How to read 20 magazines for free.

You will need Firefox and an addon called User agent Switcher and configure it with an iPhone setting :

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)

You can then visit http://zinio.com/iphone/ and read 20 magazines each month for free.

It gets better though, it is very simple to download these pages onto your computer using Linux, aren't you glad you dumped windows ;)

We now need the URL to the image so "copy image location" from the right click menu then using this command:

curl -O -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3" INSERTURL

Replace INSERTURL with the copied link you got to page 1, then delete back to the underscore and append [1-300].jpg this is a range option to grab pages 1 to 300 and can be adjusted, so the final command will look like this:

curl -O -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3" http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/issues/416078746/[1-300].jpg

The files will need to be renamed, as sadly they won't sort correctly if you are going to do the next step of combining them into a single pdf. We need the jpgs numbering from 001.jpg so they order correctly. this can be achieved in a variety of ways, using Thunar rename to insert the necessary 0's in two stages is one simple way, insert 00 at position 10 for number 1-9, and insert 0 into postion 10 for pages 10-99. it can also be scripted in a couple of steps with :

for i in `seq 1 9`; do mv *_$i.jpg 00$i.jpg ;done

for i in `seq 10 99`; do mv *_$i.jpg 0$i.jpg ;done

This could of course be scripted into one single command using a bash script.

Then we can simply issue the command:

convert *.jpg magazine.pdf

Thats it, you now have a local copy of the magazine in a handy PDF format relatively simply, it lokos more complex than it really is once you get your head around it.