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After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?
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Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).
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Here's a neat trick. I've got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they're within not-yet-shown popovers).
This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says "skip over not-yet open popovers on initial page render" -
[popover]:not(:popover-open) {
content-visibility: hidden;
}I appreciate that Lighthouse isn't the last word in performance metrics, of course. But this change alone bumped an affected page's score from 76 to 100, so it's not nothing either!
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Polyday Politics workshop
Grant ran a workshop on politics (and law) around polyamory, at a recent event. I wasn't there, but enjoyed reading his notes after-the-fact... and wanted to use the opportunity to share some of my own thoughts and experiences.
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Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)
A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!
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Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American
When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!
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Your phone is not the problem
Following the discussions in the blogsphere lately about our relationships with our phones, I'd like to echo Antonio Santos' sentiments, and add a few supporting thoughts of my own.
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Every time I see Sainsburys comparing the value-for-money of different brands of toilet roll, the abbreviation they use catches me out and I think they're telling me how much paper I should be "using".
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Online supermarket showing several brands of toilet paper with the price displayed alongside a breakdown showing the price (in pence) per hundred sheets (of toilet paper), but "sheet" is abbreviated to "sht" which looks like... a different word I associate with the product.
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WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!
25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...
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F-Day plus 214
It's been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that... it's little wonder that people are getting confused.
Like:
Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving β¦ -
A Postcard from a Labyrinth Artist
Another Postcard From The Internet landed on my doormat this week... and it's from a real-life labyrinth designer and artist based in Canada. So cool!
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On Publishing Your Salary
Kev Quirk observes that of folks who (like me) choose to share their salary online, there's likely to be a skew towards higher salaries. What can we do to better-contextualise that, I wonder?
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Re: How I made...
Noah S shared how he used some PHP code to block specific badly-behaved bots from his website. I've got a few suggestions to help him make his block faster, easier-to-maintain, and more-thorough, either using PHP code or webserver configuration.
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Did not find GC3C7FT Woodies
After seeking (and finding, surprisingly) the 2026-09-13 51 -1 geohashpoint down in the Brook Hill nature reserve, the geohound and I came to try to find this cache, too. After finding the correct way into the nature reserve (access from Verinia Court now being disallowed, apparently) we quickly found the relevant board and, after pushing β¦
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Geohashing expedition 2026-09-13 51 -1
A successful geohashing expedition to a swampy area near Woodstock, despite an incident during which I was attacked by a wasp whom I'd attempted to squash using my genitals. (Yes, really.)
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Opusfived
MiloΕ‘ NovoviΔ's experimental interactive fiction is a silly (but with a grain of truth!) simulation of what it feels like to attempt to use vibe-coding to make small, simple, isolated changes to an established codebase. Go play it!
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Hot new laptop features
Earlier this summer Chad Comello's 7-year-old son built a laptop from paint and cardboard and it's got some kickass features that you can't get from anywhere else. Wishlisted.
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Automattic Minus Matt
There's a lot of tech press this morning about the involuntary ousting of my former boss Matt Mullenweg from his CEO position at Automattic. Ernie Smith from Tedium's article is my favourite. Here's my take on why this is good for Automattic (and everybody else!), and why this should be seen not as a power grab... but as an intervention!
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Pixel Area (@pxlarea@mastodon.social) launched a couple of weeks ago, and DanQ.me was selected to be one of the initial "seed" blogs that were there at the outset (I'm at https://pxlarea.com/x38y34).
I'm... honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there's a list view available too). And 'pixel' seems to be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my 'pixel' comprises... 169 pixels). It's got a little bit of a "million dollar homepage" (remember that) feel to it... though at least it's not operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it's home-grown indie/smolweb content.
I guess it's a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it's "space" and hop to neighbours?)
So... yeah; I'm undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!
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Screenshot from Pixel Area, showing a blue 'pixel' representing Dan Q.
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That moment when you realise that you forgot your sunglasses but figure you'll just squint.
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A fawn-coloured French Bulldog sits on the wooden decking outside a back door, squinting as she looks towards the sun (evident from the direction of the shadows).
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Use Firefox
Ramkumar Shankar says you should use Firefox, and they're right: you should. Not just because it's a great browser, and it is, but because doing so helps protect the freedom and openness of the Web. Use Firefox.
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Needed to renew my driving license. My new one doesn't have an EU flag on it. The sad reminders of Brexit just keep coming. πͺπΊπ
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Hot take: AI peaked with Taco Bot 3000
AI peaked in 2014 with the invention of the Taco Bot 3000. With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see again.
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Why Are We Taught to Memorise and Not Learn?
