Robb Knight
Maker of web things, blogger, podcaster, and pizzaiolo. Cat dad and human dad.
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I had second child. No time for anything else. Thank you for reading.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
lol okay nerd[2].
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:
Despite attending a freelancers meetup every month for a decade, I've never done any freelance work until this year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Health++, Cool--.Here it is, my year-end post for 2024 https://rknight.me/blog/just-2024-things-i-didnt-get-the-year-wrong-this-time/
Lots more stuff in here than I'd thought there would be.
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