Robb Knight • Posts • RSS Feed

Day six of Recipe Week. This is certainly not healthy in any way at all but god damn is it tasty. Leek and Bacon Jacket PotatoesThere are many ways to make a jacket potato, I choose the microwave way because it's quicker. 2 Jacket potatoes8rashers Chopped...

Alex has an excellent post about how they name their computers which is, as they mention, a very important part of setting up a new device. Unlike Alex, I don't choose a new name when it gets replaced - my iPhone is always called Starlord. Which brings me to the naming scheme: Marvel characters. Some of these make sense, some of them don't. Mac...

Right folks, this is the laziest "recipe" ever but it's great so here we are: toad in the hole. I will take a better photo next time I make it, I had to pull this one from my Instagram/Pixelfed archive.

I got a lot of feedback from my last post which fell into two categories: either about the technical implementations or why someone is using Bluesky over other options. As soon as my sent my previous post Bluesky started having outages which has made looking into the feedback interesting to say the least but they've been adding obscene amounts of...

These thoughts about Bluesky are unorganised and mostly off-the-cuff so make of that what you will. The API, even just for posting, strikes me as very strange. I, as the developer, have to mark which things are hashtags, mentions, and links unlike Twitter, Mastodon, and basically every other network. If I want link previews I have to do that too....

This recipe came to me via my friend Ali, who had it at The Flatiron Room when he was living in New York. He's made it for us a bunch of times, including on my stag do, as you can in the accompanying photo. As an aside, my stag do was three of us in a cabin in the middle of the Welsh countryside for three days and it was glorious.

Recipe week day three is a cheesy chicken and bacon pasta that I tried for the first time last week and it was banging. You should try it.

Day two of recipe week is this recipe for candied jalopenos that I like to make a batch of at the start of the summer for pizzas on my Ooni.

As promised last week, this week is recipe week. This is one we batch cook for Baby Knight every few weeks and she can't get enough of it. The last batch I didn't have any tomato puree but I went ahead with it anyway and she still enjoyed it.

NoteI had already built most of this before I saw Mat had already done this including making a plugin available. Lesson learned, maybe Google it first. Cooklang, as I wrote about in my previous post, is a markup language for recipes. I wanted to put all my recipes on my site under the /recipes directory which meant I needed to add support for the...

While working on my recipe handling for this site as outlined in my previous post I realised that there are many recipe-related browser extensions available so I should be able to test my schema.org markup and my microformat class locally so I downloaded a handful of the most popular ones. And it turns out they just...don't use the schema to...

I've had a note in my todo list for quite a while to get my (admittedly small) collection of recipes on my website. The note mentioned to look into Cooklang which is a "recipe markup language" but I also wanted to see if anyone knew of any other standards I should be looking at before I went ahead. I got a few responses: Caleb pointed me to the...

We Got Family is a podcast I do with David Darnes about the Fast and Furious movies. In season one we did the first four movies, plus a bonus episode for Superfast!. It's been a while but we're back for season two starting with 2011's Fast Five. Listen on the website or you can subscribe via RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocketcasts,...

Annie has set a WeblogPoMo challenge for this month, Ask Me Anything: I'm calling this challenge WeblogPoMo AMA (Ask Me Anything). For this challenge I want to foster writer interaction: write a blog post starting with a question—the AMA—and then answer the question yourself in the blog post. There may have been some misunderstanding with how to...

I've had my eye on Setapp since it launched in 2017 but it's never been the right time for me to jump in...until this week. I really wanted to use Godspeed which is on Setapp (as well as having a standalone subscription) so I did some calculations to see if it was worth it. I started with things I knew I would definitely use: Godspeed - $48 a...

Every time I've setup a server in the past decade the SSH keys have been set for me, most hosts I've used do this (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc). This week I signed up for a server with Contabo and I had to do it myself, like a caveman. Lewis was kind enough to help because he'd done the same thing mere days before me. Step one is to copy my key to...

Trying to find the answer to how to use Miniflux with Reeder (app) and the Google Reader API proved to be a bit difficult due to the similarly of the app name and the API name. Or maybe I was sleep deprived. Either way, I finally worked it out but I never found a definitive "this is how you do it" just lots of vague Reddit threads so here we are....

During September I donated to Enigma Stationery's campaign and was entered into a raffle to win the Mark One Enigma Edition and...I actually won! I've never owned a fancy pen[1], especially not one this pretty. I don't even write with pen and paper all that much. None of my notebooks have good paper, or quality covers, or fold out flat but I'm...

Two weeks ago I tooted: Lord help me I'm back on Obsidian Tasks again I came up with a nice solution for what I wanted. Show the first todo item in each of my project files using Obsidian Tasks query language: path includes projectsgroup by function task.file.path.split('/')[1].replace('.md', '')limit groups 1not done I had to add some rules to...

After setting up DNSControl I wanted to use it to move away from DigitalOcean[1] to Bunny DNS. I'd already moved my servers to Hetzner but the DNS was more complicated. This domain, for example, has 45 records for subdomains, CNAMES for Netlify, plus verification stuff so I didn't want to risk moving it manually. I added my Bunny API keys to...

Every now and again I start listening to music on MacOS through my headphones and the audio is tinny and crackly. After some dicking around with quitting Apple Music, reconnecting the headphones, even rebooting the Mac nothing fixed it. I finally worked out the fix[1] - changing the input settings of the Mac to not be the headphones. No more...

When I linked to this post about DNS, Dave replied and mentioned he uses DNSControl for managing this kind of stuff. I'd heard of it before but never actually looked into what it did so I jumped into the getting started guide. I'd recommend reading that if you want a more in-depth guide, this post is just an overview of what I did to get what I...

When 8BitDo announced they were selling a new keycap set that matched my keyboard I got from them I ordered immediately. I didn't need new keycaps for it but I really wanted to get rid of that pesky windows key. They arrived this morning in nice little trays: At lunch I swapped out a bunch of them including a lot of the ones with symbols on,...

This was going to be a scathing review of our wedding photographer I planned on posting becuase I was furious having waited 6 months to get the photos but he's basically gone bust anyway and I've calmed down since then. I'm posting it anyway because it's been in my post drafts for months and I want it for reference. Name of the photographer is...

Mastodon 4.3 released today with a bunch of features but the one most people, including me, are excited about is author tags - this isn't the name of them but they also don't seem to have a proper name as far as I can tell. Anyway, you need to do two things to get the "More from X" section you can see in the screenshot above. The first is to add...

Today a friend shared a video on TikTok with me that I promptly sent to my wife because I knew she would find it funny. It is funny (this is a non-tracked link). A few hours later that friend said "Oh your wife has watched it" because TikTok notified him, with her username, that she had watched it. What the actual fuck. Every time you share a...

I was at a wedding on Friday and when we sat down for the wedding breakfast there was a QR code on the table to prompt us to take photos. I scanned it and to my surprise it was an App Clip for POV camera[1]. This is the first time the seven years since they were introduced that I've seen one - I assumed they didn't exist any more. POV camera is...

Me every time I open a drawer at my desk: Wow I have a lot of stickers in this drawer that I've never used because I'm paralysed with choice about where to put them and if I get it wrong there's no going back No more! I have freed myself from the shackles of sticker doubt by sticking them in a book. An extraordinary idea to stick my stickers in a...

Relay's St Jude campaign for 2024 is (mostly) over and they raised over one million dollars, which is incredible. This year for our campaign, me and Adam set our goal to one cent over last year's final total: $12,590.57. Given that last year $5k of that was from a one-off donation it seemed reasonable to try and aim for that. We never expected to...

After all the Wordpress drama this week I tooted the following: We really need a new, easy to use, CMS written in PHP to compete with Wordpress. Why PHP? Because you dump files on a server, any server, and it just works. Loads of people jumped into my mentions to point me to alternatives that exist and here they are. ClassicPress - This one is...

While watching this video about making wine from Monster[1] this morning and thinking about how I want nothing more than to try it, I wondered how this would do as a replacement for the energy drink portion of The Robb Jobb. What is the Robb Jobb? Good question, smart reader. The Robb Jobb is a punch of my own design that I have made on a handful...

Last week I asked if anyone had suggestions for a MagSafe car mount and I got a ton of recommendations. Loads of love for Peak Design but I'm not paying that much just to hold my phone. Lots of people also suggested various no-name brand ones from Amazon which were much more palatable to me. I ended up with this one by a company called Lisen. It...

Ten days ago, I passed my driving test and my dad was kind enough to give me my mum's old car: a 2011 Smart Fortwo. The plan was I would drive this for a few months before Baby Knight Two is born, then we'd trade it in and get something bigger and I would take my wife's car. It's a weird car. It's much bigger inside than you'd assume, the boot is...

tl;dr: Donate to our campaign here at stjude.omg.lol. It's basically September which means it's childhood cancer awareness month and time for Relay's annual fundraising event. Last year, me and Adam raised $12,590.57 as part of the campaign. This year we're going to try and beat that total and we have two exclusive stickers which you can get for...

