April 2025 – Dan Q
Personal website and blog of Dan Q: life, technology, magic, games, the Web, relationships, and more.| Dan Q
Personal website and blog of Dan Q: life, technology, magic, games, the Web, relationships, and more.| Dan Q
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! Outside of Christmas Day, I don’t often get to use 6+ hobs and both ovens simultaneously, but I appreciate […]| Dan Q
Maybe I'm just hungry, but this morning's breakfast bagel with brie looks especially scrumptious, right?| Dan Q
I hand-drew a QR code so it looks like what I did was made a maze in Microsoft Paint. But it works! Here's how.| Dan Q
Sean McPherson shared a "four quadrants" diagram for people's beliefs about AI, with a specific focus on LLMs used for coding assistance. Here's where I sit on it, and why.| Dan Q
Based on my experience of 'vibe coding', I think Jim Nielsen's analogies are absolutely spot on.| Dan Q
For years, I've been using a HTML+CSS-only technique for popover 'lightbox' images on my blog. Now I've come up with a more-semantic way to do the same, and its HTML code is tidier too!| Dan Q
A moderately-large house spider dropped down and startled my dog as she napped in her basket, so now she’s hiding under my desk and refusing to return to bed. 🙄😂| Dan Q
I walked to a different COUNTY one morning before breakfast, just to get a geocache!| Dan Q
This checkin to GCAJH34 Jonah's Oak reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. My little tribe and I have, in some form of another, been attending Cropredy for decades: intermittently in the past, but lately with more regularity every year. For me, it’s coincided with the growth of our family: I’ve […]| Dan Q
This checkin to GC8Z1F6 Church Micro 13672...Great Bourton ⛪️ reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. My family and I have made a tradition of our regular attendance of Fairport’s Cropredy Convention. There I – being the earliest riser of us – have in turn made a tradition of getting up […]| Dan Q
My family and I have made a tradition of our regular attendance of Fairport's Cropredy Convention. There I - being the earliest riser of us - have in turn made a tradition of getting up early to find a nearby geocache on any morning that I'm up before the kids. This practice has already eliminated all of the caches in Cropredy itself, and so now my morning walks take me further afield. This morning I opted to follow the footpath over the fields to Great Bourton to investigate the two multicac...| Dan Q
From 1973 onwards Doug Biggert, driving around California, took an (analogue!) photograph of every hitch-hiker to whom he offered a lift. Now you can view a gallery and read his story.| Dan Q
I somehow missed the news from June about Daniel Hamrick, who courageously got on stage to play a anti-transphobia protest song at a 'heterosexual pride' event in one of the most deeply-conservative parts of the USA. Here's the video of his (short!) set.| Dan Q
"I still get that powerful feeling that anything is possible when I open a web browser — it’s not as strong as it was 20 years ago, but it’s still there." - Geoff Graham| Dan Q
A freaking excellent longread by Eevee (Evelyn Woods), lamenting the direction of popular technological progress and general enshittification of creator culture. It's ultimately uplifting, I feel, but it's full of bitterness until it gets there.| Dan Q
When you signed up with an ISP, you used to get Web space, email, shared FTP access, a nearby IRC node, newsgroups, and a software bundle. Nowadays you get a shit router, a voucher for a free month of a streaming service you didn't want, and crap customer service. Where did we go wrong?| Dan Q
Finished work. Figured I’d chill in the hammock for a bit as it’s so nice out. The dog decided she wanted to lie in it too. So now I am a pillow for a dog.| Dan Q
Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you "part of" the Internet, just that they'd help you "connect to" the Internet. Most people don't need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down. The amount of effort to "put something online" didn't increase b...| Dan Q
In the event of a fire on my bus, I’m concerned that the head of the man sitting in front of me is flammable.| Dan Q
In my first few weeks at my new employer, my code contributions have added 218 lines of code, deleted 2,663. Only one of my PRs has resulted in a net increase in the size of their codebases (by two lines). I need to pick up the pace if I’m going to reach the ultimate goal […]| Dan Q
Have you ever wanted to hear a (sarcastic, passive aggressive) dramatic reading of RFC 2119? Eric Bailey - and the actor he found - have got you covered!| Dan Q
A Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is wonderful!| Dan Q
A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings. A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza... constructed using a quesapizza as its base! Watch me make one in a 90-second timelapse.| Dan Q
On a car journey on which they'd otherwise have been fighting, the kids helped me start a collection of heterophonic homonyms - words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. I've got nine of them now in English, and maybe two in other languages... can you help me find some more?| Dan Q
Thanks to the community's invention of a "Region unlocked" achievement, I've been able to instantly (and retroactively!) tick another one off my geohashing list, for my expedition on Trinidad early this year! (Possibly I've achieved it other times, too: I haven't yet determined whether anybody successfully hashed in County Mayo or County Galway before I did last year, on account of both counties spanning multiple graticules and so requiring more research!)| Dan Q
Do you know the story of how Tom Lehrer hid an Easter Egg in an academic paper he wrote at the NSA, and his joke wasn't discovered for almost six decades?| Dan Q
This weekend I once again found myself underground beneath London; this time exploring the Camden South Deep Shelter with the help of the Hidden London folks. And it was pretty damn cool.| Dan Q
Went to Wagamama. Accidentally made the "Order of the Beast". (Plus a similar side, for those who read binary.)| Dan Q
Seventy years ago, residents of this part of London would take shelter from V1 and V2 bombs in a tunnel beneath my feet. And today, I’m going down there to take a look!| Dan Q
ArtificialCast is a lightweight, type-safe casting and transformation utility powered by large language models. It allows seamless conversion between strongly typed objects using only type metadata, JSON schema inference, and prompt-driven reasoning.| Dan Q
Checked-in on this cache as it's had surprisingly-few visits yet. Reassured to find that it's all still in place and findable. Second-to-find's still up for grabs.| Dan Q
Personal website and blog of Dan Q: life, technology, magic, games, the Web, relationships, and more.| Dan Q
I spent most of a day getting my new development environment set up, because I kept hitting issues that nobody at my new employer had experienced before. A "perfect storm" of coincidences that conspired together to completely wreck my chance of a simple setup. The factors? Apple's M4 processors remove the SVE architecture and its instruction set, which was present in the M1 through M3 The Colima dockerisation tool still reports to arm64 containers that SVE is available Java < 24 will, by defa...| Dan Q
The unrepentant bleppy face of a dog who, without fail, steals the warm spot I've left behind on the sofa within like three seconds of me standing up.| Dan Q
Not just a global issue but a local one too. A local one... almost everywhere. #ShowYourStripes| Dan Q
I recently read Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella. I guess it's got a 'werewolf'. It barely feels 'gay'. It certainly left me 'bored', at times. Turns out that it's a very middle-of-the-road story about Gen Z folks growing into their identities, using sexuality and lycanthropy as loosely-fitting framing devices.| Dan Q
Performed a quick checkup on this much-loved cache before the summertime cachers come out in earnest. All looks healthy here!| Dan Q
Personal website and blog of Dan Q: life, technology, magic, games, the Web, relationships, and more.| Dan Q
Dan explores the history of two (much-maligned) HTML tags of the yesterweb. With blinking marquees!| Dan Q
I've had a few breakups, but I've only been made redundant once. There's a surprising overlap between the two! Here, let's put a Venn-Euler diagram together...| Dan Q
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?| Dan Q
