Aquileo | Robb Knight • Posts • RSS Feed

Aquileo | Drawing Resources

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:22:00 +0000

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 alienlebarge. I have one of these on the way to check it out.
The aforementioned Alphonso Dunn has a book called Pen and Ink Drawing, A Simple Guide. I found a copy of this really cheap on Vinted which is on its way to me. He also has a huge number of videos on his YouTube channel. via Hollie and kalikambo
Maggie Appleton has a great list of courses and books via Eric
Eric also suggested Fun with a Pencil and The Natural Way to Draw
Draw by Jeffrey Camp and Drawing on the Artist Within, another Betty Edwards one came via Gary.

I'm not going to get everything on this list because that would be chaos but there's lots of great stuff in here that I can choose from.

Aquileo | I Came Second in the Hemispheric Views June-Boree and Got This Neat Trophy

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:13:44 +0000

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.

Aquileo | Weeknote #2009

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:41:50 +0000

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 came across: Datatype is a "variable font that turns text into charts" and then this person built a chess rendering engine into a font which is wild.

Matt did a handwriting font, something I've done a couple of times to varying levels of success.

The last font and writing link is this post about backtrack-free cursive. I don't write cursive (or in lowercase for that matter) but this is really interesting.

What intrigued me about files.md is that it uses an API I wasn't aware of to access local folders and files. I'm not dropping Obsidian any time soon but this is an API I want to try out more.

Friend of the blog made equinox to test light and dark mode at the same time which is handy.

I'd come across but not heard of the XY problem before: "asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem". Nice to have a name for this scenario.

P4LETTE is another colour palette generator. Can't have too many.

Daily games is a thing now and I've been enjoying 4x3. I also found Gerrymandle which is interesting but doesn't spark joy for me.

Signalbox, a live train map, does spark joy though.

Finally this is a fun article about using public domain image archive for art ideas.

Aquileo | Hemispheric Views June-Boree 2026

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:00:46 +0000

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.

Day 2: Create a hyper-specific meme about a running joke from the podcast.

I had so many ideas for this - trivia corner, counter chat, thumbs up vs media corner, something Thomas-related, notes apps, and the classic depreciation spreadsheet. My main submission was this Thanos one:

And the others:

Day 03: Listen to an entire music album from start to finish without looking at a screen or skipping a track. Post the album length and link to the album.

How dare Jason try to get me to sit quietly and enjoy something. I sat down and listened to one of my favourites: Sugarcult - Palm Trees and Powerlines. 12 songs, 40 minutes.

Day 04: Record a 30-second audio clip of the ambient sound outside your house (birds, traffic, etc.) and post it without context.

This was recorded (as a video) by one of the Knightlings, on my phone, while I was dozing on the sofa so I converted it to audio (I also had to bleep out one of them saying the other's name because op sec).

Day 05: Take a screenshot of your phone battery hitting exactly 1%.

This one was just cruel, but I did it.

Day 06: Take a photo of a classic regional snack or beverage unique to your part of the world.

Burger from Kyes innit.

Day 07: Take an artistic photo of something interesting on your daily walk or drive.

This is the Havant United Reform Church near the train station.

Day 08: Write down a thought, a quote, or a goal for today on an actual piece of paper with a physical pen, and post a photo

I was on the train and it was not easy to write this.

Day 09: Find a real-world sign, menu, or package with terrible font spacing and shame it with a photo.

I didn’t get this one for a few days. I drove to a couple of places I knew of with terrible kerning on some banners but they had both been removed so I assumed I wouldn’t get this challenge. Then my car presented me with this monstrosity.

Day 10: Take a "before" and "after" photo of your desk setup after a deep declutter.

This the best I'm ever going to declutter, this is my emotional support clutter.

Before:

After:

Day 11: - Make a digital "postcard" of your town using only emoji and text.

"Time for some ASCII art" - Me on day 11.

Raw:

..____________________________________________..
||           ~~~ 🛥️ PORTSMOUTH ☀️ ~~~         ||
||       |                            ______  ||
||       |.^                         |      | ||
||       || ^                        | ^^^^ | ||
||       ||  ^        |  |           | [][] | ||
||       ||  ^       )_) ))          | ---- | ||
||      .|| ^       )__) )_)         | [][] | ||
||    .; ||^       )___))___)        |______| ||
||  ..;; ||       ___|____|___      / ----- / ||
||————————————^^^^\__________/^^^~~^^~~^^^^^^^||
..____________________________________________..

Day 12: Walk 10,000+ steps. Post a photo showing date and step count.

I usually hit 10k steps but I figured I'd post one that was the highest for the week which was just over 18k steps when I was in London.

Day 13: Do a 15-second voice memo pronouncing a difficult local place name from your area.

"Cosham and Bosham are pronounced the same" one might think.

Day 14: Take a photo of a local transit pass, train ticket, or a unique road sign from your neighborhood

Day 15: Score 50+ in Bounce in Arcadia

I prefer the games on Arcadia where I can take my time so I didn't think I'd get this but I managed to get exactly 50 and that's enough for me. Eric got 702 which is ridiculous.

Day 16: Put a sticker on something that is decidedly not a piece of tech!

I'd done this a few days prior and it fits so perfectly. My Midori cutter with a Ruminate King sticker on it.

Day 17: Take a day off, you’ve earned it! (OR make more memes)

You don't have to tell me twice. For reference, Eric is stupidly good at Arcadia, having won the previous five years of Arcadia June.

Day 18: Post a photo at exactly 12:00 PM local time of the sky/view outside your window.

Day 19: Complete 100 reps of a body weight exercise (push-ups, squats, or jumping jacks) throughout a single day. Keep track on a tally sheet and post a photo

Here’s a tally of every time I thought about the day 19 challenge and didn’t do it because lazy.

Day 20: Score 25,000+ in CandyBall

Not a chance. Eric did it though

Day 21: Change the wallpaper on your phone or desktop to something completely new and show it off.

Day 22: Buy a coffee/tea/beverage, music, or book from a local independent shop and share the haul.

These are the best pork scratchings I’ve ever had in my life.

Day 23: Score 10,000+ in The Claw.

I really did try on this one but I couldn't even get close.

Day 24: Show the most ridiculous chain of tech adapters or dongles you can assemble to connect two incompatible devices

Not quite incompatible but I've been forgetting for years to take in a C to C cable to my office, so instead I use this USB C hub that has four USB A ports. Then I use a USB A to C cable to charge my mouse.

Day 25: Look behind your computer monitor or TV and take a photo of the hidden, chaotic cable nest you pretend doesn't exist.

Behold, the cables behind my desk.

Day 26: Consume a piece of media (a podcast episode, article, or YouTube video) produced in the opposite hemisphere from where you live. Share a link!

I did two:

Day 27: Record the sound of a satisfying real-world click

This is the click of the Bluetooth knob on my 8BitDo keyboard

Day 28: Draw a terrible, MS Paint style portrait of Andrew, Martin, or Jason. Or all three!

Day 29: Write a traditional 5-7-5 syllable haiku about the podcast or your favorite co-host.

I did a Haiku:

Whimsical podcast
Martin, Jason, Andrew news
Hemispheric Views

I also did a limerick because that's my preferred poetry format:

There once was a podcast with Andrew,
Jason, and Martin, just talking,
They all jumped on planes,
To meet for a day,
It was significantly faster than walking

Day 30: Race to the finish! Score 50,000+ points in FastRun!

The final day, the final Arcadia challenge. I got 39,939 after a handful of attempts. 50k wasn't going to happen.

Conclusion

Like WeblogPomo and Inktober, I enjoy the structure of having a single, small thing to do every day but I also need the accountability otherwise I won't do it. Jason did a great job of picking a selection of challenges that every can do and it made the month interesting to go into the forum and see what people had posted every day.

