean that other people can actually access the page rather than just getting stuck loading.

It's all a bit hectic here at the moment. It's possible there's some other problems that I haven't yet fully discovered.

Author here. I've got the new hardware on my desk, so let me know if you've got any questions about it.

We've done our best to match or undercut out main competition, while at the same time providing more pages. The advertising market for Linux magazines isn't great, so none of them get much money from that, but of course it does take up space, so each page of adverts is one page less content you have to pay for (We have few).

Yearly subscriptions start from £38 (digital), which we think is pretty good considering how much we pack into each issue (take a look here for the contents list of issue 3: http://www.linuxvoice.com/issue-3-is-out/).

Print subs are obviously more expensive, mostly due to the cost of postage.

I know re-submissions are a thorny subject for some people. TBH, we've only posted a few things on line so far, and I'm still getting a feel for what's best in terms of posting to HN, Reddit, etc. I am of course biased, but I think a good proportion of the readers of HN will be interested in our stuff, so I don't feel too bad about resubmitting a few times if it doesn't get picked up.

The old magazine was Linux Format. We left because we were prevented from making the magazine as good as it could be by layers of management that didn't understand (or care about) Linux or our target audience.

Well you can buy it tonight on indiegogo [1].

We expect to be in the shops in the uk in February 2014 (and we'll ship physical or digital copies to the rest of the world then). We hope to be in newsagents and book stores world wide not long after that, but it will depend on our distributors.

[1] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/linux-voice

That's the plan (including open sourcing the app). We've just got to get the magazine up and running first.

The google speech API is the best that I've been able to get working on the Pi [1]. It needs a network connection though.

[1] http://mikepultz.com/2011/03/accessing-google-speech-api-chr...

Well yes, but only insofar as it's a script created for the video that only plays that one song!

We hope to be on the Google Play Magazine store, that means DRM.

We hope to publish as an app where we can go without DRM (personally, I'd like that app to be available for Cyanogenmod as well). However, this may be a little further down the line.

Just to reiterate, if we can make it DRM-free in a particular store-front, we will.

Phoronix is first and foremost a hardware and benchmarking site. Probably the best Linux hardware and bechmarking site. We're not going to compete with them on that.

We're going to covering a wider area. We'll feature some stuff on programming (though this will never get too hardcore -- we're a Linux mag, not a programming mag), we'll feature desktop Linux as well. We'll feature Linux gadgets where they're relavent, but we're not going to be a big gadget review mag. Some stuff on servers. Some stuff on hardware hacking. Basically, if you can do it on Linux, it'll have a place in Linux Voice.

In terms of "hardcore-ness", we'll aim to strike a balance so there's something for everyone.

We'll be addressing a casual audience insofar as it'll be written with humour and will be easy to read.

Just to be clear -- any code from the mag will be released under an open source licence. There's no question about that. This thread's about releasing the actual articles themselves (which we plan on doing after nine months -- more info on the campaign page).

Thanks for the feedback.

We're offering digital subscriptions as well, so take which ever one you like :). However, Linux Format (or the Previous Magazine as it's called elsewhere on the thread) actually increased its print circulation last year. Print's still got some life in it yet.

We certainly hope to, although our initial work has been looking at PDF, and digital news stand editions.

Thanks.

You're right, and this is exactly what we want to do but (why is there always a but?) this is highly unusual clause and while we're confident most of our contributors will accept it, we may have to waive it for some (though we really hope we don't have to). As a new magazine we're not confident to make a 100% promise at this stage.