2026-07-17 02:41:50
I backed this pen Kickstarter despite breaking my rule of no hardware Kickstarters - the company, Antou, seem to know what they're doing but we'll see. They have a lot of nice stuff on their site including this pen rest. The pen should be arriving in August some time.
Pica is a new font management app that looks great and it's free. I need to get a handle on all the fonts I have.
I'm not a font designer but if I was I might need to make proofs and Hellbox is the one.
Two fascinating fonts I came across: Datatype is a "variable font that turns text into charts" and then this person built a chess rendering engine into a font which is wild.
Matt did a handwriting font, something I've done a couple of times to varying levels of success.
The last font and writing link is this post about backtrack-free cursive. I don't write cursive (or in lowercase for that matter) but this is really interesting.
What intrigued me about files.md is that it uses an API I wasn't aware of to access local folders and files. I'm not dropping Obsidian any time soon but this is an API I want to try out more.
Friend of the blog made equinox to test light and dark mode at the same time which is handy.
I'd come across but not heard of the XY problem before: "asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem". Nice to have a name for this scenario.
P4LETTE is another colour palette generator. Can't have too many.
Daily games is a thing now and I've been enjoying 4x3. I also found Gerrymandle which is interesting but doesn't spark joy for me.
Signalbox, a live train map, does spark joy though.
Finally this is a fun article about using public domain image archive for art ideas.
2026-07-02 20:00:46
June-Boree is a reimagining of Arcadia June. June-Boree is "a challenge board spanning the entire month consisting of 30 unique challenges". I wanted to make a poster for June-Boree and it was a good excuse to use some excellent fonts like Parkly.
View the full poster here.
Day 1: Create your thread in the forum to track your progress! Your Name - 30 Challenges
Easy one. You can see my thread on the forum here along with comments and such which I won't be including here.
Day 2: Create a hyper-specific meme about a running joke from the podcast.
I had so many ideas for this - trivia corner, counter chat, thumbs up vs media corner, something Thomas-related, notes apps, and the classic depreciation spreadsheet. My main submission was this Thanos one:
And the others:
Day 03: Listen to an entire music album from start to finish without looking at a screen or skipping a track. Post the album length and link to the album.
How dare Jason try to get me to sit quietly and enjoy something. I sat down and listened to one of my favourites: Sugarcult - Palm Trees and Powerlines. 12 songs, 40 minutes.
Day 04: Record a 30-second audio clip of the ambient sound outside your house (birds, traffic, etc.) and post it without context.
This was recorded (as a video) by one of the Knightlings, on my phone, while I was dozing on the sofa so I converted it to audio (I also had to bleep out one of them saying the other's name because op sec).
Day 05: Take a screenshot of your phone battery hitting exactly 1%.
This one was just cruel, but I did it.
Day 06: Take a photo of a classic regional snack or beverage unique to your part of the world.
Burger from Kyes innit.
Day 07: Take an artistic photo of something interesting on your daily walk or drive.
This is the Havant United Reform Church near the train station.
Day 08: Write down a thought, a quote, or a goal for today on an actual piece of paper with a physical pen, and post a photo
I was on the train and it was not easy to write this.
Day 09: Find a real-world sign, menu, or package with terrible font spacing and shame it with a photo.
I didn’t get this one for a few days. I drove to a couple of places I knew of with terrible kerning on some banners but they had both been removed so I assumed I wouldn’t get this challenge. Then my car presented me with this monstrosity.
Day 10: Take a "before" and "after" photo of your desk setup after a deep declutter.
This the best I'm ever going to declutter, this is my emotional support clutter.
Before:
After:
Day 11: - Make a digital "postcard" of your town using only emoji and text.
"Time for some ASCII art" - Me on day 11.
Raw:
..____________________________________________..
|| ~~~ 🛥️ PORTSMOUTH ☀️ ~~~ ||
|| | ______ ||
|| |.^ | | ||
|| || ^ | ^^^^ | ||
|| || ^ | | | [][] | ||
|| || ^ )_) )) | ---- | ||
|| .|| ^ )__) )_) | [][] | ||
|| .; ||^ )___))___) |______| ||
|| ..;; || ___|____|___ / ----- / ||
||————————————^^^^\__________/^^^~~^^~~^^^^^^^||
..____________________________________________..Day 12: Walk 10,000+ steps. Post a photo showing date and step count.
I usually hit 10k steps but I figured I'd post one that was the highest for the week which was just over 18k steps when I was in London.