Aquileo | Over/Under Interview

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:55:58 +0000

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 useful tool to get out random thoughts I've had as well as share fun things I've seen online that week. The pressure to do them every week though, massively overrated. You don't need to do that to yourself, post when you want.

Stickers

Underrated. What a fun item stickers are but you've got to use them. Stick them on anything. Maybe Maique will spot one you stuck somewhere. I love stickers.

BuJo

This is a tough one. Bullet Journal the brand? Overrated. Intentionally or not, one look at the website shows that it exists now to sell courses, books, and other related services.

Bullet Journal the system on the other hand has a lot of good ideas. I don't do all of them, nor do I follow it strictly but the things I did take from the (the bullet system itself, migrating tasks, monthly spreads) have been massively helpful. Slightly underrated if only because the website no longer reflects the system and rather serves as the business side.

Tacos

Underrated. I'm in the UK where we have a troubling lack of mexican-inspired food available but whats not to love? Meat, sauce, taco shell, lettuce, it's got it all.

What are the two best books you couldn't live without and that you recommend?

How to Lie with Statistics. I read this when I was 17 or so and it blew my mind the way you can present data in different ways to elicit different reactions or prove your point. Fair warning this was written in 1954 so some of the language would not be appropriate in 2025, but the ideas are solid.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed. This one serves have a warning both about what one might post online, as well as how wild online mobs can get.

Aquileo | People and Blogs Interview

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:48:50 +0000

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 like yet or how it's going to pay my bills. I have a whole host of side projects I've worked on over the years; they're not all winners but they all serve, or served, a purpose. If I get lucky, they resonate with other people which is always nice.

What's the story behind your blog?

I've had a lot of blogs over the years, most of which would get a handful of posts before being abandoned. There was a version that ran on Tumblr which I did do for at least a year or two — any interesting posts from that have been saved. The current iteration is by far the longest serving and will be the final version. There's no chance of me wiping it all and starting again.

This current version is part of my main website which is where I put everything. My toots on Mastodon start life as a note post, I post interesting links I find, and I log all the media I watch/play/whatever (I don't want to say consume, that's gross) in Almanac, which itself is on the third or fourth iteration.

As I said above, I had done a few posts on the Tumblr-powered blog but if I look at my stats for posts, it was around 2022 when Twitter started to fall apart that I started to blog more. I was moving away from posting things directly onto social media sites and getting it onto my own site.

I started writing more posts that just had a short idea or helpful tip because I realised not every post has to be some incredible think piece. My analytics show that these posts also tend to be the most popular which probably says more about the state of large, ad-riddled websites than it does about my writing. For example this post about disconnecting Facebook from Spotify is consistently in the top five posts on my site but you're never going to read that post unless you specifically need it. It's not a "good" post, it just exists.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

To call what I have a process would be a very liberal use of the word "process". If I have nothing to write about I just won't write anything, I have no desire to keep to a schedule and write just for the sake of it. Usually, I'll get prompted by something someone asks like "How did you do X on your website?" or I feel like I have something to say that would be interesting other people.

I write my posts in Obsidian, then when they're ready to go I'll add them to my site. If I'm on my ~~proper computer~~ laptop I use my CLI tool to add a new post. If I'm on mobile, I use the very haphazard CMS I built.

I'll proof read most things myself before posting and I rarely ask for anyone else's input but if I do want a second opinion it's going to be previous P&B interviewee, Keenan. Usually I'm able to get out what I want to say fairly succinctly without too much editing.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

A proper keyboard and ideally a desk to sit at is what I prefer when I'm writing (or coding) but I can live with just the keyboard. My desk setup makes some people's skin crawl because there's so much going on but I like having all the trinkets and knick knacks around me.

I deeply dislike using my phone for most things outside of scrolling lists, like social media so I rarely write long posts on it. The small form factor just doesn't work for me at all but I also kind of need it to exist in the world.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

All my domains are registered with Porkbun and I manage the DNS with DNSControl - my main domain, rknight.me, has nearly 50 records for subdomains so managing those without DNSControl would not be a fun activity. Speaking of DNS I use Bunny for my DNS management and also use their CDN for images and other files I need to host.

The website itself is, as are many of my side projects, built with Eleventy. Eleventy gives me the flexibility to do some interesting things with the posts and other content on my site which would be much harder with some other systems.

The site gets built on Forge to a Hetzner server whenever I push an update to GitHub either via command line, or through the aforementioned CMS, and is also triggered at various points in the day to pull in my Mastodon posts.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Assuming I actually had to the time to do it, I think I would start with the CMS first, before building anything of the actual site. It is a pain to update things when I'm not at my laptop but jamming features into my CMS is equally frustrating.

If I wanted something off the shelf and easier to maintain I suspect I would choose Ghost or Pika.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Many of these costs are part of my freelancing so are bundled with other sites I run and somewhat hidden but I'll do my best to outline what I do use.

I have a single server on Hetzner that serves my main site as well as another 30 or so side projects so the cost is negligible per-site but it costs about $5 a month. Forge costs $12 a month to deploy my site along with other sites. The domain is $20 a year I think but that's it.

I have a One a Month Club here and I have a handful of people supporting that way. I also use affiliate links for services I use and like which occasionally pays me a little bit.

I think monetising blogs is fine, if it's done in a tasteful way. Dumping Google ads all over your site is terrible for everyone but hand-picked sponsors or referrals is a good way to find new services. Just keep it classy.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I want to read sites that are about the person writing them. Photos of things people have done, blog posts about notebooks, wallpaper, food, everything. Things people enjoy.

This is the second time I'm going to mention Keenan here because they write so wonderfully. They also have a podcast with Halsted called Friendship Material which is all kinds of lovely and joyful and everyone should listen.

Alex writes some really interesting computing-related posts, like this one about using static websites as tiny archives.

Annie is so smart and honest in her writing it brings me joy every time I see a new post from her. This post is a masterpiece.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I'd be a terrible business boy if I didn't at least mention EchoFeed, an RSS cross posting service I run.

I also have a podcast that used to be about tech but is now about snacks.

Aquileo | Reviewing Mildliner Smells

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:43:01 +0000

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 only good one. Smells like lemons.

Cool Gray / White Bloom isn't good but it is accurate. Generic flower smell.

Beige / Wood smells like mid-range car air freshener and Dusty Pink / Flower Bouquet smells like a cheap car air freshener.

There's no world in which I ever want my highlighters to have a smell, and I'm not a teenager any more so I'm not going to try and taste them to be crowned class clown but I'll use these anyway because the colours are still good.

Aquileo | Cult Pens Anniversary Mystery Box Review

Wed, 27 May 2026 19:36:55 +0000

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 wrote in the Pen Addict Slack. I considered buying it at lunchtime that day but it sold out before I could decide. Then two weeks later it was a suggestion below something else I was browsing on their website, with a fine nib. I usually go for extra fine but fine is also...fine so I ordered it.

It arrived and I was very pleased to get an MP1 as the main item along with some copic paint markers which I would never usually buy (these are £27 for 6?! I'm not good enough at art for that). The full list of items:

Monteverde MP1 Piston Filling Fountain Pen Limited Edition Strawberry
Copic Acrea Paint Marker Set of 6 Deep Colours
Iwako Puzzle Eraser Set Farm Animal
Pentel GraphGear 1000 Automatic Pencil
Faber-Castell Hexo Ballpoint Pen Matt Silver
Faber-Castell Goldfaber Aqua Dual Marker Wallet of 6 Lettering
Faber-Castell Double Fibre-Tip Pen Set - Neon (Pack of 10)
Clairefontaine lined notebook
Purple pen sleeve
Midori stickers
Two ink samples: Diamine Aqua Lagoon and Jacques Herbin Rouge d'Orient

I wasn't able to find the purple pen sleeve, the midori stickers, or the Faber-Castell neon pens on the Cult Pens website but by my count, the RRP of all this lot is somewhere around £150.

