2025-06-06 21:03:03
It's June already somehow. Wild. The passage of time comes for us all.
We had to say goodbye to our cat Morpheus at the weekend. He had fluid in his lungs and his heart was failing. We lost his brother two years ago as well so this is the first time in 14 years we've been a pet free house and I hate it. RIP buddy.
My wife has been side-eyeing my notebooks and pens for the past couple of months and she finally caved and ordered a notebook. Then she proceeded to order all manner of washi tapes, stickers, and stencils. This is gunna be fun[1].
Sticker sales have been better than I imagined they would be but I'm also bad at maths. I miscalculated how much money I made, I bought twice as many envelopes as I needed, and I ordered too many stickers compared to how many orders I had. Please buy some so I'm not drowning in spares.
I ordered a TRMNL at the start of the week and it's arriving today. I've been tinkering with some plugins and put this one together ready for Relay for St Jude in September. I'll write up a longer post about it when I've got my hands on it.
I designed a sticker for Brad and I can't wait to see the final result.
I've completely changed my Obsidian usage after reading this post from Steph Ango. No more folders, everything in the root. Search does the work now.
I have three posts about Vento, a new templating language. I'm not in a rush to switch but I'm curious to see how it moves forward.
James made Subscribe Openly as a response to A request for developers of feed reader apps and services. Anything that makes RSS easier to use is good in my book.
Three new fonts to gawp at:
Eleventy LibDoc is "an Eleventy starter project to craft slick and responsive documentation" and it's really nice.
Finally a couple of somewhat doomy posts about the internet falling apart. The Internet of Consent by Anil Dash and The promise that wasn’t kept by Salma Alam-Naylor:
I want to use my brain so I can comprehend and learn and connect with what is in front of me.
Yes. One thousand times this.
Not good for the treasury though ⤾
2025-06-03 21:32:22
Style Guide Notice
Journalling can be spelt with one "L" or two, the latter being the British English way so that's what I've gone for.
I started doing bullet journalling in January and amazingly, I've kept it up. I read the book, watched a bunch of the videos, and spoke about it on Ruminate. I'll start off with some questions, starting with Marco:
How do you carry your Journal? Do you use it on the go as well or only at home and work?
I'm using an Ottergami A5 dotted notebook along with an elastic pen holder that slots over the cover - the pen loop on this notebook broke off pretty quickly[1]. If I'm at home it's either on my desk or on the counter in the kitchen. My Lihit case is always with it as well. I throw it in my bag when I go to the office. For my next book, which is coming up in the next few weeks, I'll be using a Scribbles that Matter notebook - the paper is thicker and it has page numbers.
Do you use it for private and work related stuff or only for one?
Both. For the first few weeks I was mixing in work notes with my personal ones but I found this a bit too confusing so I switched to using a single page layout for work which I do at the start of the week, then I do rapid logging for personal things on the subsequent pages.
Did you stop using digital PKM tools completely?
No. I'm still using Obsidian and I'm still updating the Intersect. I still use Reminders for things that are more time sensitive than just "today at some point". My journal is, usually, the starting point for ideas - the sticker shop (which are available to order again right now) started life as a todo in the journal but expanded to a note in Obsidian.
Caroline asked:
What do adults who are not self absorbed adolescents write in a journal???
Below I go into a bit more detail but to be clear: I'm not writing down my hopes and dreams[2]. I do write down funny things my kids do, or when something else noteworthy(!) happens but this isn't the kind of thing you'd find when someone dies and sit down to find out what their life was like, blown away by their way with words. This is much closer to the indecipherable ramblings of a lunatic.
Finally, Neblib asked:
how do you manage "refile" tasks bringing knowledge out of daily journals into easier reference stores / calendars / notebooks?
Mostly if I write something down and it needs moving to say, a calendar, I'll add it when I get a chance then mark it as migrated > or done × in my journal. Notes that become a bit more involved like planning a new project will eventually get moved to a note in Obsidian.
The Bullet Journal method suggests a lot of reflection, looking over your notes, thinking about your life, your goals, your feelings, reviewing everything you've done all the time. I'm not into all that.