Day 13: Do a 15-second voice memo pronouncing a difficult local place name from your area.
"Cosham and Bosham are pronounced the same" one might think.
Day 14: Take a photo of a local transit pass, train ticket, or a unique road sign from your neighborhood
Day 15: Score 50+ in Bounce in Arcadia
I prefer the games on Arcadia where I can take my time so I didn't think I'd get this but I managed to get exactly 50 and that's enough for me. Eric got 702 which is ridiculous.
Day 16: Put a sticker on something that is decidedly not a piece of tech!
I'd done this a few days prior and it fits so perfectly. My Midori cutter with a Ruminate King sticker on it.
Day 17: Take a day off, you’ve earned it! (OR make more memes)
You don't have to tell me twice. For reference, Eric is stupidly good at Arcadia, having won the previous five years of Arcadia June.
Day 18: Post a photo at exactly 12:00 PM local time of the sky/view outside your window.
Day 19: Complete 100 reps of a body weight exercise (push-ups, squats, or jumping jacks) throughout a single day. Keep track on a tally sheet and post a photo
Here’s a tally of every time I thought about the day 19 challenge and didn’t do it because lazy.
Day 20: Score 25,000+ in CandyBall
Not a chance. Eric did it though
Day 21: Change the wallpaper on your phone or desktop to something completely new and show it off.
Day 22: Buy a coffee/tea/beverage, music, or book from a local independent shop and share the haul.
These are the best pork scratchings I’ve ever had in my life.
Day 23: Score 10,000+ in The Claw.
I really did try on this one but I couldn't even get close.
Day 24: Show the most ridiculous chain of tech adapters or dongles you can assemble to connect two incompatible devices
Not quite incompatible but I've been forgetting for years to take in a C to C cable to my office, so instead I use this USB C hub that has four USB A ports. Then I use a USB A to C cable to charge my mouse.
Day 25: Look behind your computer monitor or TV and take a photo of the hidden, chaotic cable nest you pretend doesn't exist.
Behold, the cables behind my desk.
Day 26: Consume a piece of media (a podcast episode, article, or YouTube video) produced in the opposite hemisphere from where you live. Share a link!
I did two:
Day 27: Record the sound of a satisfying real-world click
This is the click of the Bluetooth knob on my 8BitDo keyboard
Day 28: Draw a terrible, MS Paint style portrait of Andrew, Martin, or Jason. Or all three!
Day 29: Write a traditional 5-7-5 syllable haiku about the podcast or your favorite co-host.
I did a Haiku:
Whimsical podcast
Martin, Jason, Andrew news
Hemispheric Views
I also did a limerick because that's my preferred poetry format:
There once was a podcast with Andrew,
Jason, and Martin, just talking,
They all jumped on planes,
To meet for a day,
It was significantly faster than walking
Day 30: Race to the finish! Score 50,000+ points in FastRun!
The final day, the final Arcadia challenge. I got 39,939 after a handful of attempts. 50k wasn't going to happen.
Like WeblogPomo and Inktober, I enjoy the structure of having a single, small thing to do every day but I also need the accountability otherwise I won't do it. Jason did a great job of picking a selection of challenges that every can do and it made the month interesting to go into the forum and see what people had posted every day.
2026-06-22 17:55:58
Avengers
The movies, overrated with the exception of Infinity War/Endgame which was some of the best movie experiences I've ever had.
The comics, underrated. The stories from the comics is where it's at but it's not a medium that everyone can enjoy. There are so many great Avengers and Avengers-adjacent stories available if you're willing to give it a try. My recommendation is Kelly Thompson's West Coast Avengers run.
Weeknotes
Underrated. I love reading people's weeknotes and I've found it a useful tool to get out random thoughts I've had as well as share fun things I've seen online that week. The pressure to do them every week though, massively overrated. You don't need to do that to yourself, post when you want.
Stickers
Underrated. What a fun item stickers are but you've got to use them. Stick them on anything. Maybe Maique will spot one you stuck somewhere. I love stickers.
BuJo
This is a tough one. Bullet Journal the brand? Overrated. Intentionally or not, one look at the website shows that it exists now to sell courses, books, and other related services.
Bullet Journal the system on the other hand has a lot of good ideas. I don't do all of them, nor do I follow it strictly but the things I did take from the (the bullet system itself, migrating tasks, monthly spreads) have been massively helpful. Slightly underrated if only because the website no longer reflects the system and rather serves as the business side.
