2025-01-15 22:18:04
I was tagged by Kyle and B to do this so here it is.
Why Did You Start Blogging In The First Place?
Initially I thought I'd be some hot take blogger getting posts retweeted by loads of people and be popular or something. We all wanted to be Gruber back then.
More recently I'm blogging for me. It's recipes, technical posts, things I've solved, ideas I've had. Basically instructions for anything I, or someone else, might want to do.
What Platform Are You Using The Manage Your Blog, And Why Do You Use It?
My site is built with Eleventy. In theory, that means it's just a bunch of markdown files. In practice, it's markdown files, JSON files, javascript files, plus my custom CMS. I use it because it gives me the flexibility to make my site do exactly what I want.
Have You Blogged On Other Platforms Before?
I started on hosted Wordpress many years ago, then self-hosted Wordpress, then Jekyll, then Hugo, then Hexo, and now Eleventy.
How Do You Write Your Posts?
Usually I write a draft in Obsidian then copy it over into VSCode and publish. For shorter posts, or my notes, I write those directly into the CMS which pushes them to the GitHub repository. I wrote more in depth about this here.
When Do You Feel Most Inspired To Write?
There are two main times I feel inspired:
Do You Normally Publish Immediately After Writing, Or Do You Let It Simmer?
I rarely let them simmer, I just send them out into the world so the typos can reveal themselves.
What’s Your Favorite Post On Your Blog?
The sensible answer is 7622 - why I spell my name with two Bs but this sleep-deprived ramble about the fruits of Hey Bear is definitely up there.
Any Future Plans For the Blog?
I have a list longer than you can imagine but next up is some more work on transient slash pages.
Who Will Participate Next?
2025-01-15 07:00:00
This is the first in a new series of posts to populate my /now page with a blog post. A moment in time. What I'm doing now. A record of what I was doing.
Thanks to Nic this was really easy to do because I could copy what he does:
I'm on paternity leave for another week or so with Baby Knight 2. Everything is twice as hard with a toddler around.
I'm dipping my toe into bullet journaling and it's going...fine? It's probably a little bit early to tell. What I do know is that my recomendations on YouTube are ruined and I bought new pens.
My wife and I are watching the last two seasons of Young Sheldon. After that, she's agreed to watch The Last of Us with me. I've been dying to rewatch it.
I haven't got a yearly theme but if I did have one it would be something like "The Year of Being Whelmed"[1]. I want to stop be overwhelmed by the millions of choices of movies/tv shows/books/games/whatever and make a concious effort to choose a thing. I don't have time to do everything, especially with two kids now. If I'm not sure of something, dump it, it doesn't need to be on the list.
You know what, fuck it, I do have a yearly theme. It's that.
You can do that in Europe ⤾
2025-01-14 06:11:53
A couple of weeks ago Chris said this about slash pages:
I think it makes more sense to me to write about what I carry around right now and if I did it again later, it doesn’t have to replace what I’ve written before
Slash Pages is a site I maintain that is a "guide to common pages you can add to your website". So /uses, /now, and so on. Chris' quote above was about /edc but it applies to all of them. It was also discussed on episode 647 of ShopTalk.
My post on automating my /now page was very popular and I am proud of what I managed to do but I've been thinking for a while it's very impersonal. It's data. It's not a page written by me in any meaningful way.
Leon had some similar thoughts on this with an idea for each blog post being a section of a page but rendered as one. The end goal for him, and me, is that the new additions get syndicated via RSS, POSSE, and so forth. I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I'm doing now.
For a /now page, this makes a lot of sense - on a regular schedule I can add a new post about what I'm up to and update things as required but when thinking about my /uses page, what does an update to that look like? Assuming a short /uses page like this:
- MacBook Pro
- AirPods Max
- iPhone 14 ProThe first blog post is easy, it would include all of that but if I change my phone to a 16 Pro do I duplicate the whole thing but update just that one line? If I just post a diff of what's changed then there isn't a single place to see everything I've used.
I'm going to start with my /now page while I mull over how to handle some others.
2025-01-10 06:55:00
I’ve been todo hoarding. I have Reminders, Obsidian, and Godspeed all with different types of todos in them. Plus GitHub issues, Mastodon mentions, and Raindrop. I’m not getting to any of them. I’m missing things I should be doing. I’m forgetting important things. Also at least once a week I want to throw my computer into the sea because something that should work just doesn’t. I need to spend less wasted time on computers.
I’ve tried using notebooks before to keep track of things but without a system to organise them they just become random scribblings the likes of which wouldn’t be out of place in the zodiac killer’s apartment.
So I’m gunna try bullet journaling. You don’t need to send help (except maybe for my YouTube recommendations). But if I become the kind of person who doesn’t shut the fuck up about it I’m appointing Keenan to metaphorically smack me in my stupid note-taking face.
2024-12-31 19:35:43
I had second child. No time for anything else. Thank you for reading.
In September during some rather heavy rain we forgot to bring our awning in and it snapped off it's brackets. That was a fun adventure trying to remove that without smashing the patio doors. My dad has offered to buy us a new one which I'll need to fit in the new year.
We moved my office into the larger spare room and moved Baby Knight into my old office so Baby Knight two can be next to our bedroom. This meant I had a bit more space for shelves so I added a bunch more because I could.