I didn't realise the Copics were paint ones until I'd already smooshed it on the page like the caveman that I am so I did an art. I call it "Don't Go in the Ocean". These are fun to use and I'm definitely going to use these during this year's Inktober.

The farm eraser set is cute as fuck but I cannot use it. Look at their faces.

I didn't need another metal pencil but the graphgear is bloody lovely. The lil "clunk" when it sucks up the nib bit is delightful.

A Monteverde MP1 has been on my wishlist for quite a while but there's always been something else to buy so it was nice to have it decided for me. Even without looking, I know that a pen called "Strawberry Dreams" would the one I would get anyway. The ink looks much more purple when it's in the bottle but on paper (Tomoe River in this case) it's a stunning bright pink, I love it. The pen itself it nice to write with although my brain keeps thinking I'm picking up a TWSBI Eco and it takes a moment to adjust to the differences in feel.

I think the one dud in this box is the Faber Castell hexo has a nice twist mechanism but the pen itself is ugly and it feels cheap to hold. Not a pen for me.

Overall I'm very happy with what I got in the box. Given what Cult Pens sell I could make an educated guess about which fountain pen I was going to get from a handful so it wasn't that much of a risk. I'm not going to rush and do this every time they do one but I'll definitely consider it in the future.

Aquileo | Exporting Vinted Sold Data

Wed, 20 May 2026 10:58:13 +0000

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 add it to the clipboard.

list = document.getElementsByClassName('my-orders-content')[0]
items = Array.from(list.querySelectorAll('a .web_ui__Cell__content'))
data = items.map(i => {
	price = i.getElementsByClassName('web_ui__Text__text')[0].innerText
	title = i.getElementsByClassName('web_ui__Cell__title')[0].innerText

	return `${price} // ${title}`
}).join('\n')
copy(data)

The output will look something like this which I can then paste into Numi or Soulver to give me a total. Bundles don't have a useful title because that's not available on the page.

Aquileo | Weeknote #2001

Mon, 18 May 2026 11:43:59 +0000

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 always down for new ways to browse fonts and Font Alternatives is pretty nice.

Oat is a new UI library without any crazy dependencies.

YouSky by Ross Wintle is a fun "one person social network".

Alex always has excellent posts and this one, The bare minimum for syncing Git repos, is no different.

Chris' AI policy is excellent.

a genderless burger experience via Keenan

This guy cracks spray cans and makes little scenes inside them.

Incidental Music Player looks fun.

Disable Apple Creator Studio update popup in iWork

Walkman.land is the shit I'm here for.

I was able to use FontCrafter to make a font from my handwriting, something I did many years ago with a different service. This was initally a bit finicky but it had some updates and worked perfectly after that.

Slide Ventura. Love it.

My buddy Ben made the Legami Friends Pen Reference inspired by the Mildliner site. It's so good.

Fits on a Floppy - A Manifesto for Small Software. "Software should be as small as it can be. Not as a gimmick, but as a discipline.". YES.

Ask an Astronaut takes all the questions ever asked of astronauts aboard the ISS and uses a local AI model to search and find them for you.

ReKindle is a website as an OS for Kindles with a web browser.

Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions. Jim is very smart and this is worth your time.

AirPodsSanity solved an apparently widespread issue where MacOS will set AirPods as the microphone input which ruins the output sound quality.

Another app called Paper but it looks nice.

Journal Helper has a bunch of printable pages for your journal.

5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

Delivering a dynamic hexagonal world map in just 10kb. This is the kind of shit I'm here for. Proper web stuff.

KeyPad is "a Mac app that lets you use your Mac keyboard and trackpad as a bluetooth keyboard and mouse". Smart.

Pica, a MacOS font management app

How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer. I come back to this every few years because it's so good.

Golden tickets. Old tickets with cool fonts.

Another Day Closer to the End. A webapp for doing those "X is closer to Y than Y is to now" type things.

Mockdown — ASCII Wireframe Editor

Some Git Stash Commands I Find Useful

Aquileo | How Many Mildliner Colours Are There, Really?

Wed, 13 May 2026 19:03:06 +0000

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 day, okay?

Version two of the site includes:

The colours and sets for all Mildliner types: standard, brush, fine, mix, dot, stamp, and fragrance
SVGs of every pen type — the clips and length are different on all of them
New SVG logos for all the pen types because Zebra don't appear to have these anywhere
Icons for the pen types to use with the colour list
All 42 colours (more on that below) with indicators of which types they are available with
Print stylesheets for printing checklists of sets

While looking for something else I noticed on this page on Zebra's website^[1] that they say there are 42 colours which is one less than the 41 I was aware of. I looked through the list and none of them seemed unfamiliar so I started writing them out one by one until I found it — deep gray, which I had overlooked on my first pass, is a new colour that only exists in the Mildliner fine pens. I had misidentified the deep gray as dark gray in my review — I got really close to noticing and then didn't:

[...] all the cap colours match with the exception of dark grey where the cap is much darker on the fine one than it's standard counterpart.

Version two of the site has been a bunch of work to find out all the information - Zebra has different information depending on the country so it's been hard to trakc down some of it. I'm still looking to find out the Japanese product codes of the Mix colours but I'm hoping I'll have mine by next week to confirm that. I also believe the Dot and Stamp markers don't exist in the Japanese market so they don't have the product codes.

I'm pretty happy with the whole site but the "All Colours" section is my favourite — each colour shows, with custom icons, which pen type the colour is available with. Fun fact: Gold and Apricot are the only two colours that are available in every pen type.

Mildliner Reference Version Two

Notice the hilarious -new on the slug and the title of the page is "Copy of Discover Mildliners". The old page still exists ⤾

Aquileo | How Many Mildliner Mix Colours Are There?

Sat, 09 May 2026 10:58:44 +0000

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 them immediately. And if my maths is correct, ten is more than six, which is how many I was aware of until that moment. This was the image they had which I downloaded so I could update the Mildliner site.

I started adding them to the site and noticed that one of the colours I already had, Red and Gold, isn't going to be in the pack I ordered. I went back to Zebra's website and there's no mention of these additional colours, just the original six. So eleven is the number.

I'm down a rabbit hole now thinking about rebuilding the reference site, working out how many of the dot and stamp marker versions there are, and if there's a secret extra one in the brush versions like there is in other ranges. Very normal stuff.

Aquileo | Lamy Safari 2026 Neon Pink and Neon Yellow

Wed, 06 May 2026 20:11:34 +0000

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 "review" these - they're glossy Safaris, you know what you're getting and if you don't, smarter people than me have reviewed them before.

Here's the new neon pink at the bottom compared to a pink Balloon, the AL Star Fiery, and the standard Safari pink. When it's next to the standard pink it's more obvious how bright it is.

Aquileo | This Post About Outdoor Taps Is Actually About Sharing Things

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:21:05 +0000

Over the weekend I was attempting to setup my garden hose ready for the summer and my dad had helpfully given me a big bag of tap connectors he had spare but none of them fit my outdoor tap despite one of them being, to my eye, a perfect match.

This page from Hozelock explains threads on a tap are "sized according to the standard British Standard Pipe, also known as BSP". Yay standards. Looking into it more there seemed to be three options: 1/2″ BSP, 3/4″ BSP, and 1″ BSP which correspond to an outer thread measurement of 21mm, 26.5mm, and 33mm. I measured my tap with my tape measure and it looked to be 21mm or 1/2″ BSP. I found the correct adaptor I would need based on this but I already had that exact thing in my hand and it was the aforementioned one that didn't fit. The 1/2 was a tiny bit too small, the 3/4 was too big. I grabbed my calipers to get a more accurate measurement and it was actually 22mm which according to maths is larger than 21mm.

