The Sea Change project will design, build and operate a ‘shore power’ system across the three busiest berths at Portsmouth International Port.

Sea Change provided some data about port movements, carbon levels, and related things for attendees to use for their projects. They released it a few days beforehand and I was able to have a poke around and work out an idea. Portal Kombat, which is legally distinct from Top Trumps.

Each card has data about the ship like size, length, weight, as well as number of visits and time spent in the port. It works just like Top Trumps: pick the stat you think will beat the other card and if you win, you get a point. In the case of Portal Kombat, you can see the name of the ship and the country of origin before guessing.

I was able to get images for all the ships from Vessel Finder thanks to their excellent URL design: /vessels/details/ID where ID is the reference number of the vessel.

While coming up with the name for the project I also came up with the phrase "Yacht or Not"^[1] and I wanted to make use of it. So after every three points earned, you can play a round of Yacht or Not: based only on the name, guess if it's a yacht or not. The list came from Vessel Finder's port lookup where I looked at Gosport marina and grabbed the vessel names.

One update I have made since saturday is that "time in port" requires you to get a lower score to win, not a higher one because the boats are usually on diesel to keep everything running even when docked - something Sea Change are trying to fix.

As with most hackathon projects, there's more I could do but I probably won't but if I change my mind:

• Highlight which stat someone picked
• Sound effects
• Store previous games in local storage
• Focus on carbon emissions when that is selected

The day ran smoothly as usual and I'm looking forward to the next one.

• I much prefer smaller nibs, gotta be 0.7 or less, ideally 0.5
• I like pink and purple pens but tbh anything that isn't black or white I'm into
• Yellow ink is a bit rubbish

Anyway, here we go.

Standard Pens

Uni-Ball Jetstream, various colors: Very nice

Uni-Ball Jetstream Lite: Also nice

Uni-Ball One: Lovely ink

Zebra Z-Grip 1mm: Too thick for me

Iconic gel ink: Amazing colors, really nice to write with

Zebra Mark On: These are bloody great. The 0.4 is a bit too scratchy for me though.

Spoke Click Model C: Hefty, feels great in the hand. Swapped in a Parker .55 gel refill.

Muji .38 Gel: Very nice, doesn't feel scratchy to write with like the 0.4 mark on.

Uni-Ball EMOTT: Smooth but I've not used these much yet.

Uni-Ball Pin fineline and Sakura Pigma Micron: Not used either of these yet but I got the microns in the black and gold edition because they're pretty.

Energel: It had Pikachu on so I had to buy it. Smooth writing.

Muji retractable highligher: A retractable hightlight? Now I've seen everything. Nice color on this one.

Zebra Mildliners: Fuck yes.

Fountain Pens

Platinum Preppy 03: I like these, just don't bother with the yellow ink, it sucks.

Lamy AL-Star: I'm definitely leaning towards preferring the metal AL-Star over the Safari but I need to use them both a bit more to fully pick a side. I currently have the Fiery and Pacific Blue in rotation.

Lamy Safari: As above, still nice. Currently I have pink, green, and yellow.

Pencils

Uni Kuru Toga 0.3mm: Another one I bought because of Pikachu. 0.3 is too small for a pencil for me.

Tombow mono graph: Nice enough, it's a pencil.

Sun-Star Metacil retractable: I'd not heard of "forever pencils" before, this one is cool.

Pentel P203/P205/P207/P209: These are bloody lovely, 7mm is perfect for general use for me.

Miscellany

Ottergami Dotgrid A5: A5 is the perfect size for a bullet journal for me but the paper in this isn't as nice as I'd like. Will be switching to something else when it's finished.

Paperian Memo Pad: It's cute.

Life Noble notepads: I have an A5 and a B7, the paper is glorious to write on.

Traveler's "Let’s Go on a Road Trip" notebook: This is the one I can't bring myself to use yet. It's just so nice.

Lihit Lab compact pen case: I love it, I reviewed it here

I also have some tape I like:

• Traveler's Factory boarding pass
• World Craft Peek-a-Boo cats
• Generic pink

So...yeah. That's a lot of pens in a short period of time.