Tacos
Underrated. I'm in the UK where we have a troubling lack of mexican-inspired food available but whats not to love? Meat, sauce, taco shell, lettuce, it's got it all.
What are the two best books you couldn't live without and that you recommend?
How to Lie with Statistics. I read this when I was 17 or so and it blew my mind the way you can present data in different ways to elicit different reactions or prove your point. Fair warning this was written in 1954 so some of the language would not be appropriate in 2025, but the ideas are solid.
So You've Been Publicly Shamed. This one serves have a warning both about what one might post online, as well as how wild online mobs can get.
2026-06-22 17:48:50
Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
I'm a developer and dad to two girls living in Portsmouth on the south coast of the UK. By day I work for a SaaS company and in my own time I work on my many side projects. In a previous life I worked at a certain clown's restaurant which is where I met my wife some 15 years ago.
Although developer is what I get paid to do I'm trying to move towards more making; websites, stickers, shirts, art, whatever. I have no idea what that looks like yet or how it's going to pay my bills. I have a whole host of side projects I've worked on over the years; they're not all winners but they all serve, or served, a purpose. If I get lucky, they resonate with other people which is always nice.
What's the story behind your blog?
I've had a lot of blogs over the years, most of which would get a handful of posts before being abandoned. There was a version that ran on Tumblr which I did do for at least a year or two — any interesting posts from that have been saved. The current iteration is by far the longest serving and will be the final version. There's no chance of me wiping it all and starting again.
This current version is part of my main website which is where I put everything. My toots on Mastodon start life as a note post, I post interesting links I find, and I log all the media I watch/play/whatever (I don't want to say consume, that's gross) in Almanac, which itself is on the third or fourth iteration.
As I said above, I had done a few posts on the Tumblr-powered blog but if I look at my stats for posts, it was around 2022 when Twitter started to fall apart that I started to blog more. I was moving away from posting things directly onto social media sites and getting it onto my own site.
I started writing more posts that just had a short idea or helpful tip because I realised not every post has to be some incredible think piece. My analytics show that these posts also tend to be the most popular which probably says more about the state of large, ad-riddled websites than it does about my writing. For example this post about disconnecting Facebook from Spotify is consistently in the top five posts on my site but you're never going to read that post unless you specifically need it. It's not a "good" post, it just exists.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
To call what I have a process would be a very liberal use of the word "process". If I have nothing to write about I just won't write anything, I have no desire to keep to a schedule and write just for the sake of it. Usually, I'll get prompted by something someone asks like "How did you do X on your website?" or I feel like I have something to say that would be interesting other people.
I write my posts in Obsidian, then when they're ready to go I'll add them to my site. If I'm on my proper computer laptop I use my CLI tool to add a new post. If I'm on mobile, I use the very haphazard CMS I built.
I'll proof read most things myself before posting and I rarely ask for anyone else's input but if I do want a second opinion it's going to be previous P&B interviewee, Keenan. Usually I'm able to get out what I want to say fairly succinctly without too much editing.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?
A proper keyboard and ideally a desk to sit at is what I prefer when I'm writing (or coding) but I can live with just the keyboard. My desk setup makes some people's skin crawl because there's so much going on but I like having all the trinkets and knick knacks around me.
I deeply dislike using my phone for most things outside of scrolling lists, like social media so I rarely write long posts on it. The small form factor just doesn't work for me at all but I also kind of need it to exist in the world.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?
All my domains are registered with Porkbun and I manage the DNS with DNSControl - my main domain, rknight.me, has nearly 50 records for subdomains so managing those without DNSControl would not be a fun activity. Speaking of DNS I use Bunny for my DNS management and also use their CDN for images and other files I need to host.
The website itself is, as are many of my side projects, built with Eleventy. Eleventy gives me the flexibility to do some interesting things with the posts and other content on my site which would be much harder with some other systems.
The site gets built on Forge to a Hetzner server whenever I push an update to GitHub either via command line, or through the aforementioned CMS, and is also triggered at various points in the day to pull in my Mastodon posts.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
Assuming I actually had to the time to do it, I think I would start with the CMS first, before building anything of the actual site. It is a pain to update things when I'm not at my laptop but jamming features into my CMS is equally frustrating.
If I wanted something off the shelf and easier to maintain I suspect I would choose Ghost or Pika.
Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?
Many of these costs are part of my freelancing so are bundled with other sites I run and somewhat hidden but I'll do my best to outline what I do use.