I did try a lot of the ideas when I started but I didn't get any value from a lot of it. I don't feel the need to write down my goals or aims for the week. I don't need to reflect on what I've achieved the previous week. I have two young children and a full-time job, my goal is usually just "get everyone through the week without major injury". If that kind of thing works for you that's wonderful but it's not for me.
There's some other things that haven't really clicked with me starting with the future log. This is supposed to keep "all of your future events in one place". That sounds like a job for a calendar. I won't be doing this spread in any new notebooks. The monthly log has similar issues for me although I do enjoy the act of writing down what the month is going to look like. I think the date-based spreads would work better if I always had my journal to hand but I don't.
Collections, which is bullet journals way of saying "lists", have been handy to collect[3] ideas or similar notes about a single topic. I have some collections for this website, EchoFeed, and some house projects. What I wish I'd done is put these all in one place at the back of my journal. Having them wherever I started them in the journal is not helpful and makes it a pain to jump quickly to them. And I'm definitely not using the index.
The bullet system itself (todo, done, migrated, event, note) I do find useful. Putting every thought I have in there I find useful. Just physically writing a thing down is so much better than dumping it into an endless stream of notes in a todo app.
Now I've written it out like this it's pretty clear: I'm not doing the Bullet Journal method, I'm just journalling. The purpose of a system is what it does and a quick glance at the BuJo website (which has changed significantly even in the past 4 months), tells you what the system does: it sells courses and notebooks. That's not a necessarily a bad thing but it's a big jump from "do journalling".
One thing I've had to contend with is not having access to my journal while I'm with my kids because they like to grab everything with their grubby little hands. So I have to use something on my phone to dump notes at those times. I started with Godspeed and I'm currently using Tot. When I do sit down with my journal, I'll open Tot and transfer anything in there over to the daily log.
For the start of a month I do a small monthly spread along with a section to add any general notes I think of for that month. I don't use this spread that much so I'm considering dropping it completely.
Typically, I will start the week either Sunday night or Monday morning by picking a pair of highlighters to make my headings pretty and any pens I want to use that week. I usually pick a new fountain pen then rotate in some random standard pens. I'll setup my work spread, usually on a left hand page, and then Monday's heading ready for logging on the right hand page.
I take a quick glance over the previous week to see if there's anything that wasn't done and move them over to the new week. If there's some idea there that needs expanding, I'll add it to Obsidian to expand on later. If I get any fun stickers, packaging with pens, little notes with things I order, or someone gives me something, I'll stick it into the journal as well, sometimes with a note of what it's related to.
Depending on the week, I might make a note with a sample of the pens and inks I'm using or add a tracker to note down how many hours I've worked on a specific project. The biggest thing I've realised is there's no wrong way to use a notebook. Some weeks, I might only use a single page for the whole week. Other times a week can span over multiple pages with brainstorms for new ideas, flowcharts to understand a concept, notes on a video I've watch, or just a sketch of something I thought of.
I am going to continue with this, tweaking things as needed. As long as I'm keeping up with the things I want to get done, whatever that ends up looking like in my journal, I'm happy.
2025-05-23 20:07:16
Update
2025-05-26 Now includes a "websites 🪄" sticker as well
Last week on the 'don I said:
is MTU dns related? Don't know, don't care, don't @ me
and followed it up with:
"don't know don't care don't @ me" would make a good sticker, brb
I immediately set to work making this a reality because I wanted one but you can't just order a single sticker so I put together a plan: if I sell them at more or less cost[1] I can have one, other people can buy one, and we can all have a nice time.
I thought about setting up a proper storefront to handle this because I like to over engineer things then I remembered that Stripe payment links exist. So I setup /shop which lists all one of my things I'm selling and setup a redirect so that /shop/dont-at-me goes to the Stripe checkout page.
For the pricing, I wanted to make sure I didn't lose money but I also want people to feel like they're getting something worthwhile so for $10 you get two stickers shipped anywhere. I'm going to throw in some bonus stickers with everyone's order from my desk stash as well.
These will be available to buy for another week or so and then I'll be ordering the stickers to get them sent out to everyone.
"Cost" in this case accounting for the stickers and the stupid cost of postage to literally anywhere ⤾
2025-05-21 19:41:29
I never liked the link dump name for what was essentially weeknotes - the name was bad and I had other things I wanted to include[1]. I'm never going to manage to do this every week though so instead I'm stealing Chris' numbering solution. That way, I can do one whenever I feel like it.