We discussed it in the omg.lol discord and I said:

Why was it made? Who is it for? What market analysis led them to produce such an item

Who bought this? It wasn’t given away, someone paid money for it

Lewis pointed out it was me. I was the target market. He was right. I spent a long time thinking about if I wanted to spend £35 on this pen and ultimately decided it is ugly as fuck so I didn't. Then I thought maybe I did and I kind of still do. I can't stop thinking about it. I'm obsessed.

I looked around to find out some more info about this pen and it turns out there were three designs available applied to fountain pens and a ballpoint as you can see in this natty...website? DVD menu? Not a clue to be honest. These photos came from this core design page about the pens.

There's a bunch of different options including this set with some kind of "build your own desktop" software on it. INSTALL ME IF YOU DARE. Scary.

I kind of want one of these purely for the weirdness of it but what I really want is this: the signature limited edition. Now this is a classy pen^[1]. Having said that, I don't know what these sell for (there's no sold listings on eBay to reference) and I suspect it'll be more than I'll want to pay. If anyone has one of these knocking about, let me know.

Links:

• Tomb Raider Waterman Pens on Flickr
• Core Design Merchandise
• Lara Croft Waterman Fountain Pen

We discussed the upcoming special edition Lamy Al Stars and related inks, and the Caran d’Ache Black Edition before getting into my journey into bullet journaling, pens, pencils, and notebooks.

Listen to The Pen Addict 657: Are You Coming For Me?

Since recording the show on Sunday, I got six more Lamy fountain pens.

The blue one on the far right was the only one I was reasonably sure was a Lamy because of the logo engraving on it but I wasn't 100% convinced. Having said all that, the listing was £7 including postage so I figured it was worth the risk and it turns out I was right.

The parcel arrived this morning and aside from getting some extra cartridges on top of what was in the photo, there were three Safaris and three AL Stars. The AL Star colours are Ocean Blue, Black Purple, and I think Pacific Blue but it could also be Turmaline. If anyone knows for sure let me know.

All the Safaris were dried up but I was able to get pink and yellow up and running again. Green is going to need a more thorough cleaning. For £7 this was an absolute bargain and I still can't quite believe my luck.

Here's the Apple podcasts link.

That Christmas break I spent every waking moment playing. This was the first time I'd been obsessed with a video game. I'd go to bed thinking about it, wake up thinking about it, and spend days at school thinking about how to get better scores or where the hidden tape might be on the cruise ship. Obsessed.

Every run was two minutes and I must have done hundreds over the years which means I've listened to the first two minutes of some absolute bangers a lot. To the point that when I'd eventually listen to the full tracks I'd be surprised to hear anything past 120 seconds. The soundtracks to all of the games are iconic^[2]. I went and saw Zebrahead live as a direct result to hearing them in this game. I still listen to most of the bands to this day^[3].

I, along with everyone else back, took up skateboarding because of the games.

This is why I'm so excited for the 3 and 4 remaster. It shaped my love of video games and music^[4].

The hardest working font in Manhattan is a deep dive into a font never designed to show up pretty much everywhere.

Making Software is a new book by Dan Hollick but what struck me was the hard-drive illustration on the home page; it's gorgeous.

I used to archive Throwback Thursday playlists when I used Spotify but someone is doing it for all sorts of public playlists over there.

Kevin wrote about how he keeps a blank page in Pixelmator open all day to fill with nice messages and other things he comes across, then prints it to stick in a notebook. I love this idea.

I also love 2024 in Stitches.

I happened across track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository while remembering how Thinkup would track a person's changes to their bio on Twitter.

My Life in Weeks is fun. Not sure I want to do one though.

A f******* **n in Severance...?!?. Pen stuff becuase I'm a pen person now.

Adam had us all fingering each other last week which led me down a rabbit hole of the finger protocol and eventually to plan.cat.

I don't recall how I found Tweek Calendar but it's a "minimal to do list and weekly task planner app". One page per week, it's printable, good stuff.

Strftime is a handy reference for formatting dates.

I don't know when I'll need to create a CRT with CSS but I'll find a reason to do it.

If such a thing as a Trump-proof stack exists if you're a US citizen this is probably it.

I had no idea Panel Editor existed in MacOS and it looks pretty useful.

Finally an indie web manifesto from 1997:

We invite the users to realize the essential role they play on the Internet: when they start their own website, when they send comments, criticisms or warm letters to the webmasters, when they exchange tips and hints in the newsgroups or by e-mail, they provide an independent and free source of information that others would like to sell and control. Education, information, culture and debate can only come from users, independent webmasters, academic or associative organizations.

