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.
Update 2026-01-15
Brad and Myke discussed this on The Pen Addict 699 starting at the 23 minute mark.
2026-01-09 20:00:37
Usually if I find an 88x31 button related thing I'd bookmark it and pop it in my weeknotes but over the past few days, a smorgasbord of related links have come to my attention so, to paraphrase Morbius, it's bloggin' time.
The first is a new directory of buttons I'd not seen before by Neonaut who also links other directories at the bottom which I've added to my list on LinkAce. So many buttons.
Yesterday in the 32 Bit Cafe Discord, Dan posted a new project they'd completed: an 88x31 button creator. It has more options than I knew what to do with but I did make this banger of a button:
As if that wasn't enough, I came across this post about making the Game Boy color boot animation into a an 88×31 button. Lots of interesting technical stuff going on here to make this happen.
Finally, as I posted yesterday, Chris Burnell made some new EchoFeed buttons which I love.
2026-01-09 04:29:19
The kids are both in nursery now and I'm back at work after two weeks off at Christmas.
The sticker sales are going well, I've just about broken even if you do some flexible maths and I have a new pack incoming in the next few weeks.
After this post, my Raindrop queue is down to just eight links. Enjoy.
ISBNDB looks like an amazing API for books - it's paid, so not ideal for hobby projects but could come in handy for bigger projects.
Cinemapper shows filming locations for movies on a map which is always fun.
I think we all hate printers with a fiery passion but this open printer has piqued my interest.
Yamatter is "a command-line tool to inspect and transform YAML front-matter data". I've done stuff like this with custom scripts in the past, this would have saved me a lot of time.
enclose.hgorse is another day game I enjoy but definitely can't trust myself to play every day.
James used microformats and granary to turn his HTML element of day list into a web feed and RSS feed.
Keeping this Apple Photos exporter bookmarked for if I ever try to nuke my Apple Photos usage.
Turns out those pkpass ticket files you sometimes get to add to Apple/Google wallet can be converted to PNGs relatively easily.
Brad has a great post on the tools and techniques he uses to clean fountain pens.
Hot Dang Press make very cool iron-on art.
Get out of my <head> is an incredibly handy reference for what should be inside your head to show previews, favicons, and other related things. I added a link to this on Lens.
I think I found the only UK-based company that makes pen cases, storages, displays, and trays - Turner's Workshop.
Opus No. 1 is that fucking song everyone has on their hold music.
Speaking of music I Want my MTV Rewind is amazing.
These two Struthless videos are really worth your time:
I've had this article from Jason saved for a while and I haven't stopped thinking about this line:
I want to make things because I’m human and alive.
I sketched it too because why not.
Outtakes is a new section for failed or disregarded ideas, inspired by anh.
I had a note for a while that said "Scroll all the colours". I had a look around and there wasn't anything that did this but once I started thinking about it I realised how boring it would be. I did stumble upon all RGB though: "The objective of allRGB is simple: To create images with one pixel for every RGB color (16,777,216); not one color missing, and not one color twice.". Cool.
This also had it's own sub-failure of sorts - I started writing out my ideas on index cards, à la Paloma, and it was helpful to focus on a single idea (like the one above) but I also have ideas in my journal, Obsidian, Notes, my brain, probably other places. A failure yes, but it showed me I need to sort my shit out and work out a single place to put all these.
Until next time, be excellent to each other.
2026-01-08 21:04:42
One request I've had quite a bit for EchoFeed is to be able to handle specific, known usernames, between Mastodon and Bluesky where they are different (which is almost always the case). Some pastry-themed apps already have something similar but for EchoFeed it needed to work differently.
For EchoFeed, I've gone for the simplest solution which is also the most flexible - straight string replacement. "Replace THIS with THAT", or in real terms, "replace @[email protected] with @rknight.me when cross posting between Mastodon and Bluesky. Maybe you want to replace utm_source=mastodon with utm_source=bluesky because you're a big Business™ boy or replace every mention of "Twitter" with "the deep fake porn and hate platform" because you understand you don't hang out at Nazi bars no matter what. You can replace literally anything, it's up to you. The documentation has a bit more information about how they work.
EchoFeed won't replace strings in links and has the option to only do case-sensitive replacements. Replacements is an EchoFeed Pro feature and is available now.