I blogged about post filtering on EchoFeed which I'm currently finalising for release. I also have a couple of other fun social features I'm working on.
I'm thinking about selling a sticker but I need to work out the shipping logistics first.
I hooked up my PS2 last week and it turns out Tony Hawk 3 and 4 won't run at all so I've ripped them to run them with the PCSX2 emulator. I assume some of my other games won't run either so I'll rip those as well. So far though, everything I've tried has run perfectly with PCSX2. Maybe I should stream some THPS at some point.
Some fonts I've saved over the past couple of weeks while working on a few things:
Wendy Murphy and Beasts of England have a lot of lovely fonts.
The Steak Bake spider is an important addition to the internet and must be protected. I'd love to see the code for this.
Remy Sharp put together a CSS flag generator.
The The 12-bit rainbow palette will be going in my toolkit.
itter.sh is "Social Media via SSH". I'm on there as @rknightuk but I doubt I'll use it much. A fun concept.
LÖVE is the game engine used by Balatro and there's a great book called How to LÖVE for learning how it works.
Hosting checker is handy and seems pretty comprehensive.
I'm still obsessed with these fictional hotel notepads.
The pink Life noble notebooks that Brad always teases me with are now available to ship outside of Japan. RIP my wallet.
This is a tweet, which I would usually never screenshot, much less post on my website, but it's too good not to share.
oh poor baby 🥺🥺 do you need the robot to make you pictures? 🥺🥺 yeah?🥺🥺 do you need the bo-bot to write you essay too? yeah??? you can't do it?? 🥺🥺you're a moron??🥺🥺 do do you need chat gpt to fuck your wife ?? 🥺🥺🥺
The person who tweeted this had to delete it after the AI bros started harrassing them (I can't find the tweet now 🤷♂️).
This story about seagulls smashing the roof of a library in Oxford led Lewis to make this very good, but under appreciated, joke in the omg.lol discord:
“What did you do when the Flock of Seagulls attacked?”
“I ran”
Finally an astute observation from macmanx:
One of the nice things about being on this Discord is being informed about new and exciting fascists
I've updated the link dump posts to have the weeknote tag for the sake of completeness ⤾
2025-05-14 05:00:24
I got a new MacBook a couple of weeks ago but since I've had it I've not been able to use Tesco's website to do my shopping but I'd just ignored it and used my work machine. Then tonight I couldn't upload the latest episode of Ruminate to Libsyn so I had to investigate.
ERR_SSL_BAD_RECORD_MAC_ALERT was the error I was seeing in the console on both sites. There was lot of suggestions of resetting the Mac, re-adding the wifi, I rebooted my network, but none of it worked. Then the last comment of this Reddit thread said "I discovered that I had to set the MTU of the Macbook (not the router!) to 1280 and I no longer have the issue". No explanation as to how bacon1097 discovered this but I tried it anyway and it worked. To do this go to Settings > Network > Wi-Fi > Details > Hardware.
I don't care to look up what an MTU is[1] or why making it 1280 fixed it but it did and that's all that matters.
In a previous life I was traning to be a network engineer and I wouldn't have given a shit what an MTU is then either. ⤾
2025-05-13 15:34:01
On Sunday, the folks who run Hack Pompey hosted a new event at the offices of Waffle they're calling Hack Club:
a relaxed a day of coding on our side projects and shooting the breeze
This pilot event was invite-only and Ryan was kind enough to invite me so I went along. I could have worked on any number of side project ideas I have in my notes but there is a feature that people have been asking for on EchoFeed since it launched: post filtering.
I'd avoided doing this feature because I was worried about how complicated it would be[1] so I simplified it so it will still cover most use cases but is still easy to explain (and easy to maintain). Each Echo can have up to five rules applied to it and a rule has three attributes:
link)/micro)In this example if the link contains /micro then the rules have passed — you can choose to either post or not post when any or all rules match.
I'm still doing some tweaking and testing with this but it should be ready for pro subscribers in the next couple of weeks, along with some other fun features I'm not revealing yet.
I even have a pull request dated May last year that I started and abandoned ⤾
