Ditching Circuit Cellar

[5U4GB]

CC have just emailed subscribers to let them know that due to rising costs they're only doing a print edition bi-monthly.  I've been reading CC since Ciarcia was running it (and in Byte before then) but it's been going downhill for a long time, lots of advertorial and product announcements, and a couple of long-standing contributors that did good content have retired in the last 6-12 months which hasn't helped.  For anyone else in this position, what are you doing for your electronics reading fix? There's PE which seems to have quite a bit of overlap with SC (understandable given the ownership), leaving only Nuts&Volts if you exclude the insanely expensive Elektor which possibly also doesn't deliver to here.  Nuts&Volts is also bi-monthly but presumably better than CC and a lot cheaper.

[RoGeorge]

I didn't know there still are monthly paper printed electronic magazines.

My "fix" is to read on the desktop, electronic format not paper, but you'll get used to it after a while.  The advantage is, you may browse from a huge collection of all kind of electronic magazines from the past, e.g.:  https://www.worldradiohistory.com/index.htm

[RoGeorge]

Found the link to my ultimate fix, a collection of collections. 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/found-a-goldmine-looking-for-more-treasures-(hp-journal-and-alike)/

[5U4GB]

My "fix" is to read on the desktop, electronic format not paper, but you'll get used to it after a while.

Forgot to add in my original message, I can't read stuff in electronic format, or at least not anything technical where I need to pay attention. For that I sit down in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea and optional cat, but I can't really stare at an electronic display and get much out of it.

When the IEEE went to electronic-only form for a lot of its journals I actually looked into feeding the PDFs to a print-on-demand service to get them in a comfortable printed format. I vaguely remember that it was actually cheaper to do it that way then to pay for the (former) print subscription.

[NE666]

I can't read stuff in electronic format, or at least not anything technical where I need to pay attention.

I was a long-time reader and subscriber when it was originally under Ciarcia's ownership. When it went to Elektor they changed the typesetting, fonts and colour, and I found their choices so uncomfortable on my eyes that I gave up on it after a couple of issue, both paper and digital. It was, to me, literally unreadable. Which is something I've never experienced with any other magazines, physical or digital.

[Doctorandus_P]

I started with electronics some 40 years ago, and back then I took an subscription to Elektor ("Elektuur", NL) with a student discount. I did two schools, and after around 8 years the discount ran out, and instead of paying full price, I stopped the subscription. There were some good projects, but projects were very much alike, and actually building a project was extremely expensive. But I did learn a lot from that magazine.

Later I took a subscription to the digital edition of CC. It was low cost, had some fun projects, and unlike Elektor, they had the source code for (nearly) all projects available. That was a huge difference from elektor. With elector, they put in a GAL where a simple TTL address decoder would have sufficed, just to make it more difficult to build a project without buying parts from them. When CC  started "collaborating" with elektor, the cost of the digital edition doubled overnight and I stopped the subscription.

Over the years I've downloaded PDF's of old magazines. In total from about 15 different electronics magazines, and the time frame varies from back in the '70-ties and up to 8 to 10 years old for the newest.

IMHO magazines from before 1980 are less interesting. Then you're getting into the era when each transistor was precious. But there are also some interesting tricks in those old magazines. Magazines from 2005 or newer are mostly microcontrollers with some added I/O. These can also have (very) nice projects, but most of the value has shifted to the firmware. In between those years was the golden age of analog electronics.

Between all those old magazines, and a gazillion other sources on the Internet, there is not much incentive to maintain a subscription to a magazine.

Every now and then you can buy second hand collections of those magazines for a small price. That's a good option if you really want the paper version. If you're happy with the "digital editions" then buying back issues can be a good option. Either whole years, or all the back issues back to the start of the magazine in one go.

[Doctorandus_P]

In addition:

Sometimes I think about taking a subscription to Elektor labs. It's a quite dense collection of electronics projects, and a community that communicates about those projects. And I'm guessing there are similar communities in other parts of the world, But everything put together, I'm mostly saturated with projects already.

[5U4GB]

It was low cost, had some fun projects, and unlike Elektor, they had the source code for (nearly) all projects available. That was a huge difference from elektor. With elector, they put in a GAL where a simple TTL address decoder would have sufficed, just to make it more difficult to build a project without buying parts from them.

Yup, this is exactly the reason why I never went with Elektor. You'd have Everyday Electronics who would do a project with two BC107s and some Veroboard and then Elektor would do the same thing with a double-sided PCB and several 16-pin ICs. I never understood why all of their projects were so overcomplicated just to do the simplest things.

[5U4GB]

Over the years I've downloaded PDF's of old magazines. In total from about 15 different electronics magazines, and the time frame varies from back in the '70-ties and up to 8 to 10 years old for the newest.

There's fabulous archive of them on the World Radio History site, you just need to search for them by name here since they're not all linked from the front page.  If you remember building a project from PE in 1977, this will have the article covering it.

The only thing it doesn't have is old copies of Electronics Australia because Nicholas Vinen did a DMCA strike against them, which I found out when I wanted to look up an early-70s article. I realise SC has the copyright for old copies of EA but it seemed like a pretty scummy thing to do, I'm sure they're not losing any revenue from sales of a copy of a half-century-old electronics magazine and it's depriving hobbyists of a means of reconnecting with things they did as kids. Boo, hiss.

[5U4GB]

And another reason for letting my subscription expire was this AI-slopped gem from the current issue, in an article on AI:



AI slop, no acknowledgement that AI was used, and no sign it was ever checked by anyone given the obvious errors and glitches in it.