Our favourite support bod Paul Vigay (with or without the "The" in his name) is not only a RISC OS nut; not just a crop circle expert; no, he's also a bit keen on the old privacy stuff. For instance, did you know his back bedroom has tin foil under the wallpaper to block people trying to snoop on him? Anyway, to the point: mosey on over to his software section and you'll find a port of codegroup, a program by John Walker for encoding messages as five letter blocks, just like real spies! (well, circa 1940's anyway).

Just as having a gentle dig at Paul is traditional, so is an ArtWorks item in quickies posts. So poking around Paul's riscos.org site I noticed that ArtWorks has been updated to take advantage of the Viewfinder card's graphics capabilities - well, using a Viewfinder doesn't slow ArtWorks rendering any more, maybe future upgrades will go even further...? Anyway, kudos to Martin yet again! And damn my mail server for failing me, otherwise I'd have known sooner :(

The Acorn Cybervillage has started selling ACV merchandise to help put bread on the Halliday table. I looked into this a while back and taking the CafePress route didn't seem very good back then, but Stuart's shop seems pretty well stocked with various shirt, cap, mug and mousemat options. So go support the Cybervillage!

And finally, Acorn Publisher has been acquired by John Cartmell of Fleur Designs. Publisher has been widely seen as the best presented RISC OS mag and has been going for 8 years now, so good luck to them. Hopefully this change won't be as regular as the editorial changes at a certain other publication...