Within a few hours of tickets going on sale for Relay's 10th anniversary live show last year there was a discussion in the Discord about ways to say what seats we had so other people could see who they're sitting next to[1]. So I got on it. NoteThe domain (lodon.lol) redirects to the GitHub repo now, I won't be renewing it. The first step was to...

A couple of days ago Sara tooted, then wrote a post, with re-worked words of the Wear Sunscreen essay made famous by Baz Luhrmann. Keenan then recorded this over the music and I later had the idea to make a proper video for it, So here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5UsuZ4DS_Q

Chris was inpired to make his game library page by me. Then he went and added PSN trophy details so I became inspired to do the same - and also do Xbox achievements. I don't tend to chase getting trophies or achievements but it's nice to be able to see them all in one place anyway. NotePreviously I was scraping PSN Profiles for my current game...

Mastodon 4.3 adds support for a newly proposed OpenGraph tag to identify the creator of the link, which looks like this: meta property="fediverse:creator" content="@robb@social.lol" /> Mastodon (and hopefully other places in the future) will use this tag to display the author's profile below a shared link like so: This additional data is also...

Ben has an excellent post expanding on my findings about Perplexity ignoring robots.txt. He also digs into the various ways prompt injection does and doesn't work. The entire post is well worth your time but this part really jumped out at me: When I searched about creating an end for our sofa, Perplexity hotlinked some photos from that post which...

Since I wrote about Perplexity it has been reported on by Wired, Wired again, Fast Company, the Verge, and others. And there's more coming so keep your eyes peeled. I even ended up on Perplexity's Wikipedia page. I also spoke at length about all this on episode 187 of Ruminate. The latest article is this Wired article that reports that Perplexity...

I often have occasion to come back to a blog post and add some kind of update. Maybe I changed my mind or someone offered some new information I hadn't seen at the time of writing. Up until now I would just add updates willy-nilly; sometimes they'd be at the start, sometimes the end, sometimes in bold, sometimes not. What I wanted was something...

Update 2024-06-19WIRED confirmed my findings I wrote yesterday about blocking AI bots on the server and today I have been doing the same for MacStories. Once it was setup Federico noticed that he was still able to get a quote from a specific MacStories post from Perplexity. I figured that this might be because they index pages (they are a search...

In April Ethan wrote this post about blocking AI bots with Apache and .htaccess. I've already done this for my robots.txt file but quite frankly I don't trust any of the AI companies to respect that. Jason Santa Maria (via Ethan): robots.txt is a bit like asking bots to not visit my site; with .htaccess, you’re not asking It's been on my list...

This week I added /where and /someday to the Slashpages site. I started making my own someday page, which is still in progress, but it got me thinking about a similar but distinct page: /next. I see this page as a toned-down version of someday: rather than my hopes, dreams, and goals, it's movies and TV shows I want to watch, games I want to...

WeblogPoMo is over. You can read all my posts here. I followed the hashtag all month and also followed the @pomo account. I was flooded with excellent posts daily including people who just started blogging which fills my small web heart with joy. There's nothing I love more than reading about things people are really into and WeblogPoMo has...

Update 2024-07-10The Converse have been retired. They lasted 305 days at a cost of 16p per day. When I got married, I wore a suit and a pair of black Converse Chuck Taylor All Star's. They were brand new and the first time I wore them was the day of our wedding. The day after I just put them on because the wedding was over and they could just go...

My Famicase Exhibition 2024 - A design competition where people design fake famicon game covers. This 3D printed mechanical digital clock is glorious. Look Mum, No Breakpoints! - A great intro into using CSS clamp for fluid design. 8BitDo have some new keyboard extensions. I'll definitely be buying the Super ABXY. Handheld List. Excellent list of...

Almanac, my media logging blog, has been ported across multiple systems in the past few years. Of the ~1300 posts, some were manually entered, some were done via an API, some were imported from Letterboxd. The data was sporadic at best and I had no posters or covers which after seeing Pat's watched page and Ste's media page I knew I wanted to...

A really easy recipe that Baby Knight can't get enough of. Ingredients: 500g beef mince 500g passata 250g of orzo 1 beef stock cube Grated cheese Brown off the mince in a saucepan Add the passata, the stock cube, and the orzo, plus 250ml of water Simmer for about 20 minutes while stirring it occasionally otherwise it'll all stick together Stir in...

While working on Almanac to make sure all the posts have all the info and images they need, I came across two posts that didn't really fit there. Both of them were based on memes doing the rounds on Twitter in 2018 so I've moved them here such that they can be found easily. #GameStruck4 This one was doing the rounds on Twitter, I think from this...

After writing this post and using the new setup for a few days I would occasionally get a delay when changing the volume so I've turned this off but I want to keep the post anyway for reference in the future. I've been enjoying my new keyboard from 8BitDo but one thing has been bothering me. Unlike the MacOS keyboard buttons, the volumne knob[1]...

Following on from my two posts about Raycast, I got some feedback about some things that I missed. Dean pointed out that my scripts to open common folders were unnecessary because Raycast has a Quicklinks extension which can be used to open files, folders, and websites. He also mentioned something else Raycast has that I didn't realise: a search...

In part one I covered how many of Alfred's built-in features Raycast has (it's basically all of them). Firstly, some follow up. I mentioned my toggle workflow from Alfred in the last post. Lewis pointed out that most of the toggles exist in Raycast. I needed to install the Wi-Fi extension to have wifi toggling but all of that is now working as I...

Don't care about the backstory? Go check out slashpages.net. While putting Baby Knight to bed I had an idea for a project: a website that acts as a guide to the different slash pages you can add to you website. "Slash pages" is a phrase coined by Shellsharks when I called pages like /uses "sitelets", which is not a good name. They also helped me...

I've been planning out my mythical CMS based on my workflow on and off for a while. I know what features it needs. I know how I want it to work. What I haven't been able to work out, is how I could make it work for other people. How does configuration work? Is it hosted? Paid? Open Source? Is it hard to setup? I look at the likes of Pages and...

Ready for some first-world problem whinging? Of course you are. It's the most personal product we've ever made This is how Apple described the Apple Watch when it was introduced. And yet here we are nine years later without custom watch faces or even a way to make our own based on the components of other ones. The watchOS 10 update changed what...

I don’t have a driving licence. I’ve lived most of my adult life in Portsmouth which is the most densely populated city in the UK. We have a pretty decent bus system, taxis used to be cheap (not so much the past few years), we have rental scooters, and we have five train stations. So public transport isn’t an issue. But I have Baby Knight now and...

An excellent idea from Merlin Mann: the idea is to see if I can get somebody interested in a band I love (or sometimes even one specific aspect of a band I love) by curating a playlist of seven and only seven songs [...] Just seven really good songs that might help you fall in love too. I enjoy the "essentials" playlists that Apple Music does but...

We got married in September last year, having previously been booked in to do it in September 2020 and May 2021. We had a small wedding so we didn't need to be precise with the number of people attending for the most part but we[1] did want a website where we could put all the information, show a countdown, and have an RSVP form. To make the site...

Heiji asked what my blogging workflow is and I thought not only is it an interesting idea for a post, but also can serve as a blueprint for how I want my new CMS to work. Post Types I have four types of posts on my site: Blog posts - titled, usually long-form, posts like this one Links - Links to interesting articles usually with a quote and...

I have bad movie opinions. I love movies I know are bad in the "la-de-dah I studied cinema at whatever university" way. I will avoid movies that win oscars because more often than not it means they'll be boring as fuck. If it won darling-of-the-weekend award at some film festival, not a chance. I'd rather watch Tokyo Drift a hundred times than...

In 2005 I got an iPod Video (5th generation) for Christmas. The first thing I did was plug it in and start syncing my music collection that I'd been ripping in preparation for getting it. While I was waiting for the music to transfer over the mega-slow USB 2.0, I started browsing the podcasts section and came across The Ricky Gervais show. I...

If you're interested in what I consider a perfect album I wrote about it last week and if you want to see other people's perfect albums, check out the perfect albums project. This post was originally going to be the same idea as fLaMEd's post with their top 50 artists. Then Apple decided we should all be arguing about album rankings so here we...

I cannot stop thinking about this Waffle House video and their bonkers system for "marking" orders. It involves placing packets of jelly, ketchup, and other things a Waffle House has knocking about in specific places on a plate. John and Merlin spoke about it for almost the entirety of episode 232 of Reconcilable Differences and it's also come up...