One of the comments noted the lack of algorithm on Mastodon which led me to a realisation that seems obvious in hindsight: no matter if you follow one person or a thousand, the algorithm-driven social media platforms will make sure there's always stuff in your timeline. Even if you follow no one, you're getting a full timeline.

No conclusion to draw here, just an observation.

There are actually 36 colours - there is an secondary version of the Neutral set called "Natural", which is sold in the Japanese market. This set has dusty pink, instead of copper. Dusty pink appears in some other sets (that aren't part of the core seven) so it's much easier to find that one separately, which is exactly what I did to complete my collection^[1].

Here's an updated version of Zebra's chart to include the variations:

As I was finishing this post, I did find official confirmation of 36 colours on Zebra's website^[2], in this PDF which is named Mildliner_US-Japan_Cross_Reference.

A few months ago, as we are want to do, Zoe and I got into a heated discussion about if Portsmouth is an island or not. Then she went a bit overboard in this post correcting me about the density of Portmouth's population which is fair enough because I was misled by Wikipedia.

The second half of her post, however, is nothing short of lunacy, claiming Portsmouth isn't an island because you could get there using shank's pony:

If you can walk to it, it’s not an island

An outrageous claim. I'd like to paraphrase the great Haddaway and also start like a really crap best man's speech:

What is love an island? Merriam-Webster defines it as:

a tract of land surrounded by water and smaller than a continent

so does the Cambridge Dictionary:

a piece of land completely surrounded by water:

and Britannica, Collins English Dictionary, Dictionary.com, and National Geographic. And every other dictionary in the land including the Chambers School Dictionary I got given by my English teacher when I left school^[1]:

Even school children know what an island is. Portsmouth is, last time I checked, smaller than a continent. It's also surrounded by water.

There is no definition I could find that has a caveat of "If you can walk to it, it's not an island". The tidal island list Zoe mentioned in her post is lacking a vital entry: Portsmouth.

While writing this, I did came across some anti-island propaganda from none other than the biggest tech company in the world. Apple Maps does not show Portsmouth as an island. Shenanigans! I shall be emailing Tim Apple post haste^[2].

Anyway, you don't get to argue with the dictionary, Zoe. Words mean things. Island means surrounded by water. Like Portsmouth.

I feel like "a lot of pens" is underselling it

Thanks for that, Lewis.

I needed a case for the handful of pens, pencils, and a ruler I want to use in my journal so I went on a hunt for something slim and came across the Lihit Lab Compact Pen Case.

It has a double zip, two pockets for pens, plus smaller slots for other things. The website says it's water and stain repellent although I haven't tested that claim. I imagine it could hold maybe ten pens but it might be a bit of a tight squeeze - with two fountain pens on the left hand side and a full right side made it a bit too bulky for my liking.

It comes in four relatively boring colors so I went with red. It costs ~£10 which is very reasonable, the build quality seems solid, and it does exactly what I wanted. I'm also considering buying a second one for some of my smaller DIY stuff.

Cult Pens have it available for £9.50 right now.

However, when I got onto a proper computer and I could check, I found this photo of my dad's MGZS which I took on his Fujifilm DX 5, a month prior to the New York photo.

A couple of years before at school I had used a Sony Mavica FD75 - this fucker took a 3.5" floppy disk for storage. What a time to be alive. Sadly I don't have any photos from it but I suspect they were not good.

The Palmer utility knife was mentioned on the latest episode of The Pen Addict and it sent me down a rabbit hole, albeit a small one. Studio Neat have the Keen which is shipping this summer and costs £78 and then there's the SlideWinder at £15. Told you it was a small hole.

I am mostly tempted by the Palmer in atomic purple - the design of it appeals to me more than the others. I nearly bought it until I considered it for a moment; I just wouldn't use this kind of knife that often.

It is fun to see a bunch of different companies tackling this very specific problem though.

All the cool kids do little test pages so here you go, I did one at the back of my notebook. I really like the vermilion and the smoke blue.

