Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

Our St Jude Fundraiser has blasted past $5k, and I had to make a an Obsidian base to keep track of all the drawings I need to do. The first one arrived yesterday and if you want one for yourself there's one slot left right now. You can donate here. Thanks to Melanie pointing it out, I fixed a bug in Lens where it would catch SVG title elements when it shouldn't. It’s not for me but the detail on this Wallace and Gromit set is fantastic. Matt reviewed the Ulanzi D100H. I love buttons and knobs.…

If you missed it, Adam and I are raising money for St Jude this month and you can donate here. One of the rewards I offered this year and last is I will do a drawing of whatever the donator wants. These vary from the very simple "a horse" to the detailed like "a platypus on a unicycle in Japan at night". George ordered one with this in the notes: Did you know, petrichor is "the smell of dirt after rain"? It's a pleasant smell that indicates that life is returning. Like Spring, but your smell.…

We just passed $2000 on the St Jude Fundraiser and it’s not even September yet. Donate here. On Ruminate this week I spoke about the worst snack I've ever tried for the show. Truly awful. This Mastodon tool to see which servers the people I follow are on as well as where my followers are is interesting and highlights again that mastodon.social is just too large. FontFridge is an "enhanced Google Fonts collection" with better filtering based on the features of the fonts (variable axes, weight,…

tl;dr:Cancer is bad, St Jude is good, donate here Adam and I are once again raising money for St Jude as part of Relay's annual fundraising event. As always, we have stickers — a two pack this year. A Ruminate Game Boy one that I lovingly drew some food creatures for and a All Meat No Proxy sticker. A $20 donation gets you both stickers (and any others we might add over the month which usually happens). I'll be offering drawings again, which were very popular last year. An animal, vehicle,…

I've tried for months to redesign my site. I was fed up with the design and I wanted something new but every time I tried I would get halfway through the home page and decide I didn't like that either. There are seven half working examples in my test folder along with loads of others I'd sketched out or made some basic designs for. So I went a different way — I gave it a cool project name, Tabula Rasa, nuked everything, and started an entirely new site from scratch and just pulled it what I…

This update has been way too long - January was the last one. I kind of let weeknotes take over but they don't include the now part of a now page so I'm going to make an effort to update the now page every month while continuing with weeknotes in the sporadic fashion that I have been. Doing... We went to 4 Kingdoms which feels a bit more run down that some other places we've been but the Knightlings had a great time. Baby Knight the second is starting at a new nursery next week which means both…

The final thing I always do for a project is make the favicon and open graph image but finding a site not riddled with ads to generate these has always been a bit of a challenge. I've mostly been happy with RealFaviconGenerator although there's just too many options for my liking. I've long[1] had a todo item to try and make my own version that runs entirely client-side and asks the bare minimum of questions. I've now made it and it's called Favicons to Go. Thanks to Zoe for helping me with the…

To start with, both my wife and I have alerts turned off because when they did a test in 2023 we had a one month old baby and didn't want her to be disturbed. Leaving it off because I assumed this would be abused, as I believe it has in this case, was just a bonus. Yesterday the government used the emergency alert system to send an alert to warn people not to start fires because it's hot and dry everywhere. The full text of the alert was: There is a very high risk of wildfires nationally.…

When I posted about my zine I mentioned being surprised that there wasn't any tools for showing zines online like a web component or similar. Turns out there is, web search is just shit now. Andy pointed me to Zine Machine which is a web-based viewer that uses print styles to switch between web and print layouts. Benji is doing something similar with their zine here. Then there's Dirty Little Zine which is a web based zine maker. I added some notes to my list about zine-related projects I…

I announced the shut down EchoFeed which I intend to write more about soon. I shipped Doodle Scan this week which you can read about here. I also made a zine and I was on a podcast. I have a couple of other things I'm working on which should be out soon. I've finally had time to sort through an obscene amount of links I had saved and there was a lot of good stuff in there. Who knew? Chris built his own font and has lots of tips about how to go about doing that. delphitools is a collection of…

UpdateThis episode was recorded prior to me deciding to shut down EchoFeed James invited me onto his podcast, Web Weaving, to discuss the IndieWeb, EchoFeed (RIP), stickers, pens, and some of my other web projects. A full transcript is available on the website. Listen to Web Weaving 14: Robb