I have a single server on Hetzner that serves my main site as well as another 30 or so side projects so the cost is negligible per-site but it costs about $5 a month. Forge costs $12 a month to deploy my site along with other sites. The domain is $20 a year I think but that's it.
I have a One a Month Club here and I have a handful of people supporting that way. I also use affiliate links for services I use and like which occasionally pays me a little bit.
I think monetising blogs is fine, if it's done in a tasteful way. Dumping Google ads all over your site is terrible for everyone but hand-picked sponsors or referrals is a good way to find new services. Just keep it classy.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
I want to read sites that are about the person writing them. Photos of things people have done, blog posts about notebooks, wallpaper, food, everything. Things people enjoy.
This is the second time I'm going to mention Keenan here because they write so wonderfully. They also have a podcast with Halsted called Friendship Material which is all kinds of lovely and joyful and everyone should listen.
Alex writes some really interesting computing-related posts, like this one about using static websites as tiny archives.
Annie is so smart and honest in her writing it brings me joy every time I see a new post from her. This post is a masterpiece.
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
I'd be a terrible business boy if I didn't at least mention EchoFeed, an RSS cross posting service I run.
I also have a podcast that used to be about tech but is now about snacks.
2026-06-05 02:43:01
I got my hands on the Fragrance Mildliner pack for what I thought was a bargain price of £5. If I'm honest that might be about £5 too much but here we go anyway. I sniffed these pens hard.
Soda Blue / Cotton is the worst one by a long shot. It smells like the strongest washing powder you've ever smelt in your life. What I imagine a laundromat smells like.
Olive / Green has a smell but it's very mild, kinda like wet grass I suppose. Almost imperceptible though.
Sherbet Yellow / Citrus is the only good one. Smells like lemons.
Cool Gray / White Bloom isn't good but it is accurate. Generic flower smell.
Beige / Wood smells like mid-range car air freshener and Dusty Pink / Flower Bouquet smells like a cheap car air freshener.
There's no world in which I ever want my highlighters to have a smell, and I'm not a teenager any more so I'm not going to try and taste them to be crowned class clown but I'll use these anyway because the colours are still good.
2026-05-28 03:36:55
At the start of the month Cult Pens, for their anniversary, put up a birthday mystery box for £100. No other information, just choose a nib size and they'll send out a mystery box:
We can't tell you what's inside, because it's a mystery, but we can tell you the contents are worth way more than the price, and have an RRP of at least double.
"One part of my brain knows mystery boxes are a good way for a company to move stuff that isn't selling, the other half wants to buy it anyway" was what I wrote in the Pen Addict Slack. I considered buying it at lunchtime that day but it sold out before I could decide. Then two weeks later it was a suggestion below something else I was browsing on their website, with a fine nib. I usually go for extra fine but fine is also...fine so I ordered it.
It arrived and I was very pleased to get an MP1 as the main item along with some copic paint markers which I would never usually buy (these are £27 for 6?! I'm not good enough at art for that). The full list of items:
I wasn't able to find the purple pen sleeve, the midori stickers, or the Faber-Castell neon pens on the Cult Pens website but by my count, the RRP of all this lot is somewhere around £150.
I didn't realise the Copics were paint ones until I'd already smooshed it on the page like the caveman that I am so I did an art. I call it "Don't Go in the Ocean". These are fun to use and I'm definitely going to use these during this year's Inktober.
The farm eraser set is cute as fuck but I cannot use it. Look at their faces.
I didn't need another metal pencil but the graphgear is bloody lovely. The lil "clunk" when it sucks up the nib bit is delightful.
A Monteverde MP1 has been on my wishlist for quite a while but there's always been something else to buy so it was nice to have it decided for me. Even without looking, I know that a pen called "Strawberry Dreams" would the one I would get anyway. The ink looks much more purple when it's in the bottle but on paper (Tomoe River in this case) it's a stunning bright pink, I love it. The pen itself it nice to write with although my brain keeps thinking I'm picking up a TWSBI Eco and it takes a moment to adjust to the differences in feel.
I think the one dud in this box is the Faber Castell hexo has a nice twist mechanism but the pen itself is ugly and it feels cheap to hold. Not a pen for me.
Overall I'm very happy with what I got in the box. Given what Cult Pens sell I could make an educated guess about which fountain pen I was going to get from a handful so it wasn't that much of a risk. I'm not going to rush and do this every time they do one but I'll definitely consider it in the future.