I passed my driving test on the 20th of August (after a test two weeks earlier was cancelled with a couple of hours notice). I had 20 lessons over the course of two months, got a car the day after my test, but that didn’t last long, and now I’m driving my wife’s old car. It's possible my dream car from Hyundai might be a bit unattainable but fucking hell, just look at it.
This post is my 130th blog post this year - more than double what I did last year. I've made an effort this year to move more towards POSSE which means things that might have been a handful of toots before are now blog posts. I also have my notes which are a replacement for directly tooting on the 'don.
I also wrote a post every day in May for WeblogPoMo which I'm proud of. Not sure I can do that again though - it was a good excuse to clear out some drafts.
The most popular[1] posts this year were:
In June I noticed I had been mentioned in Perplexity's Wikipedia section titled "Use of content from media outlets" because of this post and the subsequent post on Wired. This has since expanded to become a proper "Controversies" section which I love and as Jason so aptly put:
live every day like you might end up in some wretched company’s controversies section
Here it is as of today:
The only new movie I watched and liked this year was Deadpool and Wolverine. Inside Out 2 lost whatever was good about the first one.
Fallout was a surprise; maybe we're in an era of actually good games-to-tv-and-movies. Reacher season two was excellent, I'm hoping season three keeps it up.
The last ever episode of The Grand Tour hit me harder than I thought it would. I've been watching Top Gear, and subsequently Grand Tour, since it started in 2002 which according to maths is 22 years. This led me down a rabbit hole of watching every special of both shows across a couple of weeks and every single one of them is such a joy. I am truly sad that they're not going to make any more.
The final episode of Gavin and Stacey was perfect.
Is is 2004 or 2024 because Green Day, Alkaline Trio, Sum 41, Eminem, The Offspring, Less Than Jake, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre, and Linkin Park all had new albums out this year.
Linkin Park's is easily my favourite one, Emily Armstrong was a fantastic choice.
I found a couple of new artists this year. The first one was Millie Manders via Lewis which I enjoyed so much I bought a hat from their store. The second was Ryan Oakes and his album The Bootstrap Paradox. I found him from, I think, a video that used this track of his but I can't be 100% sure. The album is wall-to-wall bangers. I love it.
A Whole New Sound has some good tracks but overall I was a bit disappointed with this.
My Musicthreads of tracks and albums for this year:
Not much time for games, as usual, but I finished Spider-Man 2 at the start of the year and I'm pretty deep into Astro Bot at the moment. I also briefly enjoyed Balatro before retiring from it forever.
lol okay nerd[2].
I added the three new MacStories shows to my subscriptions - Magic Rays of Light, NPC, and Comfort Zone even if I don't have the time to listen to every episode.
I was also a guest on two podcasts this year:
Despite attending a freelancers meetup every month for a decade, I've never done any freelance work until this year.
In January I started working for MacStories doing work to bring new features and new podcasts to the site. One of those new shows was my own, Ruminate. Along with Magic Rays of Light, NPC, and Comfort Zone we have quite a little gang of pods over there now.
Even though I'm a sole trader, I still had to get a business domain because I love a new domain name so I got knightshift.dev. I only recently cleaned it up to highlight my freelance things but it's there.
In last year's post I said "I have plans to make Echo a more user-friendly project" and in April I launched EchoFeed. The first couple of months were interesting. I fucked up a migration to a new feed-fetching system and sent 500 posts in the space of an hour or so, then I kept having issues of the server crapping out at random. But that's all sorted now.
Overall it's been successful and people seem to like it, especially Amplify which boosts posts sent with EchoFeed. There's been a bunch of changes and new features added and I'm working on some fun stuff for it.
A lot less projects shipped this year mostly because of freelancing and focusing on EchoFeed but the ones I did ship I'm pretty happy with.
Humonize! came about because of humonising on Connected and they were gunna stop because someone hated it so I made this. I honestly can't keep track of the lore. Also it has tiny head mode.
Perfect Albums is a similar project to App Defaults showcasing people's perfect albums based on the question asked on episode 110 of Hemispheric Views. Speaking of App Defaults, it's come around again with people posting their 2024 edition so it's gone well over 400 blog posts now.
The hastily put together collab between myself, Sara, and Keenan: Everyone's Free (to Make Websites).
Slash Pages is the only project I bought a domain for, it just felt like it needed one. It started off with a handful and now it has over 30 different slash pages.
Lens is a project I've been meaning to do for a long time. It checks meta tags, icons, and RSS auto-discovery - basically a check for right before I launch a site. Also handy for checking preview images.
EmojiStorm came to me while I was messing around with snow-fall. It's a bit chaotic.
During the recording of my appearance on Conduit, Jay joked that I should make a site to show the last time I'd watched Mean Girls. So I did just that.
September is, as always, childhood cancer awareness month so me and Adam were fundraising again. We blew past last year's amount and raised over twenty thousand dollars which is incredible. We added a St Jude theme to omg.lol which you can see on our St Jude account here and of course we had some wonderful stickers again.
While I was in London for Relay 10 I got the chance to meet Jill and others from St Jude at a lunch they had put on which was a lovely thing to be invited to.
I won a Mark One pen for donating to Engima stationery's campaign which is far too fancy a pen for me but I love it.
Not sure what we're going to do next year to be honest but we might as well start thinking about it, it's basically September.
Health++, Cool--.2024-12-31 05:37:53
Since I last shared my homescreen at the start of the year, iOS18 added dark mode icons which I immediately switched on. I still have a couple of apps that haven't updated but I need them on my home screen so I just live with it.
Other changes:
