Robb KnightModify

2026-02-11 17:05:58

I've spent an ungodly amount of time this week thinking about the Roman Empire how IRC could work for small communities - clients, servers, setup, maintenance. The Lounge is the best client in my opinion but it doesn't support all the new features of IRC like reactions and avatars. It's close to perfect though. I already posted about this but it's worth putting here too: two posts about setting up an IRC server like it's 2006; one from Melanie using Treafik and Coolify and one from Adam which is a pretty in-depth starter guide.

Jim has a really smart way of adding edit links to his site that open in native apps.

Mondegreen "is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning". The etymology is so good - "mondegreen" is a misheard word from a 1765 book. (via Friendship Material)

I learned about Aviation English which is "the de facto international language of civil aviation". Native English are worse at it in emergency situations because they tend to deviate from the standard. Fun stuff.

Cory was seeing the same as me in his analytics - lots of automated traffic from China. He came up with a blunt way to deal with it. Matthias is seeing similar issues. I don't knonw how the we get out of this shit.

I don't have a use for it right now, but Datasette looks very interesting.

This post by Dan Abramov is a great explainer of what can, in theory, be good about AT Protocol, the protocol that powers Bluesky.

Handy is a "free and open source app for speech to text". Nice.

I'm not in the market for a new Git system but if I was then Radicle would be on my list.

Purveyors of Packaging is a goldmine of old packaging design. [via SimpleBits]

Font Tools is a collection of, well, font tools. Handy.

This PS2 recompilation project has me very excited.

I learned about Poste Restante "a service designed for travellers who don’t have a permanent address". Send stuff to any post office and mark it as "poste restante" and the recipient can pick it up. Seems to be available all over the world.

This list of suffixes for street names has some great ones I've never heard of - "Twitten" anyone?

This post about search engines with their own indexes has a lot of great info in it.

2026-02-04 20:38:55

I've just merged in support for Forgejo to EchoFeed. Forgejo is a "self-hosted lightweight software forge" aka "We have GitHub at home"^[1]. Adam is running an instance as part of omg.lol.

It works the same at the GitHub integration with one exception: no OAuth. Forgejo can exist on any domain, like Mastodon, but it doesn't allow for creating applications (like EchoFeed) on-the-fly. Instead, it uses access tokens which isn't as convenient but I didn't want to create applications on every instance someone might want to use. Here's a screenshot of the required permissions but check the docs for the details on setting the right permissions.

Forgejo support is available to everyone right now.

2026-01-28 04:40:03

My last now update was November and I was hunting for a pink ink. I found it and I've been using it constantly since then.

I have a new sticker pack, The Internet Pack, which you can buy here.

I am deeply disliking my website design and I've tried a million different new things but I can't get anything new I like so I'm keeping it for now.

This did lead me to start making a sort of starter kit based on the snippet from my toolkit and uchū. I want to not spend time fiddling with fonts and colours and such for every little project.

I'm halfway through Everything but the Code and it's been really useful even if it's not exactly targeted for me. I'm currently dumping every idea for a project with every possible feature onto paper so I can whittle it down to the best ideas.

Also I'm angry, in no particular order, about nazis, AI, ICE, Tim Cook, age verification, probably other stuff. None of this is normal.

2026-01-22 19:45:42

Last week I bought two sets of Pilot Kire-na highlighters: the basic set and the pale set because I bloody love highlighters and they won the Japanese stationery awards last year so I figured they must be pretty good. I bought these from Art from the Heart who are, as best I can tell, the only UK stockist right now. They were £7.99 per pack, around the same as I've paid before for other similar pens.

These are double-ended with one end having a fine tip for writing, circling, etc and the other, the highlighter end, having a plastic guide around the chisel edge of the highlighter.

The basic set are bright colours and much brighter than anything Zebra make with Mildliners. For my taste though, the pale set are the nicest. Amazingly, Pilot has managed to find some shades Zebra haven't done in the 41 existing Mildliners. It's always fun to add some more colours to the collection. Here's the pale set next to the closest Mildliner equivalents.

The plastic guide definitely makes these fall firmly into the "use for proper highlighting" category for me rather than decorating and drawing but that's not a bad thing. There's a nice bit of flex in them as well which helps with getting them in just the right place. I found highlighting with the guide a lot easier to get decent coverage of my writing compared to winging it with other highlighters.

The fine tip on the other end of these pens is lovely; it's thin enough to write with but thick enough to make circling something notable obvious on the page. This is where the bright colours come out on top.

I don't know where these fit into my life because I don't do a lot of "proper" highlighting but the colours are so good that I'm going to find somewhere to use them.

2026-01-19 01:13:03

I've had this idea in my list for a long time - generate random can colours and name for Monster because why not. I finally got it done this week and it's live at monster.rknight.me.

I made an SVG of a standard Monster can, then the inputs set the colours on the SVG. You can share your creations using the share button, which gives you a URL that looks like this:

https://monster.rknight.me/?can=a81fd7&label=4e4824&name=virgin+moleskin

That is a link to a purple and brown monster named "Virgin Moleskin". So yeah, this is a thing that exists.

2026-01-14 21:14:01

When I bit the bullet early last year, my first stop was the Bullet Journal website. What I found there was everything one might need to get started: introduction videos, easy to follow tutorials, blog posts, community content, it was glorious. There was also the store, as there is today, and courses, but I'm not against people making money.

12 months later and it's as if a completely separate entity runs the website having only been given a vague description of what it was before. I would go to the site to find a guide on a specific concept I'd previously seen and those pages were either impossible to find just by navigating or when I did find them via Google search they would 404. Not found. Get fucked. Pay us for a course instead.

Ignoring the fact that the website is hilariously broken in Safari and has been for months, as far as I can tell what's happened is this: Bullet Journal spent a decade relying on the community to come up with ideas, resources, write blog posts for them, and generally make BuJo the success it is but now they've decided that it's not enough to sell notebooks and pens. Now they're in the courses business: there's three of the fuckers called "plans". One of them will help you "become the author your life" which I assume is supposed to be "author OF your life" but no one is checking anything.

To quote Ryder, the founder of Bullet Journal:

in September of 2014 I launched a Kickstarter to raise the funds to build a new website to curate the best of what the community was sharing

The website is nothing like this now. There is no links to community content or the intro guides I read last year. It's explicitly mentioned on this page that 2025 was the year for new "plans" to be launched but no mention of nuking everything else that quite frankly they didn't work on, everyone else in the community did. This free reference guide from Tiny Ray of Sunshine, as an example, was added to the official guides. Wow that's cool except where is that page now? Gone. No soup for you.

Oh and the the images that go along with these plans? AI generated slop because of course it is. Hundreds of dollars of courses but they can't pay an artist to draw a bloke in a hamster wheel, that would be impossible. Gotta fire up the slop machine for that. If they're using slop machines for illustrations there's no way I can trust that the courses are any better. The "author your life" plan is $1000 in case you were wondering.

I'm not angry about them adding "plans", courses, whatever else they want. Businesses gunna business. It's just yet another thing that was a nice thing that now isn't any more. It's just another system that exists only to either sell the system, learn about that system, or learning how to teach that system to other people at costs that are clearly designed to get employers to pay for them. A person who's curious about Bullet Journaling will hit the site, see it's not for them, and leave.

What I find most frustrating about this is that it has become a useful tool for me (I'm on my third notebook) but I can't reasonably send anyone to the site to learn about it any more. At this point, if you do want to find out more about bullet journalling, or journalling in general, you'd be much better served by Matt Ragland or Jashii Corrin. I could recommend the book but if they can't be bothered to pay people for their art, then you shouldn't give them money either.