I recently recieved my summer 2009 copy of the Howies catalogue, which as ever, is a lot more than the usual dull volume of product shots and reasons to buy.

More like a seasonal magazine, there's plenty of articles to read inside it. Maybe its a plan to stop us throwing our catalogues away or not, I don't know, but its a highly entertaining read. Maybe a cunning sales technique, or purely to avoid unnecessary waste, I don't know, it works for me.

There's a piece in there by the CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams, about his 10 rules for web start-ups which definitely appears to be simple yet effective. Certainly one reason why I'll be keeping this on the shelf for a while before chucking it in the recycling bin.

"Repair things, darn it", by Ben Terrett, is another short piece on the virtues of repairing things rather than replacing. With the portal of the Internet wide open for a lot of us, maybe we'll soon be making the most of researching into "Toy Hacking" online, finding out if our faulty cameras are a well known problem fixable by the manufacturer, or checking out Fixya to solve our woes of repairing our belongings, rather than trekking down the shops again.

Another thing I noticed while reading was an advert for the site shown above, Teepay. The idea here is to upload your own T-shirt designs, and if you get 50 orders within a fortnight, it gets printed and you get royalties for each one sold!

So if you've got a flair for that kind of thing, sign up and get scribbling! I've signed up myself, and will be submitting at least a couple of designs when time allows.

So you could have the combo of Howies ethics and your own T-shirt on at least 50 peoples frontages! Give it a try, I dares ya.