At this point I didn't really know what to search for because "like a 1/2 BSP but a bit bigger please" wasn't going to cut it. Hozelock didn't have anything on their website beyond the three standards. I still don't know how I found it (perhaps I should have used Horse) but I eventually stumbled upon this Reddit thread about tap threads where someone had included images of the exact same problem I was facing. There were a bunch of comments that linked to dead pages but the top comment was someone who had summarised everything in the thread:

For anyone else coming to this thread years later, who also had the same issue of the tap falling exactly between the 1/2" and 3/4" connectors [...] I found that my outside tap is a non-standard 5/8" thread, BUT there are connectors available for it!

I ordered a 5/8 adaptor (this Spear & Jackson BWF10 Female Threaded Brass) from Amazon, it arrived the next day, and it fit perfectly. Great success. I did see some references to another size of adaptor, 7/8", which seems to be called a "farmer's tap" but thankfully I didn't need to hunt one of those down.

As I am want to do, I posted a note about it a bit later in the day. Like many posts on my site it was as a record for myself but also on the off chance it helps someone else. To my surprise Ana replied that she had the exact same problem and had been putting it off so it helped at least one person and I have a garden hose ready for summer.

Aquileo | Mildliner Fine Review

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:50:01 +0000

Update 2026-05-13

I incorrectly identified the darker gray as "Dark Gray" but Zebra made a brand new colour for these called "Deep Gray" presumably to send me into a spiral of trying to work out where the 42nd colour was.

I'm not saying I'm obsessed with Mildliners but this review of the new fine versions will be my fourth post about them so make of that what you will.

These new fine versions have two tips: a fine 0.7 and an extra fine 0.5. They're longer than the standard Mildliners presumably to accommodate the fine tips and the top of the cap is embossed with an F. There are ten of these in total reusing existing colours across two sets: the calmer, darker "Set A" and the brighter "Set B". I've updated the Mildliner site to have the new sets but for the sake of completeness the available colours are:

Gray
Brown
Dark Blue
Red
~~Dark~~ Deep Gray
Gold
Apricot
Fuchsia
Violet
Summer Green

I think gray is probably a little too light to be useful at the extra fine size but overall this is a decent selection of colours. Two grays though? Come on. If Art from the Heart are to be believed these have limited availability although I can't verify that because Zebra don't seem to know these exist based on their website.

The extra fine tip doesn't give the kind of resistance I like from a fineliner usually but I doubt I'll be using these to write with; much more likely they get used for cover pages and general decoration. It's notable that there is now multiple definitions of "fine" across the range - the standard fine, the new fine, and the brush tipped ones mark the non-brush end as "super fine".

~~One other oddity when comparing them is that all the cap colours match with the exception of dark grey where the cap is much darker on the fine one than it's standard counterpart.~~ As above, this is because it's a different colour. Swing and a miss from me.

I paid £10 for each set of these which is about right for Mildliners and I'm impressed with them. As of right now I've only seen them on Art from the Heart but I'd imagine other retailers will get some soon.

Aquileo | Fix for Disney Plus Error 73

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:53:01 +0000

Today I was met with error code 73 when trying to login to Disney Plus on my Apple TV. Their help article says you're either on a VPN or "Attempting to access Disney+ from a country/region where service is currently unavailable" which I obviously was not.

Despite lots of articles on the web saying to trying rebooting, reinstalling, and the like, none of that worked (although I did try it anyway) because what had actually happened was Disney had blocked my IP address. I know this because when I got on live chat, explained the situation, they asked for my IP (by sending me to this ad-riddled website) then they "refreshed my IP" for me which magically fixed it. Yep, refresh the IP address, thats a thing.

No amount of rebooting was going to fix that. Next time, I'll just go straight to the live chat.

Aquileo | Ash Fetchum

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:41:23 +0000

As I mentioned in this post I set up Forgejo recently to move away from GitHub but one of the things that worried me was backups. I know I shouldn't blindly trust GitHub to not lose my data but it seems an unlikely situation so I've never done anything about it really. I trust myself less than that.

Of course I have backups of the server, which backs up the repositories, but I wanted a solution that meant I also had the code locally to then send to my offsite backup.

I currently have code in three code forges: GitHub, Source Tube (which is Forgejo), and my Forgejo instance. My first instinct was to make a script that goes into every folder in my developer directory on my computer and fetches the changes but that wouldn't work if I made a new repository on one of the services. The ideal solution is to go through every repository on each of those services and fetch the latest changes to my machine. So I built Ash Fetchum and this logo that I'm very proud of (along with the name).

Ash Fetchum works by connecting to the GitHub or Forgejo API, fetches every repository, then cloning or fetching that repository to the defined location on your local machine, in my case /repo-backups. The readme has instructions on how to set it up and it should be relatively straight forward as long as you get the token permissions correct.

It also has a "manual" mode where you can give it an array of repository remotes to keep up to date. I'm using this as bodge-job replacement for some GitHub pages deployments that I want to move away from GitHub but it could easily be used for a more defined set of repositories to backup.

View Ash Fetchum on KnightForge.

Aquileo | Back to Alfred

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:36:21 +0000

In 2024 I switched to Raycast from Alfred. I'd been a long time Alfred user but I was tempted by Raycast's shiny UI and better integration with things like Reminders. Turns out I never used the reminders integration or most of the other features Raycast has that are unique.

I had spent time converting some of my workflows to Alfred extensions to varying success. The stricter nature of how Raycast extensions are built is good for Raycast but doesn't help me, a person who just wants to write a script or two and make things do other things. It was far too much effort to make new extensions or fix broken ones (like my Safari one that broke very quickly and I never fixed).

Raycast has always been pushing their AI stuff but it's mostly been out of the way and was basically "plug in your API key to chat to your ~~ai girlfriend~~ favourite model". Except now they're getting into the slop game so I'm out.

I had to write a script to convert my Raycast snippets to Alfreds format which you can find here.

So I'm back on Alfred. It has it's own problems, like aging workflows that don't work scattered around the internet but the gallery does help somewhat with that. I wish it there was a better submission process instead of "post in the forum" and to be honest I'm not in a rush to add more of my own plugins to the gallery, I'll just keep them on my own repo for now. Which is the last thing to do: I need to get setup again with my workflows, get my backup scripts working, and move them over to KnightForge. They'll still be on this page going forward though.

Aquileo | Code Corners

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:57:29 +0000

It's been 10 years since Tim Holman made GitHub corners, the little triangle with the waving Octocat you see on some open source projects, including many of mine.

When he made those it had been eight years since GitHub posted the ribbons on their blog. GitHub is synonymous with online code but I have code that isn't on GitHub and so do lots of other people. Even if it is on GitHub, it doesn't mean we have to also have their mascot on our pages.

We're overdue a platform-agnostic alternative so I made one: Code Corners. A triangle with the classic </> in the middle.

There's no fancy animation like the GitHub one but it does fix a bugbear^[1] of mine from that one — there is no secondary colour. It's transparent so it matches whatever background you have instead of having to set that yourself.

The site is basically the same as Tim's so it should be familiar to anyone who's used GitHub corners in the past.

Forgejo Corners, Gitea Corners, SourceHut Corners, random-page-on-your-website corners. You can link to literally anything. Even GitHub.

Yep, that really is how it's spelt, TIL ⤾

Aquileo | Notes on Setting up Forgejo on Coolify with SSH

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:59:19 +0000

For reasons that I'll write about on another post, I had occasion to setup my own instance of Forgejo - "a self-hosted lightweight software forge", aka "We have GitHub at home". Despite having an install of Coolify on one of my servers which should have made this one-click, it was significantly more clicks than that.

The version in Coolify's library is version 8 where the current version is 14 - this was the start of my issues. I was able to get Forgejo running. I could create repositories, clone them and push, but only over HTTPS and not SSH. The port should have been mapped correctly to make it work but something was misconfigured. SSH is never a fun thing to debug and I had lots of help from Adam, Melanie, and Daniel all of whom had it working on their instances without any tinkering.

