About

A self portrait photograph of the author. My, is he dashing.

Hi, my name is Paul Knight, and this is my site.

I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area. I get paid to turn tea into code.

I love traveling, pretending I'm a photographer, and doing nothing during summer afternoons.

Diplowhat?

A diplograph is a machine that produces two copies of text at the same time, like a machine that's both a typewriter and braille embosser in one.

See, Ava and I used to share this site and—actually the name doesn't make any sense, now that I think about it.

Colophon

I take my photos with a Canon EOS 500D T1i. I use a few different lenses, including:

Canon EF 50mm ƒ/1.4 USM
Canon EF-S 60mm Macro ƒ2.8 USM
Canon EF 17–40mm ƒ/4L USM
Canon EF 70–200mm ƒ/4L
Canon EF-S 17–85mm ƒ/4–5.6 IS USM
Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM

I use a Speedlite 580EX II and a few other miscellaneous gadgets and gizmos when I'm taking photos.

I use Aperture to manage my library and do a lot of post processing. Photoshop CS3 does the heavy editing, and I've been playing with Viveza 2 lately. PTLens is my go-to for correcting lens distortion, and Dfine has saved more than a couple of noisy photos. In full disclosure, I've received discounted or complimentary versions of Apple and Nik products.

I write with Scrivener. I develop with TextMate and Xcode.

Diplograph is generated with a custom engine I call White Ink, written in Ruby. Content is written in White Cloth, a custom markup format based on the rdiscount Markdown implementation. HTML and CSS are generated with Haml and Sass. Postprocessing is done with Nokogiri. Some support is provided by Typography Helper, based on Typogrify. Image metadata is extracted with ExifTool. Equations are typeset with XeTeX and rasterized through Apple's Core Graphics.

The design is constantly evolving.

One day I will write a proper post about how White Ink works, and possibly even clean it up for public release.

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