There are some phrases that no matter how many times I hear them, and then look them up, I always forget what they mean either because the phrase just isn't obvious or it doesn't come up enough for it to stick in my brain. I'm writing them here in the hopes that this might help me remember the definitions in the future (it probably won't). Stuck...

This post is inspired by episode 015 of Hemispheric Views. When I started drafting this post, I got distracted trying to find the first game I ever played. Turns out it was Asterisk Tracker which you can read all about here. I played that game for endless hours on an Amstrad computer of some kind, loading it up from the floppy disk, and mashing...

Okay so maybe the definition of sitelet doesn't quite fit but it's close enough to describe these common pages people have on their sites. Maybe it needs a better name. Pagelets? Web dongles? Barnacles? Do they need a name? I want one. ![NOTE] Update Shellsharks suggested "slash pages" which I like. Anyway, Chris had an idea for a /interests...

By my count I've had 18 different phones since 2002. In my mind, there are three distinct eras in terms of the type of phones and where I was in my life. Sadly, I don't have any of these any more. Sounds like a fun project to track them all down though. The Hand-Me-Down Era I got my first phone around 2002. A Motorola M3788 which belonged to my...

How was your delivery? How was your ride? How was your call to customer support? How was your purchase you received literally 15 seconds ago? You only just got here but would you rate our website? How was your experience filling in our form to get access to your mother’s will?[1] HOW WAS IT? It’ll only take five minutes of your time which, by us...

Last week I tooted a poll to decide what my next post should be for WeblogPoMo, Ben jokingly asked: Is ‘My Favourite Games’ a compilation of the best covers of The Cardigans track? Of course, it wasn't. Then I went down a rabbit hole for over an hour and listened to every possible cover I could find on YouTube and Apple Music to pick the best...

I started writing a post about my computing history (coming soon) and realised I couldn't remember the name of a game I played a lot of in the early 90s. The best way to describe it is flappy bird in space. I tooted with this description: black background with white stars and you had to get from the left to the right by pressing spacebar to go up...

On Hemispheric Views 110 Jason presented the following question: Pick in your mind a perfect album. And I think it's mostly open to interpretation, but I'm kind of thinking an album that you would say you could just start from beginning, let it run all the way through, without skipping songs, without moving around, just front to back and just sit...

Settle in and get comfy kids, time to tell you the tale of T9 predictive text. We didn't always have a full QWERTY keyboard to type on. T9 was how we typed messages on our dumb phones back in the early 2000s. T9 stands for "typing on 9 keys". Here is a Nokia 3210 and it's glorious buttons. Note the letters on the number keys: To type the word...

Inspired by Chris' post, herein lies my favourite games across the genres I play. Also like Chris, a ★ indicates what I think is a greatest of all time game. I have a fairly large collection of physical games which you can see on my games collection page. 3D Platformers ★ Jak and Daxter (2001, PS2) I got the demo of this with the official...

Matt, then Dave, then Kev, then another Dave, all wrote about what their ideal CMS would be. I don't have as lofty ideals as they do although there's some interesting ideas in there but I do have some things I would like in my perfect CMS and might possibly be doing with a custom-built one in the future. There are some things that are...

If you prefer listening to reading, I spoke to John about this on Ruminate 183. I have used Alfred for about nine years. In that time I've come to rely on it for almost everything I do on my Mac - snippets, clipboard history, finding files, and numerous custom workflows. Raycast is the new(ish) launcher all the cool kids are using. Off the bat,...

Last week Anne put up a page for WeblogPoMo: What is it? Weblog Posting Month, 2024! If you use weblog.lol, or otherwise have a personal blog, you should absolutely participate in this month-long blog posting extravaganza! I said I'd participate so here we are, publicly committing to 31 posts across 31 days in May. My "guiding theme", as Anne...

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast is so good. This came to me via Marty and I'm so glad he thought to post about it. I love The Lonely Island and the first four episodes of this show are great. Each episode they talk about one of their digital shorts from SNL starting with Lettuce which I hadn't seen before. Hearing how Lazy Sunday came...

The past two weeks have been busy with EchoFeed. I launched it after a brief beta period, lots of folks started using it, I fucked up, fixed that, and it's sent over 1700 posts already. Lots of folks wrote about it, many of them as a test of EchoFeed which is very meta, including John, Jason, Habib, Jcrabapple, Stefan, Lou, and Lewis. I like the...

On this week's ATP (around 25:00) John spoke about how a show he listens to said that a link would be on the website and he went out of his way to find that it just wasn't there. I feel bad for the hosts because I'm sure they thought this would be done. Marco spoke about the "two worlds of podcasting" where one understands the platform and the...

It’s taken a bit longer than expected but EchoFeed is now out of beta and ready for sign ups. If you wanna jump right in you can sign up now. There’s a slew of features that have made it into the first release including support for: Mastodon Micro.blog Bluesky GitHub Webmentions Web requests/webhooks Mastodon and Bluesky can automatically include...

I hit 100 articles saved in Raindrop this week and there's no way I can post them all individually so here we go for link dump volume three. I got a new keyboard this week and that led me down a rabbit hole of Mac utilities and also keycaps. Hyperkey - Joshua mentioned this to me and I'm annoyed I didn't know about it sooner. This sets one key to...

This week I bought the 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard which is not supported by MacOS, at least according to their website. I came across this Reddit post that said it does work so I decided to go for it. I think when they say it isn't supported they mean their software for accessories doesn't work on MacOS but I knew I didn't need that. tl;dr:...

I can't find the original tweet, nor do I know which one of us sent it, but some time in the summer of 2015 either John or I sent the other a tweet that said "We should start a podcast" and Ruminate was born (after quite a few never-to-be-published "pilot" episodes). Over those seven years we've published 180 episodes and covered all kinds of...

Since I really got back into following RSS feeds in the past couple of years I've noticed a problem with Eleventy sites[1] and post dates. This also caused me an issue while building EchoFeed but that's a story for another day. If I didn't know better I'd think everyone is scheduling their posts at midnight. It's 3:15pm as I write this. Assume...

Jarrod set up a site a few days ago, One a Month Club, which is a collection of people offering memberships at $1 a month. This was inspired by Manu's post about the same thing: I recently realized that tiers are the wrong approach [...] I also realized that 1$+/month is the best price possible when it comes to supporting online creators My Buy...

Time for Link Dump #2. Lots of interesting links and not enough time to post them all separately. Here we go: Organic Software Directory - This is fun. A bit quiet right now but I'll be keeping an eye on it. Using Gitea/Github actions for triggering Echo - Lewis is running Echo on GitHub actions and wrote about it. He might not need to do this...

It’s well known how much I love Back to the Future so I was excited to see The Incomparable cover Back to the Future the past three episodes. Back in 2011 they did a single episode for all three movies which, as Jason noted, is not nearly enough time to really discuss these movies. Part I - Kramer Before Kramer Part II - A Legacy of Biffs Part...

So, I am converting every line of dialog of Office Space into a .gif. If that was to be a Mastobot, is that something you might be able to give some pointers on in the future? This was a message I got from Jason seven weeks ago. Jason then spent the next 28 hours converting Office Space into just over 1000 gifs and sent them to me so I could get...

Sometimes I hate computers. This evening I lost two hours to a stupid issue that had me doing all sorts of command line nonsense trying to fix it. I tried to install xml2json with npm and was presented with a wall of errors culminating in the actual error of No module named 'distutils'. It's related to node-gyp and anyone who's been using MacOS...

A conversation yesterday in the Hemispheric Views Discord pushed me towards an idea I'd had for a workflow for a while: type some text, append that text to a note. Don't care about the how? Download QuickNote here. As Alfred workflows go it's pretty simple: just three objects. The first is the keyword and getting the input. Typing quicknote This...

I use, and make, a lot of Alfred Workflows. Some of them I rely on every day, some only come in handy on occasion, and sometimes I build something then realise I actually don't need it. I've spent some time the past week sorting out some lingering problems with a couple of them, looking into the filed issues on GitHub, and deciding to archive one...

This post is adapted from the talk I did at the Eleventy Meetup. You can also watch the talk on YouTube. This is what I look like when I try to explain how my website works: There are three main parts that make up this website: Echo, my API server (and Eleventy data files), and standard Markdown files. Echo and Custom Post Text Echo started life...

James wrote a great post with 100 83 ideas for things to do on a website[1] with a call for people suggest more so here's another ten suggestions to add to his list, most of which already exist on my site because I have no imagination. A uses page with software, tools, whatever you use to do things you enjoy doing A collections page to show off...

tl;dr: The process is terrible. Also, these notes are only relevant to the UK. Process This is simplified but, in theory, the process is: Save a deposit Work out how much you can borrow - this tool on Money Saving Expert works well Find, view, and put in an offer on, a house Have an offer accepted Wait around needlessly while everyone involved in...