// _data/pixelfed.js

const fetch = require("node-fetch")
const { AssetCache } = require("@11ty/eleventy-fetch")
const USER_ID = '12345'
const API_KEY = 'ABCDE'

module.exports = async function() {
    console.log("Fetching pixelfed")
    let asset = new AssetCache("pixelfed")

    if (asset.isCacheValid('1h'))
    {
        console.log("Returning pixelfed from cache" )
        return await asset.getCachedValue()
    }

    const res = await fetch(`https://pixelfed.social/api/v1/accounts/${USER_ID}/statuses`, {
        headers: {
            'Authorization': `Bearer ${API_KEY}`,
        },
    })

    const json = await res.json()

    const data = json.slice(0, 3).map(p => {
        return {
            url: p.url,
            date: p.created_at,
            desc: p.content,
            image: p.media_attachments[0].preview_url,
            image_desc: p.media_attachments[0].description,
        }
    })

    await asset.save(data, "json")

    return data
}

Then in my template:

// index.njk

<div>
	{%- for photo in pixelfed %}
		<a href="{{ photo.url }}">
			<img src="{{ photo.image }}" alt="{{ photo.image_desc }}" />
		</a>
	{% endfor %}
</div>

What are five of your favourite albums?

I already wrote about this in a post entitled "The Perfect Album" so I shall refer you there. Although I'd definitely add From Zero to the list of perfect albums.

What are five of your favourite songs?

• Faint - Linkin Park
• Letters to You - Finch
• Cute Without the 'E' (Cut From the Team) - Taking Back Sunday
• Where I Belong - Simple Plan & State Champs
• Crashed the Wedding - Busted

Favourite instrument(s)?

Guitar.

What song or album are you currently listening to?

Bring Me the Horizon's cover of Wonderwall is a fucking banger and I've listened to The Bootstrap Paradox at least once a week since I discovered it.

Do you listen to the radio? If so, how often?

I deeply dislike the radio so much so that I keep it on mute in my car so I don't have to hear it even for the 5 seconds it takes for my phone to connect.

How often do you listen to music?

Every day.

How often do you discover music? And how do you discover music?

I check out the Apple Music home page for recommendations once or twice a week mostly.

What’s a song or album that you enjoy that you wish had more recognition?

Palm Trees and Power Lines by Sugarcult.

What’s your favourite song of all time?

This is a near-impossible question but maybe Faint by Linkin Park.

Has your taste in music evolved over the years?

Not since I was 16. I'm better at listening to albums now even if I don't know any of the songs to start with.

After fiddling around with the terrible charging cable, getting stuck in a loop for a while, it finally booted and I was able to set the watch face to the Relay one I made a decade ago.

Sadly when I disconnect the charger, it turns off. I guess it needs a new battery but I don't have the energy or the time to do that so back into storage it goes.

Dan, to quote Mel, "posting like a Founder (derogatory)", was not a fun thing to witness.

The Pixelfed Kickstarter says they want to be "the first Fediverse app with a billion people". Dream big by all means but this is chaotic. We've seen what happens with billion-people social networks - federation isn't going to solve this.

In Mel's post she noticed that the project account posted about a new data export feature available that day. It wasn't, and still isn't, available. The export that is available doesn't actually include your images, it's just JSON with the URLs to the files. Not an ideal export for anyone without technical knowledge.

As it turns out Pixelfed.social runs the latest commit from the repo, which means the format is different to the release version so the code Mel put together only works for other Pixelfed servers. Handily, Posty supports both formats. It's worth noting the version on Pixelfed.social isn't the full HTML version that was posted about, just a new format.

Finally this overview of Dan's "hostility towards FOSS maintainers and the ecosystem at large" is a really uncomfortable read and doesn't bode well for the future of the project.

All of this combined makes me not want to use Pixelfed so I'm going to be converting my export to note posts for here instead and deleting my Pixelfed account.

• Uniball Kuru Toga - this one has a fancy sharpening mechanism
• Tombow mono graph - I picked one of these up on Amazon for £3 to give it a go
• The Pentel sharp looks very nice
• Kathy mentioned “forever pencils” and my mind was blown so I ordered exactly what she told me to - this Sun Star retractable one

Why Did You Start Blogging In The First Place?

Initially I thought I'd be some hot take blogger getting posts retweeted by loads of people and be popular or something. We all wanted to be Gruber back then.

More recently I'm blogging for me. It's recipes, technical posts, things I've solved, ideas I've had. Basically instructions for anything I, or someone else, might want to do.

What Platform Are You Using The Manage Your Blog, And Why Do You Use It?

