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The vMac project seems to have stalled, at least as far as Mac support goes, but I just found a side project called Mini vMac.

I got me a copy of System 2 and Mac Draw, a sneaky Mac system ROM and bingo! My 2005 PowerBook is now a 1986 MacPlus!

I do love the look of this – the tiny screen real-estate of the MacPlus compared to my 15 inch PowerBook. I love the minimalist beauty of the original MacOS, especially Susan Kare’s genius icons and the Chicago system font.

And don’t get me started on MacPaint. A work of art. Utterly simple, clear, beautiful software that was the template for all image editors that followed, including Photoshop.

As a youth I think it’s fair to say I didn’t get out much. I used to spend Sunday mornings listening to short wave radio, mainly for short-wave pirates and English-language programmes from stations like Radio Netherlands.

But occasionally I’d hear something stranger. Weird echoing chimes or music followed by numbers read out in a mechanical voice. Some of them were quite chilling – cold female voices reciting numbers in German or English.

I now know that these were ‘numbers stations’ – almost certainly these are coded transmissions from various secret services to their agents.

Many years later I was working as London producer for NPR, and we had a man called Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner) in for an interview – he made music incorporating recordings of numbers stations. Lots of other people have done the same, such as Stereolab, Wilco, Boards of Canada and Pere Ubu.

I’d assumed that numbers stations had died out at the end of the Cold War, but a fair bit of Googling suggests they’re still with us. It might seem odd, quaint even, in the era of the internet, SMS and PGP, to still be using numbers read out over short wave. But it makes a lot of sense – there’s no route of IP numbers to trace, no records on hard drives. All you need is an innocuous radio set (and a rather less innocuous one-time pad or code-book!).

There are some fine audio clips on the web – for example at http://home.freeuk.com/spook007/ – I remember hearing the Swedish Rhapsody’s child-like voice, and it scared the willies out of me too.

A couple of the web sites I found said that at almost any time of the day or night there are numbers stations on the air. So I dusted off my short-wave radio, and scanned the dial. Maybe I’d find the Lincolnshire Poacher (MI6, supposedly active, and hey, kinda catchy!). Maybe the strange polyphonic beauty of XPH?

No. Nothing. Not even armed with a ‘schedule’ for the Lincolnshire Poacher.

I think I might possibly have heard a very brief snatch of a station believed to be Algerian called ‘Magnetic Fields’ – but then again, it might just have been a radio station playing a bit of ‘Magnetic Fields’by Jean Michelle Jarre.

Almost exactly five years ago I wrote a rather angrier-titled piece about fuel protestors blockading refineries and depots. It’s about to happen again and it still angers me, though. I’m just waiting in the next few days to hear protestors telling the media that they’re not hitting essential services, but I still don’t understand how hospital workers, ambulance crews and paramedics are supposed to be able to get fuel for their own cars. I don’t know how people who have to use their cars to get their children to childcare or school are supposed to manage.

I’m not really interested in football at all, but I was trying to design a football-style shirt. For some strange reason I found it incredibly hard to find photos of the backs of Premier League shirts, which I wanted to look at to try to copy the font. I tried Google, Google images, picking random clubs’ web sites – no luck.

But I did find an entire web site – in the Netherlands – devoted to the typography of football shirt numbers. Quite amazing. Well, if you’re a sad type-spotter like me, it is.

And the answer, in case you’re wondering, is that the English Premier Legaue use Optima Black squashed to about 70% normal width. And the Dutch footy-loving type-spotter is quite right – it looks awful.

There’s something strangely satisfying about being able to switch off the downstairs hall light and switch on the landing light by sweeping my hand across two switches on the same lightswitch that are both in the same position.

Anyway, I just got back from three weeks in Cornwall. Bliss. In the chalet there was a copy of Coast magazine which was filled with seaside houses to die for, and one had an article on Howies, who have now moved from London to Cardigan Bay. They can even canoe to and from work. So not only do they make deeply cool clothing, they now have a deeply cool lifestyle I think.

I first discovered Howies in the book that got me bitten by the t-shirt-designing bug in the first place – ’100% Cotton’ by Helen Walters and Tim Fletcher (although as Howies point out, non-organic cotton is actually not 100% cotton, but filled with chemicals).

I’d often wondered whether there was a UK version of CafePress so I could get some t-shirts on sale without the start-up costs of screening and printing and buying inventory – and there is a European site called SpreadShirt that offers sterling pricing and better printing methods.

Inspired by Howies, and by the Cornish sun, sea and surf, in an evening I set up my own online t-shirt shop – though I haven’t seen the merchandise for myself yet!

Have a browse around though, and check out the very cool stuff from Nerdiac.

I don’t have organic cotton – yet – but as they say at Howies:

Right now
Make a list.
Don’t sit.
Don’t moan.
Don’t talk.
Do stuff.
Change things.