I have recorded and edited over 175 episodes of my podcasts so I know some things about podcasts but this is basically a list of things I use. If you want to hear from actual professionals I recommend episode 200 of Upgrade. I record using a Razer Seiren Mini. I previously used a Blue Yeti. There are much better microphones available but for what...

After thinking on all the issues and discussion around the privacy of webmentions, I've re-done everything about how I show webmentions on my site, more specifically backfeeding Mastodon replies. Follow Up Chris noted in his post, as pointed out by Cam, that the issue we were actually talking about is backfeed. That is, pulling in interactions...

Three months ago I wrote about using the Johnny Decimal System - a system to organise your files, emails, and everything else in a way that means things are findable and storable quickly. I had assumed, like a lot of things I try, that given a month or so I'd be back to just dumping files wherever and being annoyed when I couldn't find things but...

Wouter's post about retiring their webmention server is an interesting write-up on how complicated webmentions and indieweb functionality in general can be but one point from it has stuck with me since reading it: ...people mentioning or replying to your link via Twitter suddenly appear as a mention on your site. Great stuff, right? Except those...

I was recently[1] asked by Zoe the following question: What's your preferred type of time travel (like singular timeline where things always where, multiverse when you go back, some other shit) That is quite the question. We should start with the different types of time travel to even be able to answer this. I'm not covering every possible...

I'm going to try doing some quick posts like this going forward about things I like. Being the naming genius I am, I'm calling this series "Things I Like". Pizza the Action is a seasoning from the UK-based company Condimaniac. It’s a seasoning mix designed to, as the name might suggest, go on pizza. There’s nothing particularly surprising or...

Computers are not my friend this week and I am basically ready to throw my computer into the sea. Here is an incomplete list of things annoying me at the moment: Discord not marking a channel as read no matter how many times I look at it. Only force quitting fixes it. Open source projects that say they’re “Built with Docker” with no other...

Now this is a theme I can get behind. If my specialist subject for Mastermind couldn't be Back to the Future, "Crisps of the UK" might be a close second. Following in the footsteps of Lynn, Dave, Jonathan, and Peter here are my thoughts on chips crisps. Prawn Cocktail is one of the finest flavours available and I'm sad this mostly doesn't exist...

Apologies for the terrible filtered photos but the only versions I have are from my Instagram archive when we all thought filters were the best thing ever. They were not. My first Mac was a 2009 27” iMac. It was a Christmas present from my parents. I had asked for a Mac Mini so a iMac was a big upgrade. I asked for the mini partly because it was...

Last night I updated my blogroll and podroll to include a description about the sites instead of just showing the latest post; this is much more useful to someone who lands on that page. Then I realised I could add an OPML file so anyone could subscribe to all of the feeds in the roll all at once. OPML stands for "Outline Processor Markup...

My post about implementing webmentions on this site has been fairly popular and I get quite a few questions about something I don't think I explained properly in the post which all boil down to "what is a webmention though and what has that got to do with Mastodon?". Before we get started I will say I found the different pages explaining the...

This is a fun one: I had a file, lets say it was originally called mycoolfile (2).png, it's been uploaded to S3, and then stored in our database. Except at some point it's become URL encoded so it looks like this instead: mycoolfile%20%282%29.png. Now I want to delete that file using the AWS SDK for PHP which you can do, in theory, like so:...

A conversation in the Eleventy Discord led me to remember about the dependents page of a GitHub repository. That is, a list of other repositories that are depending on a package, in this case my Post Graph plugin. I wanted to show which people are using the package on the post graph website. GitHub don't offer an API endpoint for this so I made a...

th { width: 30%; } table { text-align: center; font-size: 0.9em; } Someone recently asked me how I was able to respond to a message so quickly to a keyboard shortcut question using the command and shift symbols (⌘ ⇧) in my response. Snippets is the answer and I thought it would be a good idea to post the ones I use regularly. These all run...

It's my birthday today and Jason has been more enthusiastic than anyone about it, including me. He sent me this e-card and email which I'm sure he definitely hand-crafted himself. It's a response to this toot about my home insurance company emailing me which totally wasn't a "thinly-veiled “please wish me a happy birthday, people of Mastodon”...

Styled XML? Well, I never. Look at my RSS feeds all styled and fancy: This is done with XSLT stylesheets. A truly exciting phrase. I would recommend reading Darek Kay's post on how to do this as well as mine. I won't be repeating everything Darek wrote in his post but I do have some additional details I wanted to note down. To style an RSS or...

Now I’ve calmed down after my tootstorm, here’s what happened yesterday with Netcraft, Facebook, Digital Ocean, and this blog post.[1] At 4:06pm I received an email from DigitalOcean that said the following: We’ve received a report that there may be phishing material hosted on your Droplet at 164.92.144.168 . You can review the report that’s...

Since the last time I posted my homescreen in 2017 the main change is widgets. I still kind of dislike them and wish I could customise them more but it's better than not having them. Top left is Marvis Pro which aside from being a nice music player, also integrates with Last.fm; the main reason I use it. The other widgets are Fantastical and...

Yesterday Chris imported 470 old posts of his into his website and I was inspired to do the same. The earliest posts I could think of were when I was writing reviews of various iPhone apps for iPhoneWorld.ca in 2009. Sadly the site has been offline a long time so I fired up the internet archive and managed to find 14 of those reviews. It's a...

Since I last blogged about the App Defaults project the number of blog posts has more than doubled; there are 320 now! A few people have said something along the lines of "It would be cool to see what the most popular apps are" and I told them I'd been working on a way to do it. I shipped the best approximation I can do given the blog posts don't...

As part of a change to move my blog posts from /slug-of-post to /blog/slug-of-post I needed to set permanent redirects in my Nginx config so the old post links wouldn't 404. Forge has a UI for this but it only allows doing one redirect at a time and I had ~130 to do. So I grabbed a list of all my post slugs and formatted them with multi-line edit...

I tried this recipe on boxing day this year and it was fantastic so we made some more tonight which were, unsurprisingly, also fantastic. You will need: Maris Piper potatoes. 2kg is a reasonable amount for 4-6 people but we ate all those between three of us so do as many as you want can fit in your oven Goose fat Olive oil (optional) Salt Garlic...

Just as I started the year writing back and forth with Jason Becker, this month I was part of Kev's PenPals project. This is the conversation we had covering all kinds of topics including Christmas food, weddings, and POSSE. You can see Kev's post about this conversation here. 1st December Hey Robb, Hope you're doing well? Thanks for agreeing to...

Welcome to the Knight club - RSS-only posts. These only show for RSS subscribers but feel free to share them. Read more about RSS club. I totally forgot about one more project I'd like to get done this year. I want to take my current Eleventy-based site I used for my podcasts and make it usable for anyone to quickly get a podcast up and running....

Welcome to the Knight club - RSS-only posts. These only show for RSS subscribers but feel free to share them. Read more about RSS club. Congratulations on subscribing via RSS, you get these bonus posts. Lucky you. Welcome to the Knight Club[1]. What am I going to post here? Not a clue to be honest but there are things that I want to talk about...

Reading the title you might be thinking "Yeah no shit Robb of course the web[1] is fantastic it's literally the cornerstone of all commerce and communications in the modern world". Or maybe you're not thinking that. But I'm not talking about the web as a whole, I'm talking about the open web. The come-do-cool-things-with-our-api web. The open...

I recently added automatically generated open graph images to my site using eleventy-plugin-og-image. Here is the open graph image for this post: I won't go over how to use the plugin; the docs on the repo and this blog post explain that very well. What I didn't like is that these are generated every time the site builds which, aside from being...

I got married and had a child. No time for anything else. Thank you for reading. Writing This year I wrote 60 blog posts including this one which is a big jump compared to last year's 19. My most popular posts[1] for the year are: Please, Expose your RSS - this one hit the front page of Hacker News App Defaults - see the everything else section...

Here is the recipe for very easy to make sausage rolls. You'll need: ~450g of sausage meat. I prefer to buy sausages and remove the skin as there's a bigger variety of flavours available without having to add stuff to sausage meat myself A sheet of puff pastry. In the UK at least these come in a standard size of 320g (example) An egg A baking...

Last week I tooted about my Github-style post graph on my stats page and people seemed to like it. James added one to his blog pages. Pete swore at me. I knew I had to make it into an Eleventy plugin so other people could us it easily. If you just want to jump straight into using it, check out the docs here. To create the data, which days have...

Threads started to test ActivityPub integration this week and the fediverse is losing it's collective mind going into overdrive to block them in any way possible so they can't grab all your data. Here's the fun part: they can already do that and they definitely don't need ActivityPub to do that. Take my profile for example:...