My site is built with Eleventy. In theory, that means it's just a bunch of markdown files. In practice, it's markdown files, JSON files, javascript files, plus my custom CMS. I use it because it gives me the flexibility to make my site do exactly what I want.

Have You Blogged On Other Platforms Before?

I started on hosted Wordpress many years ago, then self-hosted Wordpress, then Jekyll, then Hugo, then Hexo, and now Eleventy.

How Do You Write Your Posts?

Usually I write a draft in Obsidian then copy it over into VSCode and publish. For shorter posts, or my notes, I write those directly into the CMS which pushes them to the GitHub repository. I wrote more in depth about this here.

When Do You Feel Most Inspired To Write?

There are two main times I feel inspired:

• When I've solved a problem and I want to document the solution
• When I feel myself thinking about writing a thread of toots

Do You Normally Publish Immediately After Writing, Or Do You Let It Simmer?

I rarely let them simmer, I just send them out into the world so the typos can reveal themselves.

What’s Your Favorite Post On Your Blog?

The sensible answer is 7622 - why I spell my name with two Bs but this sleep-deprived ramble about the fruits of Hey Bear is definitely up there.

Any Future Plans For the Blog?

I have a list longer than you can imagine but next up is some more work on transient slash pages.

Who Will Participate Next?

Keenan, please.

Thanks to Nic this was really easy to do because I could copy what he does:

1. Tag a post with the Now
2. Get the latest post tagged as such
3. Use that content on my /now page

I'm on paternity leave for another week or so with Baby Knight 2. Everything is twice as hard with a toddler around.

I'm dipping my toe into bullet journaling and it's going...fine? It's probably a little bit early to tell. What I do know is that my recomendations on YouTube are ruined and I bought new pens.

My wife and I are watching the last two seasons of Young Sheldon. After that, she's agreed to watch The Last of Us with me. I've been dying to rewatch it.

I haven't got a yearly theme but if I did have one it would be something like "The Year of Being Whelmed"^[1]. I want to stop be overwhelmed by the millions of choices of movies/tv shows/books/games/whatever and make a concious effort to choose a thing. I don't have time to do everything, especially with two kids now. If I'm not sure of something, dump it, it doesn't need to be on the list.

You know what, fuck it, I do have a yearly theme. It's that.

I think it makes more sense to me to write about what I carry around right now and if I did it again later, it doesn’t have to replace what I’ve written before

Slash Pages is a site I maintain that is a "guide to common pages you can add to your website". So /uses, /now, and so on. Chris' quote above was about /edc but it applies to all of them. It was also discussed on episode 647 of ShopTalk.

My post on automating my /now page was very popular and I am proud of what I managed to do but I've been thinking for a while it's very impersonal. It's data. It's not a page written by me in any meaningful way.

Leon had some similar thoughts on this with an idea for each blog post being a section of a page but rendered as one. The end goal for him, and me, is that the new additions get syndicated via RSS, POSSE, and so forth. I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I'm doing now.

For a /now page, this makes a lot of sense - on a regular schedule I can add a new post about what I'm up to and update things as required but when thinking about my /uses page, what does an update to that look like? Assuming a short /uses page like this:

- MacBook Pro
- AirPods Max
- iPhone 14 Pro

The first blog post is easy, it would include all of that but if I change my phone to a 16 Pro do I duplicate the whole thing but update just that one line? If I just post a diff of what's changed then there isn't a single place to see everything I've used.

I'm going to start with my /now page while I mull over how to handle some others.

I’ve tried using notebooks before to keep track of things but without a system to organise them they just become random scribblings the likes of which wouldn’t be out of place in the zodiac killer’s apartment.

So I’m gunna try bullet journaling. You don’t need to send help (except maybe for my YouTube recommendations). But if I become the kind of person who doesn’t shut the fuck up about it I’m appointing Keenan to metaphorically smack me in my stupid note-taking face.

Personal

Home and DIY

In September during some rather heavy rain we forgot to bring our awning in and it snapped off it's brackets. That was a fun adventure trying to remove that without smashing the patio doors. My dad has offered to buy us a new one which I'll need to fit in the new year.

We moved my office into the larger spare room and moved Baby Knight into my old office so Baby Knight two can be next to our bedroom. This meant I had a bit more space for shelves so I added a bunch more because I could.