While scanning my time travel zine I thought it would be nice to include some drawings I've done as part of my website, similar to how Ana has on her site. Whenever I've tried in the past, removing a background to standard that is good enough to put on another colour background is near impossible without spending a long time in Pixelmator fixing all the edge artifacts. I came across a couple of websites that do this and I noticed that they do it all in-browser so I started digging around — they…

I've wanted to make a zine for a while — it has a nice combination of drawing, writing, and being a physical item that appeals to me but I couldn't find the right topic to tackle until I realised I'd already done the writing part of it with my post entitled My Favourite Type of Time Travel. The format I've come across most is the eight-page foldable zine which means including the cover there are eight pages of stuff to fill. As it turns out my time travel post had seven main types which was…

TL;DRI'm shutting down EchoFeed within the next 12 months when the final subscriptions expire. It will continue to run as it is until then so if you've already paid you have access until the end of your subscription. Last night, after a few months on and off of problems with EchoFeed from my side and general feed problems I made the decision to shut it down. As of right now, this is what I've done: Registration for new accounts is closed Existing free accounts can no longer upgrade to EchoFeed…

I asked for recommendations for courses and books related to learning drawing techniques and I got a bunch of great suggestions. I've not tried any of these yet (except a single video from Alphonso Dunn but I want to collect these in one place I can refer back to. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards via Kerri and Valrus. There's a few editions of this but I'll pick up a second hand copy of whichever one I come across first. Books by Christopher Hart via Andy and…

I posted about my June-Boree entries a couple of weeks ago and the winners were announced on episode 167. Turns out I came second, beaten narrowly by Arcadia king Eric, which means I get one of Jason's famous trophies. After some shenanigans with trying to send it to a pickup location which UPS couldn't do three days in a row, I finally got my hands on it and it's glorious.

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…

Preamble 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. The Challenges 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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Over the past month or so I've sold a bunch of stuff on Vinted and I wanted to know how much I've made but Vinted don't give you that data, at least not in a nice way. They have monthly reports but that shows what you started with and ended with which only works if you don't withdraw or spend anything, which I had. So I went to the sold page, scrolled the infinite scroll list until it had loaded the months worth of stuff and whipped up this snippet to take the price and title of the item and…

I haven't done a weeknote in a while and this one is packed with links because I've got very behind on all the things including my saved later list. What do you mean you don't have custom artwork for your weeknotes? Weirdo. First off, I was thinking about Y2K as one does and I remembered that these keyrings were everywhere in 1999. I am somewhat annoyed I missed weeknote 2000 to post this in but here we are. While I don't think all of these truly "replace" the premium ones they claim to, I'm…

This is, in fact, another post about how many colours of Mildliners there are but it should be the final one of this format. Last week I posted about the Mildliner mix colours in which I said I was going to look into redoing my Mildliner reference site and I've done just that with version two. That right there is the mildliner colours. Now let's talk about the mildliner colours. Can we talk about the mildliner colours please, Mac? I've been dying to talk about the mildliner colours with you all…

A couple of weeks ago Ben was kind enough to send me a 3-pack of Mildliner Mix pens — two-colour highlighters made by Zebra. This led me down a path of looking for the second set called "Cool" but the price of shipping meant I would have been paying ~£5 a pen which I wasn't willing to do. Then this week, as I am want to do, I went over to Stationery Pal (that website is riddled with ads just a heads up) and they had a big banner on the home page about a ten pack of Mildliner Mix so I ordered…

Today my 2026 Lamy Safaris arrived even though Lamy themselves still haven't actually announced them. Thank you to the fine folks at Fontoplumo for putting these on sale early so I can get my grubby hands on them. The yellow is striking in person and is exactly as bright as you think it will be. The pink doesn't jump out at me quite as much but the colour is still great. I think I would prefer the pink to have the black hardware because on the yellow it looks fantastic. I'm not going to…

I found the solution to an obscure problem I had on a random Reddit thread

A review of Set A and B of the new fine mildliners

A fix for Disney Plus error code 73