2025-12-30 04:05:46
I really need a better structure for these. I find it so hard every year to remember what to include and in which section. Herein I shall attempt to define some kind of structure.
I mostly just kept it together with the lack of sleep from having two children who refuse to sleep much, or at the same time. I did install a new electric awning at the back of the house so that was something. Not much else to report in this area.
This section has the "online" suffix because I also have the analog part of writing to talk about but they are very different things.
This is post 73 of the year; less than last year but a bit over 2023. My most popular new posts this year were Biting the Bullet which I assume is because of how good the title is, How Many Mildliner Colours Are There? (a lot of traffic from search engines coming into this one), and I Am Obsessed With this Tomb Raider Pen which of course I eventually bought. I'm very happy that this post about the 8BitDo keyboard is my most popular post in general now, no longer will I be plagued by this stupid post.
I started doing weeknotes numbered by the week of my life it is because I can't commit to weekly and I'm happy with how they've come out. They're a useful outlet to post about interesting things I find, like an internet Womble.
I started bullet journalling[1] in January which led me to pens, pencils, paper, notebooks, inks, and everything in between. The actual journalling has been really useful in keeping track of things I need to do, ideas I have, things I might want to do. As of this month, I've finished two notebooks and I'll be starting a new one in January.
I was on The Pen Addict in March and again in October and I hope Brad will invite back again at some point because it was a lot of fun. I said it in another post but the pen community are all bloody lovely and welcoming.
I want to try and improve my lowercase handwriting because right now I exclusively write in capitals.
As a direct result of journalling I ended up drawing for St Jude, participating in Inktober, and inventing Jeff, a loveable dinosaur. The sticker fun pack includes a Jeff sticker just fyi.
Because I only got started this year, I picked up a lot of pens and other related things. I reviewed some pens, a pen case, and even some sticky tabs but the big one was my Esterbrook Funky Town and the hottest pink ink I could find. I love this pen so much.
I have my eye on a few other fountain pens for next year including a Diplomat Viper but I expect it will be a much slower year in terms of purchasing.
We did three holidays this year, the first time we've gone away with either of the kids. The first was to Fisher's Farm in one of their cabins. This was exhausting for us and the kids because it's non-stop every day we were there but everyone had a great time. We then did 5 days at both Haven in Bognor and Butlin's, which is also in Bognor. The year of Bognor.
The one definitive conclusion we came to is that we are not "cook while we're on holiday" people. I never want to cook anywhere that isn't my kitchen, so we're just not going to any more. It'll cost more money, but less stress for me.
Kids are not conducive to watching a lot of TV that requires attention but we were able to squeeze in The Last of Us, Silo, and High Potential. We also watched Pluribus but I have no idea how I feel about that show right now. We'll be straight into Fallout season two when that's all available too.
We ended up on a rewatch-the-MCU binge for most of the year because of the aforementioned lack of attention needed. Only four new movies this year:
I played the Tony Hawk 3+4 Remaster and it's a solid effort but the new levels are just not very good. I don't care about the 4 career mode but it is a big missing piece.
I became, I think there's no other word, obsessed with MGK. I was shown a preview of the Cliché video on my Apple TV, I watched it and I loved it. Then I watched it 10 more times and listened to it, as of this writing, 200 more times. The whole album it's from, Lost Americana, is incredible and then I went into his back catalog and listened to all that all the time.
I'm sure other music existed but MGK has been my 2025.
Oh my God, Karen, you can't just ask people what books they read.
I decided KnightShift Studio was a better name than KnightShift Development because I'm a big sticker boy now and "studio" better encapsulates random ideas I might have outside of general development and web apps. Anything where money might change hands is filed, in my mind, under the KnightShift banner. Something something business.
Note the lowercase "B" and "J". The brand is definitely not what it was even 12 months ago. ⤾
2025-12-18 19:41:04
tl;dr: I have a proper shop now with new sticker designs which you can find here.
If you've been following along for the past 6 months, I designed four stickers that I sold in two different batches - Don't @ Me and Sparkly Websites and Pirate Bay × Training Data stickers. It was a lot of effort but it was a fun thing to do.
The "effort" was twofold: setting up Stripe payment links every time I wanted to sell a new batch and doing addresses on the envelopes. I setup an Eleventy site to do some of the work of laying out addresses so I could print onto label sheets which was fine until my printer ran out of ink and I had to hand-write ~100 envelopes.
The latter problem was easy to solve: an Adam-approved thermal printer, the beautifully named "OFFNOVA USB Shipping Label Printer, 4x6 Thermal Printer for Shipping Packages, High-Speed Label Maker, Compatible with ShipStation, UPS, FedEx, Ebay, Amazon, Shopify, USPS". It's a 4×6 thermal printer that has drivers for MacOS, Windows, and Linux. The only learning curve was making sure to pick the 4×6 paper size from the print dialog otherwise you get cut-off labels. Like before, I setup an Eleventy site that takes a CSV and outputs each address as a full page which then print to the labels. Because it's just HTML, I could easily add the Robb Knight × omg.lol logos in the bottom left.