Beep Beep mf

I passed my driving test on the 20th of August (after a test two weeks earlier was cancelled with a couple of hours notice). I had 20 lessons over the course of two months, got a car the day after my test, but that didn’t last long, and now I’m driving my wife’s old car. It's possible my dream car from Hyundai might be a bit unattainable but fucking hell, just look at it.

Writing

This post is my 130th blog post this year - more than double what I did last year. I've made an effort this year to move more towards POSSE which means things that might have been a handful of toots before are now blog posts. I also have my notes which are a replacement for directly tooting on the 'don.

I also wrote a post every day in May for WeblogPoMo which I'm proud of. Not sure I can do that again though - it was a good excuse to clear out some drafts.

The most popular^[1] posts this year were:

• Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent
• Thinking About Recipe Formats More Than Anyone Should
• Using the 8BitDo Keyboard on MacOS
• Blocking Bots with Nginx
• The Web is Fantastic

Enemy of Perplexity

In June I noticed I had been mentioned in Perplexity's Wikipedia section titled "Use of content from media outlets" because of this post and the subsequent post on Wired. This has since expanded to become a proper "Controversies" section which I love and as Jason so aptly put:

live every day like you might end up in some wretched company’s controversies section

Here it is as of today:

Media

Movies

The only new movie I watched and liked this year was Deadpool and Wolverine. Inside Out 2 lost whatever was good about the first one.

TV

Fallout was a surprise; maybe we're in an era of actually good games-to-tv-and-movies. Reacher season two was excellent, I'm hoping season three keeps it up.

The last ever episode of The Grand Tour hit me harder than I thought it would. I've been watching Top Gear, and subsequently Grand Tour, since it started in 2002 which according to maths is 22 years. This led me down a rabbit hole of watching every special of both shows across a couple of weeks and every single one of them is such a joy. I am truly sad that they're not going to make any more.

The final episode of Gavin and Stacey was perfect.

Music

Is is 2004 or 2024 because Green Day, Alkaline Trio, Sum 41, Eminem, The Offspring, Less Than Jake, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre, and Linkin Park all had new albums out this year.

Linkin Park's is easily my favourite one, Emily Armstrong was a fantastic choice.

I found a couple of new artists this year. The first one was Millie Manders via Lewis which I enjoyed so much I bought a hat from their store. The second was Ryan Oakes and his album The Bootstrap Paradox. I found him from, I think, a video that used this track of his but I can't be 100% sure. The album is wall-to-wall bangers. I love it.

A Whole New Sound has some good tracks but overall I was a bit disappointed with this.

My Musicthreads of tracks and albums for this year:

• 2024 Albums
• 2024 Tracks

Games

Not much time for games, as usual, but I finished Spider-Man 2 at the start of the year and I'm pretty deep into Astro Bot at the moment. I also briefly enjoyed Balatro before retiring from it forever.

Books

lol okay nerd^[2].

Podcasts

I added the three new MacStories shows to my subscriptions - Magic Rays of Light, NPC, and Comfort Zone even if I don't have the time to listen to every episode.

I was also a guest on two podcasts this year:

• AppStories 412: What Kind of Person Are You? in which Viticci accused me of giving off linux person vibes. My blog post about it.
• Conduit 91: Robb Knight made this for himself, and maybe you too.. Jay asked me a bunch of questions and was far too nice to me and I didn't know what to do. My blog post is here.

Side Projects and Freelance

Despite attending a freelancers meetup every month for a decade, I've never done any freelance work until this year.

KnightShift and MacStories

In January I started working for MacStories doing work to bring new features and new podcasts to the site. One of those new shows was my own, Ruminate. Along with Magic Rays of Light, NPC, and Comfort Zone we have quite a little gang of pods over there now.

Even though I'm a sole trader, I still had to get a business domain because I love a new domain name so I got knightshift.dev. I only recently cleaned it up to highlight my freelance things but it's there.

EchoFeed

In last year's post I said "I have plans to make Echo a more user-friendly project" and in April I launched EchoFeed. The first couple of months were interesting. I fucked up a migration to a new feed-fetching system and sent 500 posts in the space of an hour or so, then I kept having issues of the server crapping out at random. But that's all sorted now.

Overall it's been successful and people seem to like it, especially Amplify which boosts posts sent with EchoFeed. There's been a bunch of changes and new features added and I'm working on some fun stuff for it.