As best I can tell is that between version 8 and 14 lots of things changed, as you'd expect, so changes I made to port mapping weren't applying correctly. Then I'd try a fresh install but forget other settings I needed to edit. Then I'd do it again and forget something else. I installed Forgjo from fresh at least six times before I was able to get it running and the final working version was simple: change the version to 14, change the 22222 port mapping to 2222 and don't touch anything else. That's it. I had seen this GitHub issue which also ended with "lol did a reinstall now it's fine" so I at least have a bit more info here.

My final docker compose file looks like this:

services:
  forgejo:
    image: 'codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:14'
    environment:
      - SERVICE_URL_FORGEJO_3000
      - 'FORGEJO__server__ROOT_URL=${SERVICE_URL_FORGEJO}'
      - 'FORGEJO__migrations__ALLOWED_DOMAINS=${FORGEJO__migrations__ALLOWED_DOMAINS}'
      - 'FORGEJO__migrations__ALLOW_LOCALNETWORKS=${FORGEJO__migrations__ALLOW_LOCALNETWORKS-false}'
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
    ports:
      - '2222:22'
    volumes:
      - 'forgejo-data:/data'
      - 'forgejo-timezone:/etc/timezone:ro'
      - 'forgejo-localtime:/etc/localtime:ro'
    healthcheck:
      test:
        - CMD
        - curl
        - '-f'
        - 'http://127.0.0.1:3000'
      interval: 2s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 15

Miscelanea

The app.ini file, when installed with Docker, lives at /data/gitea/conf/app.ini.

You can add robots.txt, customise the icons, and even the templates. These won't exist in the container under data/gitea/public (for robots and icons) or data/gitea/templates on a standard install. If you add them, they then override the defaults, usually after a reboot. My updated home page template, home.tmpl:


<div role="main" aria-label="" class="page-content home">
	<div class="tw-mb-8 tw-px-8">
		<div class="center">
			<img class="logo" width="150" height="220" src="/img/logo.svg" alt="">
			<div class="hero">
				<h1 class="ui icon header title" style="font-size: 3.5em;">
					
				</h1>
				<p style="font-size:1.3em">The personal Git instance of 
                <a href="https://rknight.me">Robb Knight</a>. 
                <a href="/robb">Have a gander at the code</a>.</p>
			</div>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

Finally, not Forgejo related but noting it here anyway, to connect to the container when you're on the server (via Cory), run docker ps -a | grep forgejo to find the Forgejo container then use the ID to connect: docker exec -it <ID> sh.

You can browse the code I've already moved on my Forgejo at git.7622.me.

Aquileo | Weeknote #1987

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:05:58 +0000

I've spent an ungodly amount of time this week thinking about ~~the Roman Empire~~ how IRC could work for small communities - clients, servers, setup, maintenance. The Lounge is the best client in my opinion but it doesn't support all the new features of IRC like reactions and avatars. It's close to perfect though. I already posted about this but it's worth putting here too: two posts about setting up an IRC server like it's 2006; one from Melanie using Treafik and Coolify and one from Adam which is a pretty in-depth starter guide.

Jim has a really smart way of adding edit links to his site that open in native apps.

Mondegreen "is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning". The etymology is so good - "mondegreen" is a misheard word from a 1765 book. (via Friendship Material)

I learned about Aviation English which is "the de facto international language of civil aviation". Native English are worse at it in emergency situations because they tend to deviate from the standard. Fun stuff.

Cory was seeing the same as me in his analytics - lots of automated traffic from China. He came up with a blunt way to deal with it. Matthias is seeing similar issues. I don't know how the we get out of this shit.

I don't have a use for it right now, but Datasette looks very interesting.

This post by Dan Abramov is a great explainer of what can, in theory, be good about AT Protocol, the protocol that powers Bluesky.

Handy is a "free and open source app for speech to text". Nice.

I'm not in the market for a new Git system but if I was then Radicle would be on my list.

Purveyors of Packaging is a goldmine of old packaging design. [via SimpleBits]

Font Tools is a collection of, well, font tools. Handy.

This PS2 recompilation project has me very excited.

I learned about Poste Restante "a service designed for travellers who don’t have a permanent address". Send stuff to any post office and mark it as "poste restante" and the recipient can pick it up. Seems to be available all over the world.

This list of suffixes for street names has some great ones I've never heard of - "Twitten" anyone?

This post about search engines with their own indexes has a lot of great info in it.

Aquileo | Forgejo Support for EchoFeed

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:38:55 +0000

I've just merged in support for Forgejo to EchoFeed. Forgejo is a "self-hosted lightweight software forge" aka "We have GitHub at home"^[1]. Adam is running an instance as part of omg.lol.

It works the same at the GitHub integration with one exception: no OAuth. Forgejo can exist on any domain, like Mastodon, but it doesn't allow for creating applications (like EchoFeed) on-the-fly. Instead, it uses access tokens which isn't as convenient but I didn't want to create applications on every instance someone might want to use. Here's a screenshot of the required permissions but check the docs for the details on setting the right permissions.

Forgejo support is available to everyone right now.

I don't intend this to be mean but the uncanny valley of how close the UI is to GitHub is hard to miss ⤾

Aquileo | Now (January 2026)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:40:03 +0000

My last now update was November and I was hunting for a pink ink. I found it and I've been using it constantly since then.

I have a new sticker pack, The Internet Pack, which you can buy here.

I am deeply disliking my website design and I've tried a million different new things but I can't get anything new I like so I'm keeping it for now.

This did lead me to start making a sort of starter kit based on the snippet from my toolkit and uchū. I want to not spend time fiddling with fonts and colours and such for every little project.

I'm halfway through Everything but the Code and it's been really useful even if it's not exactly targeted for me. I'm currently dumping every idea for a project with every possible feature onto paper so I can whittle it down to the best ideas.

Also I'm angry, in no particular order, about nazis, AI, ICE, Tim Cook, age verification, probably other stuff. None of this is normal.

Aquileo | Pilot Kire-na Highlighters Review

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:45:42 +0000

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.

Aquileo | Random Monster Generator

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:13:03 +0000

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.

Aquileo | Bullet Journal Is a System for Selling More Bullet Journal

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:14:01 +0000

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.

Aquileo | 88x31 Button Curios

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:37 +0000

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.

Aquileo | Weeknote #1982

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 20:29:19 +0000

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.

Links

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

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.

Aquileo | String Replacements on EchoFeed

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:04:42 +0000

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 @robb@social.lol 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.

Aquileo | App Defaults 2026

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:44:45 +0000

It's been a couple of years since my first post in this series. In 2024 I did an "updates only" list but I think it's worth going for a full list again this time.

📨 Mail Client: Apple Mail still. Email sucks, I don't need it to be better I need it to go away.
📮 Mail Server: iCloud with custom domain.
📝 Notes: Obsidian. I've just done a big reset of all my notes and I'm following Steph Ango's structure somewhat.
✅ To-Do: Journal for untimed things, Reminders for timed.
📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
🟦 Photo Management: Photos.app
📆 Calendar: Fantastical
📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud Drive
📖 RSS: Miniflux with Reeder Classic
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Contacts.app
🌐 Browser: Safari
💬 Chat: Discord, Signal, IRC
🔖 Bookmarks: LinkAce
📑 Read It Later: Raindrop
📜 Word Processing: what
📈 Spreadsheets: Numbers
📊 Presentations: Keynote if I have to but I never do
🛒 Shopping Lists: Alexa lists, reminders
🍴 Meal Planning: Journal
💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Numbers
📰 News: Nope
🎵 Music: Apple Music scrobbled to Last.fm with Sleeve
🎤 Podcasts: Overcast
🔐 Password Management: 1Password, begrudgingly.