Update 2025-12-22
The code for this is now on GitHub
The first problem though, of having a proper store, was a bit more complicated. There are so many fees associated with some platforms (looking at you Etsy) that it's hard to know how much it would cost to sell a single sticker. Then I remembered my friends over at Hemispheric Views have a sticker store that runs on Big Cartel. Big Cartel has a free tier limited to five products, one photo per product, plus some other limitations, but it's perfect for me to get started. Even when I do upgrade, it's $15 a month and that's it. No skimming a percentage from sales or anything like that.
I bought a cutting mat to take photos on, ordered the first batch of stickers, and got the store up and running last night. There are three new designs: Pen Addiction, Mildliner Bouquet, and nAIve plus the aforementioned Pirate Bay ones and a discount pack which gets you everything in the shop plus a bonus Jeff Sinclair sticker.
I'm going to see how this goes for the next month of so and if it works out, I'll start adding new stickers (I already have a shedload of ideas including this one). I've not had a sale yet so either no one wants to spend money this close to Christmas because this is a terrible time to launch a store or the site is broken. We will find out 🤞
2025-12-10 16:59:41
Since I updated to MacOS Tahoe 26.1 the open/save dialog of Finder became unbearably slow, like five seconds for every navigation step. I found this thread on Reddit that suggested turning off iCloud Drive documents and desktop syncing but I've never had that turned on. It also suggested turning off iCloud drive all together but I was not about to do that.
Someone in that thread linked to this solution which is an easy one: delete the plist file that keeps track of recent folder locations.
I deleted
com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService.plistand restarted, now the Open/Save panel opens quickly.
To delete this file navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/ in Finder (⌘ ⇧ + G or Go > Go to Folder) then delete com.apple.appkit.xpc.openAndSavePanelService.plist. I didn't even need to restart like the person on Reddit did and this immediately fixed it.
Why am I making a blog post with the same information as the Reddit thread? The reasons are twofold:
2025-12-09 06:12:01
Things are in motion to get a proper sticker shop online early in the new year - I have a new sticker I'm excited to make plus I'm going to keep stock of some that people always ask for.
And more sticker news, the St Jude campaign stickers are on their way to everyone not in the UK. If you're in the UK, I have them in hand and will get them posted as soon as I can.
Advent of Code has nuked the global leaderboard and dropped down the 12 days instead of 24. Maybe I'll give it a go again next year.
The Aston Martin Cygnet is adorable and I love it. Also it's £40k second hand so perhaps not.
This internet scrapbook idea from Alex is great.
Clues by Sam is a new daily game that I enjoyed once but won't play because I know I'll stress myself out needing to do it every day.
This post reminded me I want to make my own handwriting font. I should get on that.
Public Transport Card Designs is exactly what the internet was made for.
This post about Culdesac, "Arizona's car-free neighborhood", is fascinating - one shop for every 14.5 residents. Don't miss their website with more photos, floorplans, and info on it.
Victorian Christmas cards are something else entirely. Tag yourself, I'm mutant parsnip man.
Intertapes is a collection of found cassettes and their contents. There's some gorgeous SVGs on the formats page. RSS feed please.
This fork of Streetpass but for RSS is handy. Chrome and Firefox only right now.
2025-12-05 05:09:14
When I was on The Pen Addict a few weeks ago, I mentioned I was looking for the hottest pink ink the world has to offer to go with my Estie Funky Town. I got loads of suggestions and I eventually stumbled on an ink that I think is perfect for what I wanted - Octopus Fluids Neon Pink.
I ordered a bunch of inks during Black Friday day/week/month and Ben sent me a sample of Robert Oster Hot Pink. It wasn't until after I got all these inks that I then realised I already owned a very similar ink that was also what I was looking for, Diamine Hope Pink, but I had misremembered and didn't think it was as bright as it was. Some of these I knew wouldn't be the winner but I wanted anyway because they're nice colours - Wearingeul Cheshire Cat for example. Nevertheless, here's the samples:
There are more than I don't have from the suggestions including:
There are a shedload of lovely pinks and purples here (and in general, look at this list on Mountain of Ink) and I can see myself using all of the ones I bought at different times. Although Hope Pink and Neon Pink look similar in the sample, Neon Pink definitely has a slight edge over the Diamine for me but I suspect if they weren't next to each other I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
2025-11-18 20:25:06
Now the dust has settled on the piracy stickers, I checked how many I had left and it was a few more than I thought so I'm putting them back up for sale until they run out. Here's what I have available:
I will do another run of the Sparkly Websites stickers very soon — I don't have any of those left right now. As always, the shop page has all the links as well, at least until I decide on a better system for selling stickers.