Inspired by Marco and Kev, here is the current state of my subscriptions. Any prices that were in dollars I've converted to GBP. Anything I pay for yearly I've divided by 12 and marked them as such. Miscellanea I pay for Apple One Premier at £36.95 per month which includes Apple TV+, iCloud Storage, and Apple Music for me and my wife but I'll...

Part One Given this an input like this, find the next number in the sequence. See the advent of code instructions for more details, but we need to go from this: 0 3 6 9 12 15 To the following, to get the final value for that row of 18. To do this we take the first two numbers and get the difference between them. That becomes our first number on...

We've navigating a network today for...reasons. Part One The sample input looks like so: RLAAA = (BBB, CCC)BBB = (DDD, EEE)CCC = (ZZZ, GGG)DDD = (DDD, DDD)EEE = (EEE, EEE)GGG = (GGG, GGG)ZZZ = (ZZZ, ZZZ) The first line is a list of instructions (left or right) and the rest is the nodes with their left and right defined. So if we go right from...

Time to play some matches of legally-distinct-from-poker-and-easy-to-play-on-a-camel[1] card game. Part One Each hand has five cards and a score: 32T3K 765T55J5 684KK677 28KTJJT 220QQQJA 483 Each hand outranks others based on how many cards of each type it has, starting at five of a kind and ending with high card. Here's the array I was using to...

According to Overcast's stats I've saved 424 hours with smart speed. Smart speed, or "trim silence" as other apps call it, is a feature that will remove silences from podcasts and at launch was Overcast’s primary selling point. After the best part of a decade I was convinced by Keenan (if you can, listen to the audio version of the post, it's...

It's boat racing time. For each millisecond you hold the boat down, it's speed will increase by one millimeter per second. Just like the bus in Speed, the boat never slows down. Part One The input format: Time: 7 15 30Distance: 9 40 200 Each column is a race which contains the race time and a distance the boat needs to travel to win....

The description for this puzzle was confusing. Like, really confusing. I had to read it at least five times before I even understood the question. Part One For this puzzle the sample input was as follows: seeds: 79 14 55 13seed-to-soil map:50 98 252 50 48soil-to-fertilizer map:0 15 3737 52 239 0 15fertilizer-to-water map:49 53 80 11 4242 0 757 7...

As soon as I saw this one this morning I knew it was going to at least be a bit easier than yesterday. Part One The premise for today was scratchcards with two sets of numbers: winning numbers and numbers you have. The first half is winning numbers, the second is numbers you have. Card 1: 41 48 83 86 17 | 83 86 6 31 17 9 48 53 From the Advent...

More regex and string parsing today. Sounds like a party.[1] Part One Given an "engine schematic" like below, identify which numbers are part numbers. That is, they have a symbol (not a . though) either next to, above, or below them including diagonally. 467..114.....*........35..633. In this example, 467 and 35 are part numbers, 114 and 633 are...

After finally finding time to do today's challenge, I was able to knock it out in about 30 minutes for parts one and two. At the core of both of parts was parsing strings like this: $input = [ 'Game 1: 3 blue, 4 red; 1 red, 2 green, 6 blue; 2 green', 'Game 2: 1 blue, 2 green; 3 green, 4 blue, 1 red; 1 green, 1 blue', 'Game 3: 8 green, 6...

Until Zoe mentioned it this morning, I didn't know what Advent of Code was [1]. Advent of Code is an "advent calendar of small programming puzzles". So once I knew what it was, I figured I'd give it a go. I'm not sure if I'll make it all month but I'll certainly try. I'm doing it in PHP because it's what I know and it will annoy Zoe a little bit;...

Sometimes one idea begets another. In the case of Crossover I had the idea while building DoubleShift but I was too far in to change it. DoubleShift also now has some fun additional features like leaderboards which only make sense for that site. Crossover, unlike DoubleShift, isn't limited to a handful of TV shows: if a show is in The Movie...

I have watched Scrubs more times than I can count and I am currently re-watching Grey's Anatomy for the third (maybe fourth?) time. I noticed there are a lot of actors who have appeared in both and it seemed like it was every other episode. After some data-wrangling I have an actual answer: 28 actors have appeared in both series. The Idea I...

Now my new site design is done, I've been able to take some time to add features I've wanted for a while. In this case, I want to show popular pages based on pageviews at the end of blog posts, on the search page, and on the 404 page. Fetching Pageviews I use Fathom for analytics on my sites and they have an API which is handy. If you use...

Recently someone emailed me to ask how I was doing SVGs on my website because they'd looked in the source but it wasn't obvious how it actually rendered the SVG so I figured I would do a proper post about it. Here is their email: I'm looking to steal more ideas from you and found this while looking through your web site source: svg class="icon"> ...

Today, I attended a casual no-official-name hackathon. Just a bunch of people working on silly projects. It did have a theme though: silly interfaces. I spent the first hour before I arrived thinking of a few ideas until I thought of the perfect thing: a Mastodon client but it's in a Pokédex. Try it out here. It's fairly limited but you can: Sign...

Two weeks ago when Hemispheric Views 097 released and people started putting up their default app posts Jason said this in the HV Discord: take a hike /now. It's all about /default now I decided to quickly throw a site together to collect all these (at the time eight) blog posts in one place: App Defaults. I used this old web framework you might...

In episode 028 of Hemispheric Views Andrew mentioned the Johnny Decimal (JD) system for organising files. I made a note of it as a thing to look into. Then, like a lot of things, I never went back to investigate. Then in episode 096 they had Mr Johnny Decimal himself on to talk about the system. This was the kick I needed to properly check it...

Earlier this week I had a need to manually find a bunch of people's RSS feed links. It seemed simple enough: go to their website and look for an RSS/Subscribe link but I was surprised to find that a lot of people don't have a link anywhere to their feed. Even if people only ever add your website into their feed reader and let the app find the RSS...

Inspired by Hemispheric Views 097 - Duel of the Defaults! and this post by Gabz herein lies all the apps I use in the various categories as written by Andrew: 📨 Mail Client Mail.app Score: 1 📮 Mail Server iCloud with custom domain Score: 1 📝 Notes Notes.app, Obsidian Score: 2 ✅ To-Do Reminders Score: 1 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting iOS Camera...

It's September 37th and the Relay for St Jude campaign has closed. They raised $774,262.53, putting Relay at $2.98m lifetime raised! Our St Jude sub-campaign raised $12,590.57 and sent out 106 sticker packs to 15 different countries. This is a far cry from my initial goal of $250. I want to thank everyone who donated but I want to call out some...

tl;dr: You can't set full screen artwork without being featured by Apple. In iOS17, the Apple Podcasts app has (for some shows) fancy new full screen artwork but I noticed that my shows don't. After some hunting around, some tooting, and messaging John, I came across this page that outlines the full screen artwork. It explains the sizes for hero...

Late last year I moved Ruminate from Simplecast to it's own site built with Eleventy for a two reasons: I wanted full control over how the site looked Simplecast is $15 a month and that's a lot for a show that makes no money Since then, I've successfully used that same Eleventy site to build the site for We Got Family, my Fast and Furious...

This year is Relay FM's 5th annual fundraiser for St Jude Children's Research Hospital. If you don't know St Jude: The mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child...

I've seen a few conversations on Mastodon the last week or so about why we have so many apps rather than decent mobile websites and why we're shown "things are better in the app!" banners (and who's fault is that website?!). I've been thinking about this on and off for a long time. I don't like that Apple hold all the keys to distrubting an app...

Ten years ago Ed Poole and I launched Just Delete Me. Just Delete Me, as I described it at the time, was: a directory of urls to delete your account from web services I wrote three blog posts in first ten days which you can read here: Just Delete Me 24 Hours of Just Delete Me JustDelete.me: One Million Page Views As I recall we made it over the...

Yesterday I asked on Mastodon what methods people are using for compiling CSS with Eleventy. It's been a while since I've need anything more than a single stylesheet but since I keep adding various things to my site, the stylesheet has got a bit unweildy. I'll admit, I know very little about the various css libraries and tools (the last time I...

Update 2024-03-30: Cory is maintaining a much better list on this repo which I will be using going forward. A robots.txt file "tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site". Generally one would use this to tell a search engine which directories should be crawled, which ones shouldn't, or to completely block from...

I recently started listening to the Hemispheric Views podcast and decided I would go back to the start and listen to the 74 previous episodes that I hadn't listened to. I wrote down all my feedback. I started this endevour on the 17th of May and finished the last episode this morning. Jason agreed to this: We will take any feedback, 3 years old...

Yesterday Mike pointed out that the pilot episode of my new podcast was quiet compared to other shows. I opened up the project files in GarageBand and couldn't see anything that would be causing this so I started hunting around in the settings. It turns out the "Export projects at full volume" was causing this. I don't know what this setting is...