When this post is added, that will be five hundred blog posts on the App Defaults website. You should go and listen to the episode that started it all, 097: Duel of the Defaults.

Aquileo | Logitech Options+ Alternatives for MacOS

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:29:22 +0000

Update 2026-01-07

It turns out Logitech let their developer certificate expire which is equally stupid for a $10 billion company.

Also, as pointed out by Mel and Jason, Logitech/Logi has another name in Japan: Logicool. Which is clearly the best one.

Note

Logitech is called "Logi" in some markets but not all of them and to be honest I don't care enough to work out which is "correct" in this case.

As of this moment Logitech Options+, the app that handles all the features for my Logitech MX Master mouse, is down. It connects to Logitech's server for some stupid reason but if said server is down then my mouse doesn't work properly. Very cool and normal.

I posted about this and Reilly was all over it suggesting LinearMouse. I downloaded it and it's an almost-exact replacement for the Logitech crap with the exception of gestures. In Options+ I could set thumb button + swipe to switch between spaces (or in my case, my single full screen app - the Music app). As a workaround, I set LinearMouse to use ⌘ + the back/forward button to do the same thing.

Update 2026-01-07

The beta version 0.10.3 beta-2 of LinearMouse has support for gestures although it doesn't have the option to use the MX Master thumb button at the moment.

The Logitech software has always been shit but I could live with it but not being able to use my mouse because servers are down? Fuck right off.

Anyway, I had started collecting alternatives while I was putting Baby Knight II to bed but given LinearMouse does everything I need, I won't be trying them but here they are:

Logitech have an offline-only version for IT admins to use.
BetterMouse - this one looks like it has all the options.
SteerMouse
Mac Mouse Fix

Aquileo | Pens, Inks, and Obsidian Bases

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:55:44 +0000

I finally got around to trying out Obsidian Bases this evening but I needed a relatively small dataset to try it with. So I grabbed my ink export from fountain pen companion (FPC) and converted that CSV to markdown files. This isn't relevant to using Bases but here's the abridged version of that code anyway:

// inks.js
const fs = require('fs')

fs.readFileSync('collected_inks.csv', 'utf-8').split('\n').slice(1).forEach(line => {
    const data = line.split(';')
    const title = `${data[0]} ${data[2]}`
    const content = [
        '---',
        `brand: '${data[0]}'`,
        `name: '${data[2]}'`,
        `hex: '${data[4]}'`,
        `type: ${data[3]}`,
        `purchased: ${data[13]}`,
        '---'
    ]

    fs.writeFileSync(`./inks/${title}.md`, content.join('\n'))
})

// Diamine Meadow.md
---
// ...
hex: #59ac2b
// ...
---

Once I'd added the new files I created a new Base and added a filter to only show files in my Inks folder. FPC includes a hex code for each ink and ideally I wanted to show this color in the table view. If I could run Javascrupt on every change I would do something like this to change the colour of the text where metadata-input-longtext is the classname of the cell elements of the table:

Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('metadata-input-longtext')).forEach(el => {
    if (el.innerText.startsWith('#')) {
        el.style.color = el.innerText
    }
})

Sadly (or not), you can't do that in Obsidian. I tried using attr() but that only works if the data attribute is on the element you want to style. I then saw in the docs that Bases also has formulas as well as an html function. So I added a formula to my ink Base (Properties > Add Formula) and added a formula that uses the html function.

html("<span style='height: 100%; aspect-ratio: 1/1; background:" + hex + "'></span>")

Next up will be doing the same for my pens and linking them to the inks that they currently have in them. Now I've tried it I can see how Bases could be really powerful on some more complicated data. Perhaps I'll move some of my collections into Obsidian and sync it to my website.

Some posts that helped me understand Bases better:

Aquileo | EchoFeed Profiles

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:48:18 +0000

I'll say this up front: I don't want EchoFeed to be a social network. There are many platforms better suited to that and EchoFeed isn't it. Having said that, I do think there's something nice about being able to link to a profile that says "Yeah I use this thing, I like it, look at a photo of my face and stuff" so I made profile pages that can have a photo of your face and stuff.

There's not much here, by design. Go to the profile editor in the dashboard from the dropdown in the top right and you can set your username, bio, website, and choose a colour for your profile (and your open graph image). Your profile will show if you're an EchoFeed Pro subscriber, how many echoes you have, and how many posts you've made. It will never expose what feeds you have enabled or posts you've made — I may add something related to this in the future but it will be off by default^[1]. You can turn off your profile at any time by unticking "Profile Enabled".

Speaking of open graph images, to get this out quickly I used simonhamp/the-og which is a "An OpenGraph image generator written purely in PHP". It pretty simple to use and had a built-in layout that was mostly what I wanted already. I will update these in the future to have more information but for now, they do the job nicely.

I'm seeing a couple of instances where opengraph images won't load I think because of caching (which I need for the stampede problem) so if you see something off, let me know. For now, you can check out my profile at echofeed.app/@robb.

Tangentially related to this but I'm moving all EchoFeed announcements to here instead of maintaining a separate blog which is overkill. I'll setup redirects and import the existing posts to here in the next few days.

hey tech bros, this is called "consent". ⤾

Aquileo | Weeknote #1981

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:01:35 +0000

Final day of the year, final weeknote of 2025.

The sticker shop is live as of a couple of weeks ago with a handful of stickers I think you'll like.

I'm into a new journal for tomorrow and this time I'm using a Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal I got for a steep discount. The paper isn't as thick as the STM paper I used last year but it's certainly nice to write on. I definitely have some more thoughts about the Bullet Journal brand but that's for another time.

I am getting so many ads on YouTube for fucking AI generation, AI business leader training, and it's all shit. Stop it. Just stop.

KFC have a merch shop and I want this hat. I don't need it but also, KFC hat.

The song "Louie Louie" has been covered upwards of 1600 times. "Three chords and the most mundane beat possible. Any idiot could learn it, and they all did." is a very funny description of the song. I just went to get a link for the song, having read the wikipedia page not actually knowing what the was, only to realise I do know it. I'm assuming everyone does.

Malcolm in the Middle is back and I am here for it.

Superman by Goldfinger went gold earlier this year and they performed it with Tony Hawk on vocals at the Warped tour. As I always do when I mention this song, check out Mike Herrera's acoustic version and his version of No Cigar while we're at it.

Spigen made an entirely unnecessary Classic Mac case for the Mac Mini and I want it.

Mel put together now-updater which automatically updates your now page. Imagine this Rube Goldberg machine I built but it's easy to use and better in every way. It's that.

Game Font Library is a new site listing fonts from games, 259 of them as of this writing.

It's not for me right now, but Year Compass is an interesting idea. (via Juhis)

I linked to this National Park-style font pack in weeknote 1973. Turns out there's another similar one available with seven weights.

Adam made this printable one-page calendar a while back and I printed one to stick in my journal. If you want to see some other versions or find out why Adam is the worst, it was on Hacker News this week. Ellane also has some markdown calendars if that's your thing.

I love this outtakes post from anh.

Finally these Pigeon Post combination letter/envelopes are really cool and I'm buying some for sure. Maybe I'll send some of my stickers to random buyers.

Aquileo | Just 2025 Things

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:05:46 +0000

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.

General

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.

Writing - Online

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.

Writing - Analogue

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.

Travel

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.

Media

TV

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.

Movies

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:

Thunderbolts - This was fine. If Florence Pugh wasn't in it this would be nothing.
Captain America: Brave New World - This was better.
Fantastic Four: First Steps - This was fun but very obviously a filler movie before Doomsday.
Freakier Friday - I was so hopeful but this was awful.

Games

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.

Music

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.

Books

Oh my God, Karen, you can't just ask people what books they read.