Other Projects

A lot less projects shipped this year mostly because of freelancing and focusing on EchoFeed but the ones I did ship I'm pretty happy with.

Humonize! came about because of humonising on Connected and they were gunna stop because someone hated it so I made this. I honestly can't keep track of the lore. Also it has tiny head mode.

Perfect Albums is a similar project to App Defaults showcasing people's perfect albums based on the question asked on episode 110 of Hemispheric Views. Speaking of App Defaults, it's come around again with people posting their 2024 edition so it's gone well over 400 blog posts now.

The hastily put together collab between myself, Sara, and Keenan: Everyone's Free (to Make Websites).

Slash Pages is the only project I bought a domain for, it just felt like it needed one. It started off with a handful and now it has over 30 different slash pages.

Lens is a project I've been meaning to do for a long time. It checks meta tags, icons, and RSS auto-discovery - basically a check for right before I launch a site. Also handy for checking preview images.

EmojiStorm came to me while I was messing around with snow-fall. It's a bit chaotic.

During the recording of my appearance on Conduit, Jay joked that I should make a site to show the last time I'd watched Mean Girls. So I did just that.

The Donation Daddy Returns

September is, as always, childhood cancer awareness month so me and Adam were fundraising again. We blew past last year's amount and raised over twenty thousand dollars which is incredible. We added a St Jude theme to omg.lol which you can see on our St Jude account here and of course we had some wonderful stickers again.

While I was in London for Relay 10 I got the chance to meet Jill and others from St Jude at a lunch they had put on which was a lovely thing to be invited to.

I won a Mark One pen for donating to Engima stationery's campaign which is far too fancy a pen for me but I love it.

Not sure what we're going to do next year to be honest but we might as well start thinking about it, it's basically September.

Miscellanea

• I moved my wiki to this site
• Almanac now has posters
• I built a CMS for my site
• I added recipe support to my site
• I quit smoking in November. Health++, Cool--.

Since I last shared my homescreen at the start of the year, iOS18 added dark mode icons which I immediately switched on. I still have a couple of apps that haven't updated but I need them on my home screen so I just live with it.

Other changes:

• I'm back on Reddit but only reading, not posting
• I'm using Raindrop instead of Omnivore (which has shut down anyway)
• Godspeed is where I'm doing most of my reminders and todo lists now

We spoke about some of my projects including what I’m doing with EchoFeed and then I was challenged^[1] to make a site, which I did. In the super conductors post-show Jay asked me about British cars and I had to channel all of my knowledge from Top Gear and Grand Tour.

Listen to Conduit 91: Robb Knight made this for himself, and maybe you too

Why

I built this because during the recording of episode 91 of Conduit I had to come up with a new connection. I did have one prepared, but Jay and I had joked about a website which would check how long it had been since I'd watched Mean Girls. So I made that instead.

How

I already have this data in Almanac because I obsessively log every movie and TV show I watch. I knew I'd need some kind of endpoint to get this data into the new website and since I already had the infrastructure to easily make new JSON feeds for collections so that's what I did. I added a new collection for any post with a matching Movie DB ID:

almanacMeanGirls: (collectionApi) => {
        return collectionApi.getFilteredByGlob(makePath('almanac/movies')).reverse().filter(p => {          
            return p.data.tmdbid === 10625
        });
    },

Then added the new JSON feed to /api/meangirls.json.

---
name: Mean Girls
permalink: api/meangirls.json
layout: feed-json
collectionName: almanacMeanGirls
eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true
---

Initially I had intended for the new site to be a straight HTML site with a custom build script to insert the data but as with most projects, I ended up adding Eleventy to save time.

Ignoring the usual boilerplate (package.json, package-lock.json, .gitignore) the entire source of the site is an index file, a single data file that fetches the RSS feed, and an assets folder with icons, a js file, and fonts in it.

For fonts, I wanted to match the logo from the movie which was easy enough to do - it's Futura and Futura Extra Bold. For the burn book font, I found a handful of "ransom" type fonts but I one I liked the most was Magazine Letter. It's missing a lot of symbols but I didn’t need those for this purpose.

For the "burn book" section I borrowed the border styling from DoodleCSS which uses an SVG and border-image which I don't think I've ever used before.