I wanted to expand a bit on my Threads thread so instead of adding to the thread, I've written a blog post about Threads. Clear? Good. The Mastodon blog has a good post about Threads and what it means for the fediverse in general: The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized...

MacOS customisation is basically dead. Plenty of apps that used to work, no longer do. You can still have custom folder icons which is nice but I wanted custom sidebar icons for those folders, like the developer one. I started googling around trying to find something for recent versions of MacOS and the only thing I found was this Reddit post...

To start with, I'm not convinced everything I've done here is exactly to the ActivityPub specification or if there will be problems interacting with Bugle on various ActivityPub servers outside the main ones (Mastodon, Calckey, etc). I'm also unclear on which parts of this are Mastodon-specific and which parts are pure ActivityPub. I will use...

Hey Bear is a YouTube channel with videos of dancing fruits, vegetables, and other nonsense designed to make kids stfu entertain young children. It works. Baby Knight loves it. Last night my partner asked if I was okay because I looked distant and downtrodden. I wasn't sad or tired, I was pondering the biology of the fruits that dance in these...

In episode 20 of Hemispheric Views Andrew talks about his asset lifespan spreadsheet which shows the cost of an item, the date purchased, and the cost per week for said item. I figured I'd have a crack at making my own and after some wrangling with formula in Numbers I was able to get something up and running. The key part was using the DATEDIF...

Over the weekend I spent some time splitting the audio from the Brian Butterfield Diet sketch and then subsequently the Christmas version. Both of these sketches are from The Peter Serafinowicz Show from 2007. I split the audio using Sound Studio which has a handy "split by markers" feature then used Eleventy data files to output those files...

In November 2021 I bought an Ooni Frya 12 (thanks Black Friday discounts!) and since then I've used it somewhere between 10 and 15 times. Each time I've managed to make something about the pizza better; the sauce, the dough, the topping ratio. Herein lies my notes about making better pizzas. For all my pizzas, I've used the Ooni classic dough...

From me, yesterday: We setup a baby name pool at work, £1 a guess. We have 50 names, £51 in the pot. Someone has guessed the name so no money for me. Some additional rules we discussed: If the correct answer is guessed by more than one person, the pot is split Spelling is not important. So "Emelia" and "Amelia" are the same name for the purposes...

Discontinued food items I miss. Fruit Allsorts Brannigans beef and mustard Wonkalate Campino Strawberry and Yoghurt Toffee Crisp honeycomb Tooty Frooties Mingles Sensations Regal Lamb and Mint

When I used to use Plot (RIP) to track movies that had a thumbs up or down system. When I switched to my own CMS for this I did the same thing. Then when I switched to Letterboxd I translated what was essentially a 1-3 rating system to the five-star system (even though it's actually out of ten not five) Letterboxd uses. From my Letterboxd...

MusicThread is "a website to create and share lists of music" by Ed Wellbrook. I recently started using it to save new tracks I've found and new albums, which are then cross-posted to my Mastodon account with Echo. The iOS app, currently in beta, has a share sheet extension for adding to a thread, but for MacOS I needed to make something in...

I recently helped my friend Tim move his site from a Wordpress install to a much simpler Eleventy setup. The biggest hurdle was transforming the Wordpress exported data into Markdown files. Thankfully wordpress-export-to-markdown exists. This is a command line tool that takes a wordpress export, puts all the posts in markdown files, and downloads...

Some more links and tools I've found or had saved about webmentions. Read my post on adding webmentions here. @remy/webmention Sadly the webapp side of this is down at the moment but the command line tool for sending webmentions is completely standalone. You can pass the script a url or an RSS feed and it will scan it to find links, confirm those...

Right off the bat, I read the following two articles to get a sense of how to do this so I won't go over too much of the same content but rather add some thoughts of my own about the process. I would highly recommend reading both of these. Adding webmentions to your static blog by Jan Monschke Using Webmentions in Eleventy by Max Böck Also, I...

If you want to make your Twitter archive a bit more useful than the standard backup Twitter give you, there are 3 options of varying complexity I'm aware of. Option 0: Don't do anything This is by far the easiest option. Don't care about your tweets. Let them wither away into the ether. Be free from the shackles of hoarding your data. Option 1:...

Letters is a ongoing project by Jason Becker that I was involved in for this month. The what: Letters will involve me corresponding with someone else on the internet over the course of a month. Each week, we will each write a letter to each other. There are no set topics. The why: I was thinking about how much of our history (in the West at...

Note: Every Mastodon has an RSS feed you can use to get statuses if you don't need the data in JSON format https://example.social/@foobar.rss. If you want to get a user's statuses from Mastodon you can't just look these up with the username. You need, to quote the documentation, "the ID of the Account in the database". To get this, we can use the...

I'm not signing up to any service that doesn't offer at minimum RSS feeds for my data. Ideally an API, even a simple one. No more apps that aren't part of the web. I'm done. To quote Sophie: Why bother tracking what you're playing/reading/watching if you can't then do fun stuff with that data? Is it too much to ask for an RSS feed of listen...

This post is a spin-off from Automating My Now Page. If you want to programatically get data from a site that doesn't have an API, scraping is the solution. Keep in mind scraping could be against the terms of service of some websites or illegal in some places. To scrape a website there are (at least in this tutorial) two steps: Get the web page...

This post outlines how I automated my now page(s) but I should start with what a now page is. From nownownow.com: a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a "now page" I had heard of now pages a long time ago and always meant to add one to...

When I started my industrial placement at Radweb nearly 10 years ago (👴), Dan Harper sent me his bash aliases which included a lot of handy Git ones including this one that uses pick to list git branches. I can either do gco, search, and enter to checkout to that branch, or do gco branchName to checkout immediately to a branch: function gco()...

A brief history of my newspaper blackout poems. Not sure how I've not seen this before, but I'll be buying the book ASAP. AI generated Marvel cat-characters. Cute AF. Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness. Not sure why this was in my read later list but very cool (article is from 2009) Audio Cassette Player | We Are Rewind. A cassette player with...

I am a hoarder of data. I have exports from dead Tumblr sites, Twitter accounts, Pinboard, Instapaper, and probably more I'm not thinking of. I also like to be able to check when I did something, watched something, or just tweeted something funny (it happened at least once). Bye Almanac In February 2015 I started using Plot (RIP) for tracking...

Update 13/01/23: Echo now supports Mastodon and webhooks as well as Micro.blog. Check out the website for more details. After a conversation with Zoe about status.lol, as well as this reply from Markus, I decided to write Echo last night (do I know how to party on my birthday or what?). From the readme: Echo is a node script to post new items...

I've been thinking about how better to handle all the different places I'm posting too including this site, Micro.blog, and my wiki. To quote myself: Starting to think some things I’ve put into my wiki might be better served as a blog post that I just update as and when I find things. The discoverability of pages is kinda crappy for anyone who...

In the past, I have implemented my own search for static sites and while it's good enough, it's not great. Recently Tweetback, a self-hosted Twitter archive, added search using PageFind so I dug into the code to see how it's done. PageFind is: a fully static search library that aims to perform well on large sites, while using as little of your...

Inspired by Sophie's post I decided to do a little roundup of things I've done the year. House Project We purchased our house in November 2021 and it hadn't been decorated since 1971 so everything needed doing; most of this year has been spent getting all the rooms fixed up. In July, we found out my partner was pregnant (🎉) which is very...

When me and John started Ruminate, we didn't know much about hosting podcasts so we decided to go with Simplecast to host and manage the podcast. Seven years later, Simplecast has changed quite a bit to the point that it's hindering rather than helping me post the show. It's not a bad service, but it's overkill for posting one episode every two...

The past few months Micro.blog (M.b.) has improved its support for Mastodon and thanks to Space Karen doing what he does best, I've been following more and more people from there as they join via M.b. This has led to my timeline being busy which is good, but the way people post on Mastodon is very different to M.b. Threads (write a damn blog post...

Prami posted a challenge on social.lol to decode this string and win a lifetime subscription to omg.lol. The string below is an encoded lifetime omg.lol gift code: eoad1o1fpoawctnjeiri11dmj7rir6d8ehadkt4seo6u4 [...] in this format: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX I figured I'd have a go which ended up being a good few hours. Then I kind of lost my mind a...

ChatGPT is wild. I entered "Describe a mysql database schema for tracking the owned books of multiple people" and it came back with the queries to write the tables including foreign keys: CREATE TABLE people ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL);CREATE TABLE books ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, title VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, author...

I've published a new Micro.blog plugin called Lite YouTube which does one thing: finds YouTube links in posts and appends a lite-youtube-embed to the post. Example before and after below: You can see it working on this post about The Last of Us or on this post with two videos. Why did I do this instead of using YouTube shortcodes? Two reasons:...