Projects

KnightShift Studio

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.

EchoFeed is growing slowly and I've added a handful of new features including filtering rules and a shiny new logo.
KnightShift sticker shop is up and running and has had some sales. I wrote more about it here.
I designed this Pen Addict Waffle House sticker for Brad.

Curios

It's no Humonize but the Connected Outro Maker is a fun little thing.
I don't remember how I got the idea for The Wellness Place but it exists.
Portal Kombat is Top Trumps but for boats, built at Hack Pompey. Related blog post here.
The journalling really got me good and I ended up collecting all the Zebra Mildliners and building this site to track all the sets and colours. Then I did the same for the Zebra ClickArt pens.
I had fun getting set up to print directly from Big Cartel to my new thermal printer.

Miscellanea

A lot of the projects above I made new icons and illustrations for, like the Mildliner and Clickart SVGs. I've gotten a lot better at making these this year and it's opened up some fun possibilities.
It was a year of printers and cameras - I bought a Camp Snap, a Kodak Charmera, a thermal printer for shipping labels, and a Kodak P300 instant printer. Oh and the cat printer that I hooked up to the fediverse.
Me and Adam raised over $15k for St Jude this year, putting just under $50k raised over the past three years.

Note the lowercase "B" and "J". The brand is definitely not what it was even 12 months ago. ⤾

Aquileo | New Stickers, New Store, Who Dis?

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:41:04 +0000

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 🤞

Aquileo | Fix for Slow Open and Save Dialog on MacOS

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:59:41 +0000

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.plist and 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:

I'll probably need to reference this in the future.
I can't rely on a random Reddit thread (or two in this case) still existing in a months time, let alone a year or more.

Aquileo | Weeknote #1978

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:12:01 +0000

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.

Aquileo | Hunting for the Hottest Pink Ink

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 21:09:14 +0000

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:

Pilot Iroshizuku Tsutsuji which Brad is sending me a sample of
Diamine Pink Glitz
Lamy Rhodonite
Sailor Ink Studio 431 and 731
Colorverse Las Vegas

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.

Aquileo | 2025 Stickers Redux

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:25:06 +0000

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:

Four pack of the Don't Know Don't Care Don't @ Me stickers. There's only two of these available. [sold out]
Training Data double pack. 2 × Pirate Bay, 2 × Piracy Ad. I have 20 or so packs of these. Buy
Pirate Bay four pack. There's 10 or so of these available. Buy

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.

Aquileo | Weeknote #1975

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 12:35:04 +0000

I've narrowed down the inks I'm going to try for finding my perfect pink ink to a handful. I'm planing on ordered Taccia Momo first because this is the one that's been recommended to me the most. I also updated my ink list on FPC.

I've added some more pens to my wanted list including the Diplomat Viper, the Monteverde MP1, and the new TWSBI Eco Cosmos Blue with Onyx. I also found somewhere selling the discontinued Pink Eco at retail price so I might need to buy that first.

I managed to find the time to go to the Analog Tools meetup where I got to talk to some wonderful people and also said something very silly.

I've backed Bonfire on IndieGoGo because I'm fascinated by what they're trying to do.

Despite not being an iOS developer (nor do I have any intention of becoming one), Everything but the Code is 50% off for Black Friday and aside from some app-specific things, seems like it'll have a lot of useful stuff in it.

Links

Flare is a new unified app for connecting to multiple social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky. I don't I need this but it's interesting nonetheless.

Grila is a keyboard-driven calendar app for MacOS which reminds me a lot of Godspeed.

Taking stock of my tools by Britney Winthrope is a great post with an new (to me) way of categorising tools you use (the CODE framework - Capture, Organize, Distill, Express).

The Ollee watch is back in stock but I resisted for the time being.

These Japanese firework illustrations are gorgeous. This also led to me to find Affinities which is a book by The Public Domain Review. Right onto my wishlist that goes.

Mutant Standard emoji is a fun new emoji set.

Aquileo | Now (November 2025)

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 20:53:53 +0000

I'm hunting for the best pink ink to match with my Funky Town Estie. As always, Mountain of Ink is an incredible resource for such things and there was some good suggestions on episode 690 of the Pen Addict.

We're organising Baby Knight II's first birthday party because the passage of time comes for us all and she's nearly a year old somehow which means it's nearly Christmas. wtf.

Perpetually thinking about redoing my website, but I want to find the perfect body font before I start.

I'm trying out Bloom as a Finder replacement and I want to find some time to see how Affinity works for vector work now it's free. Pixelmator is good, but isn't really built for it.

We've been rewatching a bunch of Marvel movies while we're a bit short on new shows to watch but we did start Pluribus today.

Finally, I'm full steam ahead on a new KnightShift project - Project Rumble. No information for you, just the code name.

Aquileo | Weeknote #1973

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:30:26 +0000

It's been a while since my last weeknote and it's fine - this is why I'm not committing to doing them weekly.

We are hurtling towards the end of the year and I realised I haven't been taking notes for my year in review post so I've hastily thrown some notes together but I'm sure I will miss something important when I eventually write it.

I don't have McDonald's all that often but I tried the garlic & black pepper nuggets last week - they were pretty good. I also had the Sakura Cherry Blossom × Sprite which was delicious.

On a note of better food, I've been trying to branch out a bit from the ten or so meals we always cook. I've been watching a bunch of Sip and Feast videos and tried out a couple of recipes, the first of which was this garlic butter chicken. The videos on Sip and Feast are really good, easy to follow and all the recipes are also on their website which is handy.

This has led me to assess my saucepans, frying pans, and other kitchen stuff and I am ready to replace everything with stainless steel - most of what we have is fairly cheap and some of it is falling apart. Pro Cook is the top candidate right now but I'm going to their shop at some point to have a proper look at it before I buy anything.

A few interesting videos I watched while on this food kick:

Is Chipotle a Waste of Money? - ignore the clickbait title, this is an interesting look at the cost of food when you include the cooking and travel time.
The Pantry Staples I SPLURGE on (and the Ones I DON’T).
How to Cook With Stainless Steel

I have a big list of EchoFeed features and bugs to deal with that I will get to as soon as I have time so if you're waiting for a response from me, I apologise.

Links

Les goddams is "an obsolete ethnic slur historically used by the French to refer to the English, based on their frequent profanities". History is fun.

Multipotentiality is a new word I learnt. Not sure when I'd ever use it though.

This collection of Hair Band letterings and logos is great.

Visconti Maze fountain pen is bonkers and I love it.

This pizza sticker is amazing via Nic

Top 80 Greatest Guitar Intros. Best or not, this is an impressive show of skill by this guy.

Little Link is "an open source DIY Linktree alternative". Handy.

This story about a snail "farmer" is wild.

I don't know how I'm going resist this font duo. Just look at it.

Aquileo | Inktober? Completed It Mate

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:29:32 +0000

After my adventures with getting okay at drawing I decided to have a go at participating in Inktober - one drawing every day for 31 days based on a prompt, the full list of which you can see here.

I did the first two prompts (mustache and weave) and then on the third day I stumbled upon a dinosaur character I quite liked, who I have named Jeff. He appeared in the next few drawings so I went back and redid them to feature Jeff. I love Jeff.

I love all my inky children equally but these are some of my favourites. I find it notable these are all after the halfway point of the month.

My John McClane one for day 15 "ragged" got a lot of traction and birthed this glorious "screenshot" from Die Hard:

Did I learn anything about myself or drawing or whatever? Yeah I did:

I actually enjoy drawing if I put some effort in
I need to learn more about perspective
I prefer Uni Pin over Micron fineliners
Drawing existing characters is hard. If anything is even slightly off, it looks weird

Now I've finished I feel a bit lost because I have no prompts but I have had an idea I want to try - Lost Americana has a logo for each track so I think I'm going to try and do the same thing for a different album, probably Meteora.

