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.

  • Hive's Password Policy Makes Me Cry

    Hive's password form can't decide whether you need 8+ or 12+ characters, gives misleading error messages and... requires that you use a 'special character' except most special characters (including most common punctuation) is secretly banned, and gives you a misleading error message if you try to use it. Do better, Hive! Read more →

  • Do Contact Forms Attract More Spam than Email Addresses?

    David Bushell, Luke Harris, and Kev Quirk all shared how they got less spam from exposing their email addresses on their personal websites than they did through their contact forms. That's not my experience, though, and I think I know why... Read more →

  • Impossible Countdown

    Are there any tilesets that can be legitimately drawn during Countdown's Letters Game for which there exist no English words? I began writing a program to try to find the worst possible deals, but then found a series of heuristic shortcuts that meant I could find one with just a few minutes thought... because it turns out computers aren't always the right answer! Read more →

  • Two Days Offline

    This week we lost Internet access for two whole days, and it was pretty disruptive and annoying! Read more →

  • The Beer Token

    Thanks to the success of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, we can never forget quite how much beer you used to be able to get for a fiver (plus an exceptionally-generous tip). Nowadays, it'll get you one pint, if you're lucky... and that offers us an exciting opportunity... Read more →

  • MS Paint-grade QR Codes?

    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. Read more →

  • Details/summary lightboxes in pure HTML + CSS

    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! Read more →

  • Internet Services^H Provider

    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? Read more →

  • Quesapizza-pizza

    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. Read more →

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    (articles are traditional long-form blog posts)

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  • It Is A War Out There - Take Control of Your Supply Lines with HtDTY

    Andrew Stephens reminds us to HtDTY (Host the Damn Thing Yourself) to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks and improve privacy. But I think the argument goes further than this. Read more →

  • The Scroll Art Museum

    The Scroll Art Museum demonstrates a surprisingly cool way of generating animation using ASCII art in a scroll buffer and... look, it's just cool, okay? And it inspired me to dust off a copy of QBASIC for a moment, too... Read more →

  • Post: 1% Guild

    vole.wtf’s 1% guild wasn’t the easiest club to gain membership of, but somehow keeping my phone alive for long enough to snap this screenshot was even harder.× Read more →

  • Somebody just called me and quickly decided it was a wrong number. The signal was bad and I wasn't sure I'd heard them right, so I followed up by replying by text.

    It turns out they asked Siri to call Three (the mobile network). Siri then presumably searched online, found Three Rings, managed to connect that to my mobile number, and called me.

    If Siri's decided that I represent Three, this could work out even worse than that time Google shared my phone number. Read more →

  • Dogspinner

    Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed. Read more →

  • Lowriders & websites

    Praise for a blog post by Adam Stoddard, defending the handcrafting of software even where it serves no direct purpose other than the satisfaction of its creator. Read more →

  • Post: Hot Boxes

    I’d never put much thought into it before but a slow cooker is basically the opposite of an air frier.They’re both relatively small (compared to an oven) hot boxes for cooking food. But an air frier uses the small space to contain as much energy as possible in thir vicinity of the food, while the […] Read more →

  • Note #27400

    Did I just rank my LPG provider 10/10, or 1/10? I genuinely don’t know. × Read more →

  • Whenever I'm writing a rhyme,
    I can't do the third and fourth line.
    Dah-de-da-dah-duh,
    Dah-de-de-dah-duh.
    But somehow it still works out fine.

  • Note #27366

    I'm looking at listing for a ¼" to ⅝" screw adapter, for which the seller warns that I should "please allow 1-3cm error".
    A 3cm error would mean that a ⅝" screw could result in a screw thread anywhere between 1⅘" and... minus half an inch, I guess? (I don't even know how to make the concept of negative lengths fit into my brain.)
    I suppose this seller could send me an empty envelope and declare that it contained an infinitesimally small adapter. At which point... I'd be the one that was screwed! Read more →

  • Egencia Mailing List Accessibility

    A special level of accessibility failure on Egencia's mailing list subscription management page: the labels for choosing which individual mailing lists to subscribe to are properly-configured, but the "unsubscribe all" one isn't. Click the words "unsubscribe all" and... nothing happens.

    But it gets better: try keyboard-navigating through the form, and it's hard not to unsubscribe from everything, even if you didn't want to! As soon as the "unsubscribe all" checkbox gets focus, you get instantly unsubscribed: no interaction necessary. Read more →

  • The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

    Cory Doctorow paints a bleak picture of the future world economy in the aftermath of the bursting of the AI bubble. I agree that we're in a bubble, but I'm slightly more-optimistic that we can survive it without a total economic catastrophe. Read more →

  • Note #27339

    We made it to the end of another Bleptember, with a photo every day of my especially-bleppy young doggo.

    Thanks for coming along for the ride. See you next year! Read more →

  • Note #27329

    Somehow, even when she's alert and focussed, our dog's bleppy tongue makes her look at least a little bit dopey.

    It's the Twenty-Ninth of Bleptember; we're almost done for another year!

  • Note #27327

    It’s a little wet and miserable this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember, but what really perturbed this bleppy doggo was somebody she didn’t recognise moving a wheelie-bin outside their house. What could they want? Can they be trusted? Might they have ham? 🐶 × Read more →

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    (of all kinds: articles, checkins, notes, reposts...)