A couple of weeks ago I posted a photo in the MacStories Discord and Federico demanded asked very nicely if I would write about it, so here we are. I have a lot of consoles which means I have a lot of games and controllers. I’ve never been one to sell games after I’ve finished them so I always had a collection of some sort. I worked at a second...

It's been a really good year for music especially for artists I've been listening to for years. Avril Lavinge - Love Sux - This is the link to the deluxe version which contains some excellent acoustic versions of some of the tracks. State Champs - Kings of the New Age Simple Plan - Hard Than It Looks - This is as good an album as they've ever...

Update 1 Ed Wellbrook solved this with grabgif like the absolute hero he is. Update 2 Turns out in my frustrated state, some of the things I tried did work but I just didn't notice (or I did something like clear the clipboard by accident). After looking at Ed's solution it clicked. This solution does work: osascript -e 'set the clipboard to POSIX...

Apple Music Replay is a vast improvement on last year. I grabbed some of the data so I have a record of it (I have no idea if you can access a previous years data or not). No suprises Hamilton is top again with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Leslie Odom, Jr. taking 2 of the top artist spots. Combined, they take the real top spot. I was in the top 100...

I wanted to import a bunch of tweets from my archive (mostly cat photos and a few other bits) but I didn't want to have to manually go through each tweet, copy the text and download the photos. So I wrote a script to do it for me once I had the IDs (which I got with my Safari shortcut). One thing that had annoyed me for a while is I didn't keep a...

A few days ago James Thomson posted that you can find your tweets based on how many likes they got with the following link (switching my username for yours): https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Arknightuk%20min_faves%3A1000&src=typed_query&f=live I think it's very likely my account will be deleted at some point so I figured I'd have a little look...

We moved into our house November 3rd 2021, just over a year ago. Most of the house hadn't been decorated since it was built in the '70s so everything needed redoing. With the exception of a few carpets and a bit of painting, everything is now done. Bathroom Main Bedroom Spare Room Office Nursery Kitchen This was the biggest project. We extended...

Micro.blog has support for following and replying to Mastodon users but getting from someone's profile on Mastodon to the follow page on Micro.blog can be a pain. To search for a user you need have it in the format of cooluser@mastodon.instance which isn't the same as the profile URLs. To make this easier I made a shortcut that does the...

Bluetooth cutting out randomly on my Mac when using wireless headphones has been an issue for me for ages. I assumed it was because of everyones BT devices in the office but I'm here by myself this morning and it was still happening. Had a google around and found this thread on Reddit and it solved it. Settings > Sharing > Turn off AirPlay...

A couple of weeks ago I signed up to Micro.blog and stopped using Twitter, Instagram, and Pocket. Twitter Micro.blog (MB for the rest of the post) has no likes, no follower counts, no retweets, and no post dunking quote tweets. If I post something, I don't know who saw it or who enjoyed it but it doesn't matter; I'm posting it because I want to....

For Automation April MacStories ran a contest where people could submit a shortcut and be in with a chance of winning an Analogue Pocket and a Stream Deck. Until the announcement of the contest I had never made a shortcut but I wanted to enter just for the fun of it (and that sweet role icon in the members Discord). I decided to convert my...

I recently signed up (again) to Micro.blog in an attempt to move away from services run by billionare shitposters. I will probably write up a full post about it soon but you can hear me talk about it on episode 144 of Ruminate or view my micro blog here. One of the features Micro.blog offers is bookmarking of posts and links. After a conversation...

During the pandemic Max Braun managed to squeeze a Pi Zero with camera module into an Apple iSight camera. I came across the post a few weeks ago and decided to have a go myself. Despite the Rapsberry Pi shortage I was able to order a Pi Zero, the camera module, the Pi Zero camera cable, and an iSight. I ordered the 3D-printed internal chassis...

It's been a while since I released the first version of the Monzo pot image generator and there's been a lot of requests on the Monzo forum for various new features. So I spent some time adding and updating the site: New about modal with credits for the new icons: Nearly 2000 brand logos from Simple Icons Country flags from lipis/flag-icon-css...

I came across Nikita Volodoev's wiki recently when looking for other things and realised this was exactly the type of things I'd been looking for to store snippets, links, and other notes about various things that don't justify a full blog post. And because I'm an idiot I ended up building my own solution with Eleventy. The result is Intersect....

NB: This workflow has been deprecated and replaced with the Agenda Workflow tl;dr: Calendar events workflow for Alfred. Download it here. I released a Reminders workflow a few days ago and while working on that I realised a lot of the code would be reusable for a version to manage calendar events. So I went at it tonight while it was too hot to...

NB: This workflow has been deprecated and replaced with the Agenda Workflow tl;dr: Reminders workflow for Alfred. Download it here. There are a number of workflows available for Alfred to manage Reminders on the Mac and I've tried most of them; none of them do everything I want. Most of them have one of these problems: They don't order reminders...

While browsing this thread on the Monzo forums I came up with an idea to generate Monzo pot images whenever I want so I created the Monzo Pot Image Generator. First thing was to work out how to generate and download the images. This turned out to be relatively easy with a combination of dom-to-image and FileSaver. To generate a list of the Font...

Before YouTube was the go-to place for game tutorials, GameFAQs was one of the only decent places online to get in-depth guides on how to complete games or get cheat codes. GameFAQs only allowed text posts on the site so people came up with interesting ways to navigate chapters and sections in what feels like a precursor to Markdown. Every guide...

I changed my name (and my email) a couple of weeks ago and I have a few thoughts about the process. Most of this should also apply if you've changed your name because of marriage. Make a List Before you do anything else, make a list of everywhere you need to change your name, along with the process to do it (letter, email, in branch). If it's a...

I think they used the same cougar sound effect from the first one. When I heard it, I had flashbacks The map is huge, I'll be surprised if I finish this in less than 100 hours The controls for switching weapons, items, and clothing are so confusing

This morning I tweeted that there's no way to convert a Spotify account from Facebook login to email and password login. I even spoke to Spotify support who said: As your account was created via Facebook, it can't be unlinked. Don't worry, we can free up your email address so you can create a new account. Once that's done, we'll transfer all of...

A lot of things have changed for me since I last shared my Home screen in 2015. Last year I switched to Android, using a Pixel XL as my phone because I had become frustrated with some of the interface changes to iOS. Just under a year later I was as irked with Android as I previously was with iOS, but for different reasons (Seriously Android? No...

Setting up RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi is fairly easy but I did come up against a couple of issues that I needed to fix. This post is just a collection of quick fixes for those issues. Remove underscored games when transferring from a Mac When copying ROMs from a Mac, you may end up with a bunch of files that start with an underscore. To remove...

In 2015, Pieter Siekerman wrote a blog post describing what the perfect TV should be: For two years now I’ve closely watched various TV manufacturers trying to find their way in the changing landscape of TV platforms and I just don’t get it. In September, (and again this week), I ordered the Hisense H43M3000 despite it being a relatively unknown...

My Hisense TV (H43M3000) recently received an update to support HDR, which is something the PS4 supports for some games. After plugging the console in, the PS4 told me my TV doesn't support HDR but after some playing around with settings and ports I managed to get it to work: The PS4 must be using either HDMI port 3 or 4 Open the TV settings and...

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If you want to hear more about this, or just prefer listening over reading (hi Myke), I spoke about this with John on episode 30 of our podcast, Ruminate. Find it in Overcast, Pocketcasts, or iTunes, or any other podcast app you use. I wrote about replacing all my apps on Android just under a week ago, but I wanted to lay out some of my thoughts...

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably already know I've ditched my iPhone in favour of a OnePlus 3. The biggest hurdle to switching is the apps I used regularly (and some not-so-regularly). After making a list of apps I had installed on my iPhone, I was able to filter it down to just two lists: ones with no equivalent, and ones I needed to...

I have no self control so I bought an Echo while Amazon were offering £50 off for Prime members last week. Here's a brain dump of my initial thoughts on the device. Setup Setup is pretty easy using the Alexa app. The Echo creates it's own wifi network which you need to connect to so you can choose your home wifi network. Once that's done, you can...

Although there always seems to be some great Lego bargains to be had in the US from the likes of Walmart and Target, the UK doesn't really have equivalent stores that do reductions like those stores do. But there are a number of ways to save significant money on Lego in the UK. Lego VIP Points Lego's VIP points is a points system where for every...

When you've created a model in Lego Digital Designer, you likely want get those parts into a Bricklink wanted list so you can order them. Unfortunately, LDD doesn't have an option to export to the required Bricklink XML format. Thankfully, Rebrickable has the ability to convert an LDD model to Bricklink XML. You'll need a Rebrickable account to...

When I first saw the Hermès Cuff for Apple Watch I thought it looked like a great watch band but also knew that there was no way I was going to pay upwards of a thousand pounds for one. So I kept an eye on eBay, looking for third party manufacturers making similar bands. These became available for purchase about a month after the announcement so...