This also isn't the last of Jeff, he's featured in the November cover page of my journal:

Update 2025-12-18

You can get the Jeff Sinclair sticker on my sticker shop

And I'm working on a sticker based on the Sinclair Oil Corporation logo:

You can see all my inktober entries here. I guess I'm somewhat of an artist myself now.

Aquileo | I Was a Guest on The Pen Addict

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:49:48 +0000

Myke was off this week so Brad asked me to fill in on episode 689 of The Pen Addict.

We caught up on what I've been up to since the last time I was on in March, how pens led me indirectly into drawing for St Jude and then Inktober. To wrap up toptober we did our top five stationery items of this year which included a discussion of our handwriting styles.

Listen to The Pen Addict 689: A Platypus Riding A Bicycle

Since recording I have ordered Diamine Claret, Brad is sending me a sample of Pilot Iroshizuku Tsutsuji and Ben is sending me a sample of Robert Oster Hot Pink to try out in my Funky Town.

Aquileo | Pilot Juice Space Smash Set

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:35:00 +0000

I posted in July about the Pilot Juice Planet Labyrinth set which are neon editions of the juice line. I had mentioned there was a second set called Space Smash and I picked those up this week.

The purple is great, blue is decent, but the yellow is nearly impossible to read - I thought the green was bad but yellow is much worse for readability.

Aquileo | The Internet Is Cool Actually

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 12:40:00 +0000

On my desk right now I have:

A copy of issue one of Good Internet magazine
The Internet Phonebook
The print version of S3 of Foofaraw
Unch issue 1, a crossword magazine

All of these are made by cool people on the internet and I think that's pretty cool.

Aquileo | Get Okay

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:26:12 +0000

Of all the things parents can annoy you with the clichés are the worst. "You won't know until you try". Okay mum, whatever you say. I think you know where this is going.

I've always thought I wasn't any good at drawing but what had actually happened is I never tried. Like really, sat down with a pencil and paper and tried to draw something. Maybe with a reference image. It turns out, if you actually try a little bit you might be okay at a thing.

Near the start of the St Jude campaign I noticed I had some spare stamps so I figured why not use them on something interesting like...do a drawing and I'll send it to someone. Initially I intended them to be my usual "I haven't tried that hard" ones but then people actually donated for one and I panicked. I can't send something crap to someone who has donated, it had to be at least a little bit good. So I actually sat down and tried. Those came out pretty well so I offered a few more. And some more. By the end of the campaign I had sent out 26 unique animal drawings and one London bus (Hi Joe 👋). Turns out, I was okay at drawing.

These requests led me to ask some curious questions like do snails have nostrils? Whats the different between a tortoise and a turtle? What the fuck is an opossum? What is an ionic column? If a hotdog horse had a hot dog bun body, would the legs also be made of bun?^[1]

Doing these added somewhere in the region of $1000 to the total we raised this year and has introduced me to a new hobby I'm enjoying and doesn't cost lots of money. I've been doing Inktober and plan to continue through the rest of the month. I also seemed to have stumbled upon a character who is yet to be named, but he is a dinosaur with little stubby hands and feet. Here he is on his way to comic con, lil' cutie.

Sort of. The latter lives in water. It's a marsupial, proper weird looking. They are the tallest, thinnest, and most ornate out of all three ancient Greek orders. I decided that yes, it would. ⤾

Aquileo | St Jude 2025 Recap

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:02:12 +0000

It's the 2nd of October, AKA Bonus September which means Relay's St Jude campaign is more-or-less over, having blown past the $700k target. Adam and I fell short of our target but still raised over $15k, putting us just shy of $49k raised over the past three years.

As we tend to do, we added additional stickers during the campaign. Everyone who donated for stickers is getting five stickers instead of the original two which are being ordered and posted very soon.

On a whim, I added an incentive to get an animal drawing from me. These turned out to be quite popular so I ended up doing 27 of them in total and the final ones went into the post yesterday. I'll have a separate post up about that soon but here's one I did for Kevin:

Like I did last year, I bought a roast from JD who destroyed my website with his youthful venom:

Alright, Robb, it’s your turn. rknight.me, what a digital masterpiece. I mean, in the same way a Facebook marketplace listing with a few blurry photos is a masterpiece. Your website looks like the cool indie blog your friend built in the mid-2010s… except slower. That 4.56s LCP time means I could’ve walked my pet dinosaur before I saw an image appear. Listen, I’m not a web dev, but good thing you didn’t ask that before telling me to roast your website. I went to the Eleventy leaderboards and man do you have a lot of ⚠️ and 🚫 icons everywhere! Do I understand what most of the abbreviations mean? Heck no, but it’s a good thing Eleventy uses icons. Well, not for you, I suppose…

Ok, but the typography. It feels like it was chosen by closing your eyes and spinning the Google Fonts wheel. And no capitalization on the proper nouns? Is that what they teach in schools across the pond, right after your multiple math classes? The color scheme is straight out of a disco, which is certainly a vibe.

Robb, you certainly love your links. Your website is a choose your own adventure book, where every choice leads to another hallway of sub-links, dropdowns, ‘more here’, and ‘check this out’ pages. You can't just visit rknight.me, you get lost in it, just like in Ikea. At least at Ikea they give you meatballs when you’re trapped, though. Click one link, and you’re suddenly three levels deep in a subsection that exists solely to link to more subsections. It’s the Russian nesting dolls of websites.

So, yeah, your website is a maze of slow-loading pages and questionable design. But hey, at least it’s memorable! Not because it’s good, but because it’s the only website where I can both roast it and see my name immortalized in /uses. Without that part? Just another personal blog site on the internet.

I donated to have my name, and those of my friends Robbb and Robbbb, on Brad's board:

I'm a sucker for incentives so I donated for stickers and a coin holder from MVO, a postcard from Lisa which arrived this morning, the Brad pack from Kaleidocraft, stickers from Ste, and a pin from the Lovely Devs.

The newly updated Donation Daddy site worked perfectly throughout the month and I already have some fun ideas for next year.

Thank you to everyone who donated or shared the campaign. It makes a difference.

Aquileo | Weeknote #1966

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 11:12:14 +0000

We've raised over ten thousand dollars for St Jude as of right now, with a couple of weeks left of September to go. You can still get stickers and I've been having a lot of fun doing animal drawings - I will open at least a few more slots before the end of the campaign. You can donate at stjude.omg.lol.

This is a lovely knob and I want one.

Ollee Watch turns your classic Casio watch into a smartwatch. This is fascinating and I could see this being a replacement for my Apple Watch.

I must have a teeny tiny Kodak Charmera. Just need to find somewhere to buy one.

Speaking of weird cameras, Camp Snap have a new pro version coming which looks very cool.

Life is Strange is getting a TV adaptation. I swear to god if Amazon mess this up I'm gunna flip a table.

Letter Club is an interesting concept - a newsletter that everyone on the newsletter contributes to.

While looking for redacted I came across this site that has dimensions for various things including Pokemon like Ditto as well as how they compare to other objects (or in this case, a Jigglypuff).

roughViz is a library for creating hand-drawn styled charts in the browser. I reckon I can find a use for this soon.

This friendly introduction to SVG is a masterclass in writing technical posts.

HomeBox is some nice looking home inventory management software. Do I need this? Probably not but nothing says fun like home inventory.

This isn't news to anyone even vaguely familiar with map distortions but the African Union is pushing to start using more accurate maps. I'm all for it.

sveltia-cms is a Netlify/Decap CMS successor and has been written from scratch. Need to try this out soon.

Finally this toot is way too real:

We really need to start pushing the truth about AI.

The easiest job for AI to replace would be Management.

Uses the most resources, while offering the least amount of actual productivity.

Reads something by some idiot on the internet, and bases their Management Style around it.

Makes decisions without context.