Dan Q

I'm Dan Q (he/him). I've spent the last 26+ years creating and writing online.

I work as a software engineer, and I volunteer with Three Rings. I live with my partner, her husband, two kids and a dog. I can sometimes be found geo*ing, performing magic, or recording the most pointless podcast.

I believe in open source, open relationships, and opening doors to marginalised groups. Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights.
Be nice to humans, human.

Photograph of Dan, his ponytail hanging over the shoulder of his black t-shirt, smiling from behind his beard and waving to the camera.

  • DOCTYPE

    I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids. Read more →

  • Pushing RSS to WhatsApp (for free?)

    RSS remains the gold standard for subscribing to Web content... but WhatsApp Channels/Newsletters provide another interesting opportunity for syndication. If only somebody had written an RSS-to-WhatApp integration that could run for free in a GitHub Action? Oh wait, that's what I just did! Read more →

  • Postcards... from the Internet!

    A few weeks ago I published a PO Box address to which visitors to my site can post postcards, to try to bridge the gap between my 'Internet friends' and the physical world. Today I received my first two postcards, and I couldn't be more thrilled (not least because I wasn't entire sure anybody would go for my weird suggestion!). Read more →

  • I guess I'm never paying DreamHost back

    About 17 years ago, I stopped using DreamHost. They later decided I owed them money. I disagreed, but enjoyed watching them incredibly-slowly claw it back via the 'refer and earn' program, from all the people I ever recommended them to. But now, only a few months from the (alleged) debt being settled... they've killed the program, depriving me of the opportunity for... a more-humorous blog post, I guess? Read more →

  • Beige Buttons

    When was the last time you saw a computer with a reset AND a turbo button? Bet it's been a while. But now, thanks to a stupid web component I made, you can see one on my website... or your own. What does it do? Nobody knows! Read more →

  • How I Learned the Pythagorean Theorem

    I clearly remember the day I first learned the Pythagorean theorem, because I had a problem I wanted to solve and a practical application that I wanted to use it on. Let's re-create the experience, and see if I can take any lessons about how to support my kids in their own mathematical journeys. Read more →

  • Are you closer to Ireland or Scotland?

    A throwaway comment in a WhatsApp group lead me to a deep dive into geodata encoding and drawing a big old line all the way across England (and a little way across Wales!). It's nerdsnipe time! Read more →

  • Send Me a Postcard!

    Sure, you could leave a comment or drop me an email or say hi on Mastodon... but wouldn't it be cooler if you could send a physical postcard in response to a blog post? Let's find out together. Read more →

  • The Signal and the Noise is still excellent

    13 years ago I reviewed The Signal and the Noise by Pagan Wanderer Lu. Despite being knocked down at least one peg, it still stands among my top ten concept albums ever, and it's now available for free so you should go and listen to it. Read more →

  • More articles →
    (articles are traditional long-form blog posts)
  • Post: Minimalist Trees

    Not sure I’m a fan of these new ultra-minimalist Christmas trees.× Read more →

  • For the last few years I’ve been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more difficult, […] Read more →

  • Woodcraft Folk statement on the exclusion of trans children from Girlguiding

    Girlguiding UK recently opted not to modernise their articles, meaning that their interpretation of the Supreme Court's misguided decision necessarily excludes trans girls and young women from Girlguiding. So it was heartening to read this statement from Woodcraft Folk, reaffirming that their support for trans kids is fundamental and unwavering. Read more →

  • Post: Please Insert Dog

    We got our dog a Christmas jumper.
    My favourite thing about it is that its coat hanger contains instructions for use:
    "Please insert dog" Read more →

  • Post: Chinese Domain Name Scam

    I find a lot of these "this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases" emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They're a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying "No, please help protect my brand identity, I'll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!"

    But I've always wondered - what happens if you reply and say "Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains." I'd know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)... but they can't admit that they know that.

    Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)

  • Dithering - Part 1

    I already understand how using a threshold map to perform dithering works... and yet I still appreciated this amazing visual explainer from Damar Berlari. Read more →

  • Post: Trams Rights

    Fellow folks at the interest-intersection of "public transport" and "queer activism" (I know you're out there!): I had an idea for a t-shirt.

    Do I print it? Or give up on graphic design and go back to backend programming where I belong? Read more →

  • HTTP is not simple

    After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends. Read more →

  • How Online Privacy Has Been Championed by Dreamwidth

    Coyote's written some solid words about how well Dreamwidth are standing up for user privacy and liberty against an increasingly hostile and censorship-ridden environment. Read more →

  • Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying "ethical non-monogamy"?

    Nobody feels the need to say "ethical monogamy"; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.

    I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word "ethical" and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)

  • Post: The perils of doors in gamedev

    Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be! Read more →

  • Post: Male Surname?

    This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut?

    Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!? Read more →

  • SVGs that feel like GIFs

    Back in July Vincent D. Warmerdam shared a great tip on screen-recording terminals into small, scalable animated SVG files, and I only just got around to reading it. Amazing stuff! Read more →

  • Happy Polyamory Day y’all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I’d have forgotten about it, like most years.)Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn’t always glamorous; […] Read more →

  • AI and cigarettes

    Chris Ferdinandi draws parallels between people pushing 'less-harmful' AI and those promoting vaping as 'less-harmful' smoking; the latter, of course, ultimately resulted in new people taking up a nicotine habit that might now have otherwise: not what was intended at all! Read more →

  • More posts →
    (of all kinds: articles, checkins, notes, reposts...)