The new Apple TV supports game controllers which is great. What's not so great is the fact that developers can't require them. By not allowing developers to require a game controller, what Apple have done is limited the platform and the games produced for it. I bought a Nimbus controller so I could play games like Rayman Adventures and Asphalt 8...

Since the Apple TV got released I have been running Apple TV Apps, a blog and Twitter account showcasing the best Apple TV apps available. With discoverability being sub-par compared to the iOS app store, the site has been moderately successful and I've been contacted by a number of developers with iTunes links to their apps asking me to feature...

I've started a new blog to highlight some the best and most interesting Apple TV apps available. If you're interested you can follow @_atvapps on Twitter or check out the blog at http://atvapps.net.

I like to try and keep all of my apps on one page, hence the large number of folders. In the fight between quick access to apps and tidiness, tidiness always wins. Having said that, I do still like to keep my most used apps one tap away. The empty bottom row is used primarly for apps that I'm trying out which, at the moment, happens to be...

John Voorhees and I decided to have a go at creating out own podcast. The current description of the show is: A podcast about the opportunities and challenges that technology presents us with every day This might change in the future (podcasts are harder than they seem) but for now we'll be talking about how technology helps solve problems, as...

Brickset, as well as being a great source for LEGO news and reviews, is a also an excellent service for keeping a list of all the sets and minifigures that you own. Brickset also has some more advanced features for marking sets that you own without minifigures and custom flags to make managing your collection even easier. Once you've set up your...

This is a simple way to deploy to a remote server, more for my reference than anything else. Create a new folder on the server and initialise a bare git repository in it. mkdir /root/repos/project-namecd /root/repos/project-namegit init --bare Create a post-receive hook (nano /hooks/post-receive) with this as the contents:...

When you add environment variables to Laravel homestead, they get added so you can access them within your applications. The problem is, if you delete a varaible from your homestead.yaml file, it doesn't get deleted within Homestead. If you need to remove them, you can delete them from php-fpm.conf located at /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf.

This morning, I was watching Top Gear and decided it would be fun to create the Stig quote generator. I grabbed all the "some say" quotes from the Top Gear Wikiquote page and split them into two parts (the "some say" part and the "and that" parts). The generator then grabs two of them at random, one of each type, and joins them together. Example:...

Joe Steel wrote about digital content following an interview with a Kevin Tsujihara, CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment: Incredibly, he highlights that they’re still trying to push hard on UltraViolet. Consumers have roundly rejected this as any kind of solution. Disney, Google, and Apple won’t participate — but sure, let’s prop this sucker up,...

Yosemite Mail will sometimes show Gmail outgoing mail as being offline when you first setup a Gmail account. To fix this open up Mail and do the following steps: Open preferences and go to Accounts. Select "Edit SMTP Server List" from the "Outgoing Mail Server Dropdown". Select "Advanced" and put your account password in the password input....

Apple: On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it's not technically feasible...

Myke and Stephen: Relay FM is our new home on the Internet, and where you can find all of our podcasts. The shows you have known and loved for years are being rebooted as part of the new network. Everything we have done so far in our podcasting careers has led us here, and we're pouring all of our love, knowledge and attention into this thing....

Things Are Happening, Is This The End?, It's What Panda's Must Feel Like, All The Time. Stop Belling Yourself, What's The Point, Do You Remember Rogif Moore?, Too Sad. World's Latest Podcast, Our Non-Specific Internet Phone Calls​, To Our Child Bionique, The Magnificent Meese​. You, I and Our Love Child, I Put A Bell On The End, Not Even a Full...

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. If you're not a developer, this is not for you. If you do install it, don't go reviewing apps in the App Store because they don't work. Don't complain when shit breaks. Don't moan when the beta expires. Don't be surprised if your phone becomes...

The Chromecast got released in the UK on Wednesday and I bought one, in the hopes it will be better than the plethora of other streaming devices I have (Apple TV, Google TV, Xbox 360, PS3). As a side note, the Google TV, specifically this model is the worst peice of equipment I've ever owned. Setup The Chromecast is really easy to setup; plug in...

I visited my friend over Christmas who is currently working in New York. I had an amazing time and I thought I would recommend some places I visited for anyone who is planning on visiting in the future, as well as to keep a record of what I got up to. Restaurants We ate at quite a few restaurants and these three are the ones I would recommend to...

Whilst creating a document which requires me to put some data (which isn't in the slightest way tabular data) into a table, I wanted to create the table with no headers. However the way markdown works mean it requires you to set a header for it to create a table in the first place. By using the HTML non-breaking space entity it can be done:...

The Telegraph reported this morning that two six-year-olds racked up a £1000 bill through in app purchases because they knew their parents iTunes password. And of course the parents are placing the blame entirely on the developers of apps that include in-app purchases. Parental controls iOS has built in parental controls that allow for...

The first Pub Hack took place yesterday. Jo and Lillian did an excellent job of organising everything including food, t-shirts, trophies as well as all the other behind-the-scenes stuff that needed doing. The theme was "post-apocolypse" so pretty much everyone, including our team, took that to mean zombies. We wasted the first hour on an idea...

So Apple had their iPhone event. iPhone 5S. iPhone 5C. Nothing particularly surprising but interesting nonetheless. iPhone 5S The same solid design of the iPhone 5 with an improved camera, A7 chip and fingerprint scanner system called Touch ID. Touch ID is the feature I'm most excited about. Not because I find inputting a pin code "cumbersome",...

When I wrote this post about justdelete.me I assumed that would pretty much be the best I could hope for in terms of traffic. 3000 visitors in 24 hours was an amazing response to get.The last few days? We’ve been doing that in half an hour. News coverage The coverage in the news has been insane. We were picked up by Minimal Mac on Monday and the...

“I’m sure I’ll get a couple of hundred visitors”. That’s what I was thinking yesterday when I launched justdelete.me. I wasn’t completely wrong. The response to justdelete.me has been incredible. In just 24 hours it was linked to by Minimal Mac (swoon!), tweeted and retweeted by hundreds of people and had over 3000 visitors. Since launch five...

After seeing a few tweets about how difficult it can be to delete your Skype account and then hearing that Netflix flat-out won’t delete your details I decided to build JustDelete.me. JustDelete.Me is a directory of urls to delete your account from web services. (Yes, I am aware how terrible that description is. If you’ve got a better one, let me...

I wrote a post over on the PF Meet blog about how the event helped me get an industrial placement. Worth a read if you're going to be applying for placements or wondering about the benefits of events like PF Meet.

I love Back to The Future. I even have a DeLorean tattoo. Back in December of last year, Lego announced that that they were going to be making a Back to The Future themed set. On Saturday my Back to The Future Lego set arrived and I opened it like a kid on Christmas morning. The set has 401 pieces, plus the usual random selection of spares, and...

Instapaper, having been sold to Betaworks in April, has a shiny new beta for the web interface which is long overdue. Not that the site wasn’t usable, but it was starting to feel very dated when compared to the likes of Pocket. Despite this I had stuck with Instapaper as it had the one thing Pocket still doesn’t have: a way for me to pay them for...

I download a lot of TV shows (all legal of course) and have been renaming the files using TVRenamer. After using TVRenamer manually for months I got fed up with having to do it, or the much more likely scenario happened where I would just leave them to build up in my downloads folder. I recently started using Hazel to automatically rename and...

Spotted this tip on Twitter (I can't remember/find who tweeted it, sorry!) and it blew my mind. When resizing a window in OS X, hold down alt. The window will stay centered on the screen. Amazing.

70Decibels is merging with 5by5 which is great news for everyone involved, including listeners. Myke has worked incredibly hard to get 70Decibels to where it is today, starting with The Bro Show and expanding to the packed list of shows now: 70Decibels is nearly 18 months old. It's amazing what has happened in that time and we all know that we...

Google have announced that they're shutting down Google Reader come July 1st: We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and...

Two Playstation 2, two GameCube, four N64, two Xbox, four Wii, two Guitar Hero. You get the idea, I have lots of controllers. So does Matt Gemmell. And I'm sure, so do a lot of other people. My solution for organising them is a fairly simple one, but I haven't seen it documented elsewhere on the web. So here it is. I had an old DVD rack not being...

As many of you noticed, moments ago my timeline (and yours) was filled with tweets from every single blog post I've ever written. I apologise, I am a tool. Pro tip: Import posts before setting up Wordpress to Twitter.

This morning I took a practice exam for one of the web units I’m studying. Most of the questions were fairly easy but one of them in particular annoyed me. The question was: “PageRank is so named because it was created by Larry Page, not because it ranks pages” I incorrectly marked this as false. When I asked how much trivia we would be asked in...