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.
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£4,803.40 a Year for Water?
When we moved house, Thames Water failed to set us up an account correctly, and the hacky workaround they came up with claims that we spent our first 11 hours in the Chicory House perhaps pouring three tonnes of water into an ankle-depth 5×10 metre swimming pool. Read more →
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Once You're Asking the Right Question, You Don't Need To Ask!
The other week, a coding LLM helped me... without me ever submitting a single prompt to it. I just typed into it all the component parts of my problem, and in doing so the solution revealed itself to me. It's rubberducking... silent AI edition! Read more →
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BBC News RSS... with full-size thumbnails!
A user of my Improved BBC News Feeds reached out to suggest that I upgrade the resolution of the thumbnail images. Turns out this was a quick win: my noodles hadn't even cooled before I finished. Read more →
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FlipFlop Solitaire's Deck-Generation Secret
I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse! Read more →
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My Salary History
Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent. Read more →
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Chicory Keys
There's a special spot in my wallet where my "front door key" lives, but - despite the practical reasons to do so - I've resisted adding the Chicory House key in that spot. Instead, I've found myself keeping it in the "secondary key" spot, as a tiny reminder that the current state of affairs is a temporary one. Read more →
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Letting Games Die
Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation. Read more →
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Wood-Fired
This year's 3Camp venue had a wood-fired pizza oven, so I signed-up for a shift of cooking for my fellow volunteers and thoroughly enjoyed making and baking a monumental amount of dough. Read more →
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Food divided by Distance
In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal. Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
Reply to: locked-open
Dave Winer asked "What's the opposite of locked-in? Locked-open. Mwhahaa." Which kicked me off on thinking about how we secure the open-source nature of software, standards, and concepts... and the ideas that land in each. Read more →
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rejecting convenience
RNotté shares a manifesto to seek out inconvenience in order to seek greater human connection and authentic experiences. And you know what their post reminds me of? The Matrix! Read more →
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Something’s gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household’s film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition… × Read more →
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Reply to: let's write a blog post about CSS
Dave's struggling to finish his blog post out CSS. I get the feeling... let me tell you about my blog post about pedestrian crossings. Read more →
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Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️ Read more →
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It's been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is - going many others, mostly older and larger than him! - finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞
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Wrote note for GC9EXXC Shady Seat on The Green
Checked up on this cache, this morning, as I was in the neighbourhood. It's looking healthy, with dry contents including a sharpened pencil for logging plus a couple of tradables that have turned up. Read more →
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Found GCBMAGF #07 Northmoor Loop
Imagine my surprise when the geohound and I are out for a walk from Appleton to find the Rainbow Bridge cache, to receive a notification of a new cache series at Northmoor. All we need to do is extend our walk a short way, I figure, and we can claim an FTF! But it was not to be! Read more →
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Found GC8B4J5 Rainbow Bridge
Our taeget cache got the geopup and I: I've coated under this bridge, I think, but never found an excuse to go over it into today. The doggo is running out of steam and the afternoon looks likely to be too hot for her, but we'll make a quick run at one of the new Nortmoor Loop series before we turn back. Might even score a FTF! Read more →
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Found GCBB3J9 Appleton Wharf
What a beautiful spot for a geocache, which the geopup and I quickly found in the second host we checked. Then, we enjoyed a delightful few minutes of peace, sitting on the riverbank, before continuing our morning's adventure. Read more →
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Did not find GCBBDDV To The Thames
The geohound wouldn't let me search as long as I'd have liked, and my GPS must've been off because I couldn't really find anything that matched the hint description. One for another day, perhaps. Read more →
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Found GC8JWW9 Aslan's Spring
The geopup tested the waters while I retrieved the cache. What a wonderful spring on a delightful footpath! TFTC, and FP for the wonderful location and proper-sized cache container. Read more →
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Found GCBAZZN The Big Dipper
QEF for the geohound and I on a walk around Appleton this morning. Excellent container with a fantastic hint, FP awarded. TFTC! Read more →
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Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.
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The "regular" house's Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.
Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven't yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh! -
More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)