Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

X is bad. Obviously. Davey hits the nail on the head here: People return to X just want followers in the strictest sense of the word. Sycophants that will just click like and subscribe on their posts without calling them out on anything. Much like the companies they cover, they just want to see number go up. Couple of interesting game projects. The first, PS2 games in the browser with WebAssembly. Secondly, someone ported a bunch of N64 games to Miyoo Mini and a there was asecond project just…

Doing... I hand-delivered the final drawing for St Jude this morning and we're almost halfway through Inktober — I am furious to confirm that practicing actually works and does indeed improve your skills. Some of the art I've done in the past month I'm properly proud of. Jim loved his so much, he framed it. The Knightlings have been ill on and off for the past month while the weather can't make it's mind up. We've had a couple of hospital visits as well — one for scary breathing-related things…

I'm not updating my personal Mac so this isn't relevant to me but this script turns off all the Apple Intelligence shit on MacOS and gets the model space back. I did link to this post from Cory but it's worth linking again now — this is like the sabotage field manual for the modern web. Crawler Zoo is fun. Blake made his own Solitaire game and I got distracted for a lot longer than I should when he linked it. Da Vinci, the guy who totally "invented" the helicopter, drew some legged penises in…

Here we are, a week into extended September and Relay's annual fundraiser has come to a close with over $750k raised — and nearly $9k of that came from mine and Adam's campaign. This is short of our goal of $15k that I set without really thinking much about it and it is lower than previous years. A couple of people reached out privately to apologise that they couldn't donate this year — it's rough out there. I haven't donated as much as previous years either for various reasons but to raise…

Over a year ago I bought a Kodak Charmera keyring mini camera; it's a tiny little camera that takes photos at 1440x1080 and I was lucky enough to get the best design. It's taken me until now to actually try it out at Alice Holt forest today — we went because they have Gruffalo sculptures and the Knightlings are obsessed. Here it is compared to a Renault 5 and a Sharpie The photos are about as good as I expected which is not good at all but it is a fun camera to use. I think I'll stick with the…

Dave is doing important work here, holding Cadbury Heroes to account. MacOS 27 broke the drivers for my thermal printer but thankfully someone made a new driver. I'm on board with Spymarks, not watermarks. The winners of the street photography awards are fantastic (obviously). Side-eyeing projects like Una to try and get away from my Apple Watch at some point. Hannah Fry's favourite fountain pens. Love this. There's no world in which I can watch this documentary about Elon Musk but I'm glad it…

Brad is walking in Memphis this week for the podcastathon so we recorded this episode a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the incentives we're both offering for St Jude and the work that goes into those as well as my progress as an "artist", and Jimothy. Then we discussed finishing notebooks and inks, and finished off with my analog defaults. There's still a few days to donate to St Jude. Listen to The Pen Addict 736: I’ll Keep You All Knight

It's Inktober again which means I'm drawing one thing a day, in ink, from the official[1] prompt list. I'm tagging my posts with #Inktober and #Inktober2026 — these tag pages are flagged to render the images in a gallery instead of the usual notes pages. My first drawing is up as of this morning. As much as I love Jeff the dinosaur from last year[2] it's too easy to fall back on "Jeff does/interacts with whatever the prompt is" so this year will be mostly Jeff-free. Last year my drawings were…

We've added new stickers to the St Jude fundraiser including a sparkly Jimothy. You're gunna want this one. Donate here. We've got a new garage door going in next week which means I'll be able to actually use the space to it's full potential. I'm more excited than I should be. Alex has been abusing ID3 chapters to make "video" podcasts by setting chapter art every few seconds. This is glorious and terrible and I love it. I like the look of the Platinum Komono as a pen, but I am not a fan of any…

Since I made Doodle Scan I've had a bunch of ideas of things I can do with image manipulation — it led to me finally doing my favicon generator. The third idea, the tool trilogy if you will, was to replicate a simple version of what CleanShot does — adding a background, padding, and rounding corners to a screenshot. I have CleanShot but sometimes I'm on my phone or a computer that doesn't have it installed. I like to think I'm pretty good at naming things but this is not one I'm particularly…

Back in July I broke own rule of never backing a hardware Kickstarter and backed a hardware Kickstarter for a Pen N — a pen that supports 100s of refills with a universal clamp that screws into the barrel. I paid $55 for it plus another $20 for shipping. I paid the extra $5 for the orange clip because I was feeling fancy When it arrived I tried it with a bunch of different refills I had including zento, jetstream, Muji, and they all worked great. No wobbling, exactly as described. It came with…

The St Jude Fundraiser passed $150k overall and we hit $6k on ours last night. We still have drawing slots available and some sticker news is coming soon. Donate here. Stop Omarchy is a well-cited resource by Brennan explaining exactly why Omarchy is more than just a Linux distro run by a facist. I caught some of the most recent Dennis the Menace show on TV and I can't believe they made him look like this. This dotgrid desk mat is also a whiteboard of sorts. If I didn't always use my St Jude ×…

A few months ago, Brad came up with analog defaults loosely based on the Hemispheric Views app defaults. I've been meaning to write mine up but having sat on it for a while I don't think it's worth me having a dedicated page like my app defaults or /now. My personal usage is better served by my #currentlyInked tag for fountain pens and this post as a general overview. On a Sunday evening if I have time, I sit down and pick out new pens for the week for each category I carry in my Rickshaw…

Last night I was reading this excellent post about scanning pencil artwork and the first step the artist mentioned is setting the pallette to greyscale. This made me realise how useful that would be on Doodle Scan — the black and white mode is good but only in some circumstances where the drawing is just lines, greyscale would be much more useful for illustrations with colour or shading. Like all the other features on Doodle Scan, it wasn't immediately obvious to me how to do this. After some…

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.