Subscribers should already have started to receive LXF129, and the rest of you will be able to pick up your copy from this Thursday. Inside you'll find a four-page tutorial on how everyone - even someone with only a few weeks of coding experience - can submit patches to the Linux kernel. It might sound crazy, particularly as many people consider the Linux kernel to be Really Hard or out of reach of mere mortals. But I hope that when you've finished the tutorial, you'll feel confident enough to give it a try.

If you've received your copy of LXF128, you should by now have spotted that our new special edition magazine, Paul Hudson's Coding Academy, is now on sale - you can read more about it at www.linuxformat.com/codingacademy.

The problem is, it's selling a bit better than we had expected - we had 200 copies ready for sale online alongside the thousands destined for newsstands around the world, but all the online copies have already sold out. We're trying to get more for online sale by pulling copies back from newsstands, but it's not easy.

So, there are some things you need to know:

I've just spent the last few hours putting up a beginners Emacs tutorial on TuxRadar. Long-time LXF readers will recognise it from way back in the dark mists of LXF - from the early 60s to the mid-70s to be precise - and I figured it was time to set the content free for everyone to enjoy. It's hardly as if Emacs has changed all that much, after all, and even the most hardened of LXF subscribers are unlikely to dig that deep into our subscriber-only area to find the PDFs. If you find yourself bored over the holiday break and you're interested in trying something different, give it a read.

So, I'm done now. I'm free to enjoy my last Christmas without kids, which means tomorrow morning I'll sleep in, then hopefully have a very relaxed day indeed. We're all out of the office now until January 4th, so I wish you all a very merry Christmas and an awesome 2010!