For the falling lips I used snow-fall. This is also how the idea for EmojiStorm came about.

Because this data is coming from a JSON feed I could use EchoFeed to trigger a build but given I only watch this movie every few years, that seemed like overkill. The site does rebuild every day because I didn’t want to use client side JS to show the relative time (e.g. “two days ago”). I’m also considering how to incorporate the musical version when I get around to watching that.

See when I last watched Mean Girls here.

I had previously started this project a long time ago using Netlify functions but I didn't want to be tied to Netlify so I went back to the thing I always do: PHP.

The backend is pretty stright-forward: given a URL, fetch the page then extract the meta tags using DOMDocument. This example is simplified and doesn't have all the error handling, but you get the idea.

$site = [
	'charset' => null,
	'found' => []
];

$contents = @file_get_contents($url);
$document = new \DOMDocument();
@$document->loadHTML($contents);

$metaElements = $document->getElementsByTagName('meta');

foreach (iterator_to_array($metaElements) as $mel) {
	if ($mel->getAttribute('charset')) {
        $site['charset'] = $mel->getAttribute('charset');
        $site['found'][] = 'charset';
    }
}

header('Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8');
echo json_encode($site);

For the front end I wanted to give Alpine a try after reading Blake's post about it - for a project like this where I mostly want to toggle some things based on data existing it was perfect. I initalise the data I need, mostly as null, then when data is fetched I can set things as ticked or filled in. For example, this is the preview card code:

<div class="preview">
    <div 
        class="preview-image" 
        :style="`background-image: url(${site.image})`"
    ></div>
    <div class="preview-details">
        <div 
            class="preview-details-title" 
            x-html="site.title"
        >
                A Title
        </div>
        <div 
            class="preview-details-desc" 
            x-html="site.description"
        >
                a description
        </div>
        <div 
            class="preview-details-site" 
            x-html="site.host"
        >
            example.com
        </div>
    </div>
    <div
        class="preview-details-fediverse disabled" 
        :class="site.fediverse ? 'enabled' : 'disabled'"
    >
        <svg class="icon"><use xlink:href="#mastodon"></use></svg> 
        <div>More from this person</div>
    </div>
</div>

x-html sets the content of an element, x-show only shows an element if it's set, :style runs the rules as JS so they data can be filled from the data (in this case, the site image).

It checks exactly the things I care about and nothing more. I don't check Twitter's meta stuff because I've never used it and I suspect it's less relevant than ever now. It does check for the fediverse:creator tag but it doesn't verify if you've set it correctly in the Mastodon backend. It uses Grandsans for the headings because it's a lovely font.

See Lens here and you can View the source on GitHub.

EmojiStorm is such a project. It starts with one instance of Zach's snow-fall component then you can just keep adding more but it's a random emoji.

It gets a bit slow after ten or so depending on your computer so you've been warned.

Check out EmojiStorm here.

I'm using store-bought flatbreads for this which are lovely, but I'd love to find to find a nice, easy, flatbread recipe. If someone has one, let me know.

• 1.2kg Chicken Thighs
• Oil
• 1 Chopped Onion
• 3cloves Sliced Garlic
• Salt
• 25g Tomato Puree
• 400g Sun-Dried Tomatoes/Fire Roasted Peppers
• 2 Large Chopped Tomatoes
• 200g Chicken Stock
• 50g Chipotle Paste
• 5g Salt
• 20g Apple Cider Vinegar
• Flatbreads
• Little Gem Lettuce
• Sour Cream
• Immersion Blender

Pre-heat the oven to 200°c/400°f.

Lay out chicken thighs on a sheet tray. Generously salt both sides and roast in the oven for 25 minutes.

Add a oil, chopped onion, sliced garlic, and salt to a pan and fry on medium heat for 5 minutes.

Add tomato puree to the pan, mix, and fry for 2-3 minutes.

Add sun-dried tomatoes/fire roasted peppers, large chopped tomatoes, chicken stock, and chipotle paste to the pan. Simmer for 10-15 minutes until it's thickened a bit and the fresh tomatoes are cooked through.

Stir in salt and apple cider vinegar then blend with an immersion blender until smooth.

Shred the chicken by hand then mix it with the sauce.

Lightly grill the flatbreads, add a tablespoon of the chicken tinga to each flatbread, add some chopped little gem lettuce, and drizzle with sour cream.