Γaki puts forward a political but fair look at the mass-production standardisation of English-language education in British schools. In an effort to make work measurable and objectively assessable, it argues, we're stripping the joy out of the art of writing.
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The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
One of the best books I've read so far this year (although my review is about three months late!) was Holly Gramazio's debut novel, The Husbands. A proper page-turner that keeps you engaged through all of its twists and turns, I can't recommend it strongly enough.
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Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
Jeff Johnson observes that Google Chrome has AGAIN started ignoring user privacy settings specifically for .google.com domains. This leads me to ask, not for the first time, why are there still so many people using Chrome as their daily driver, when there are so many perfectly-good alternatives that don't feed the beast in the same way?
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F-Day plus 204 (no content??)
HTTP status code 204 means "no content". No update. Nothing to tell you. F-Day plus 204 brings the same meaning: a disappointing lack of updates to the efforts to repair our house following getting flooded-out in February.
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Why I Stopped βCreating Contentβ
Michael Lynch uses a tongue-in-cheek metaphor as a vehicle through which to argue against the ubiquity of the term 'content', and I agree: we can do better with a richer and more-specific definition of our arts.
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It took 13 years to notice my invalid vehicle registration certificate!
Thirteen years ago, it seems, a DVLA form processor decided that my name must have been a company name, and incorrectly registered my car's keeper as being a non-existent company imagined to share my name. And I only just found out.
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Wrote note for GC9EXXC Shady Seat on The Green
Quick check while I was passing, as nobody's logged this cache during our stupidly-hot July or August (and I don't blame them: it's been horrible outdoors!). Anyway: the cache is fine and healthy and looking forward to its next visitor!
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I descaled the coffee machine yesterday. We live in an exceptionally hard-water area and this maintenance was long overdue.
This morning I turned the machine on and something felt unfamiliar and wrong. I couldn't put my finger on what, until I realised...
...I'd gotten so-used to seeing the "descaling needed" light illuminated that I'd subconsciously forgotten that it wasn't supposed to be always-lit! Turns out that a warning left long enough becomes not just invisible but normalised!
(Next, maybe I should do something about the 'check engine' light in the car. It's been on for a while too...)
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Close-up of the buttons on an automatic/beans-to-cup coffee machine.
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How do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say?
My fellow volunteer Oliver Earl has been picking up on his blogging and asks, with reference to my archives... how do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say? And then he comes to the correct conclusion:
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The modern app
The other month, David Bushell made a tongue-in-cheek interactive simulation of the state of modern desktop applications. It's pretty fun, and I see what he means.
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we don't shame smart glasses wearers enough
Ava's take on techbro ideas of "privacy", and in particular the situation with "smart glasses", is especially well-written and worth a look.
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Found GC9BHWG Watercress beds
Despite immediately honing in on exactly the right host, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to find this cache. This, despite having found - and even hidden - cache contsibers of exactly this type before!
My usual technique for lazily finding them, which involves swooping my phone through likely hiding spots with β¦ -
Found GC8ZWZ3 Letcombe Bridges 1
QEF while passing through the village on a circular walk. TFTC!
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Wrote note for GC4H2MB Church Micro 4008β¦Letcombe Regis
Found the grave, but this is now the second offset I've found here that's asked me to double-back on my walk. Nope! I'm just going to save the calculated coordinates for the next time I'm in the area! Looking forward to returning!
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Wrote note for GC9F5YC GIs in Letcombe
Found the clues and solved the coordinates, but I've JUST walked past the final location a while ago and don't feel like doubling back today!
A=How many letters in the word underneath Knoxville?
B=A*2
C=Number of letters in place where "Beckett" came from.
D=C+1
E=F Number of letters in the β¦ -
Found GC9QWHD Plankton's cache
Like many before me, from the looks of things, I didn't find the cache at the published coordinates but about 11 metres away at N 51Β° 34.086', W 001Β° 26.441'. Possibly worth the CO checking if those coordinates work better for them, too, during their next maintenance visit. TFTC!
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Found GC93M2N Segsbury Fort
A challenging but worthwhile find during a walk along and around the Ridgeway.
AltA windswept and rolling rural landscape, with storm clouds brewing in the distance.
My initial attempt to collect the coordinates was way off because I misinterpreted some of the instructions and it yielded a point almost 2km away! My second β¦ -
Found GC46RY8 It really is about the (2 millionth) cache
This morning I came up to explore the Ridgeway and escape from thinking about Life Stuff for a bit. (Although escaping from the rain wasn't a possibility! It was real wet up here today!)
I was wandering this path in a bit of a reverie when I spotted something unusual and thought it a β¦ -
Found GC39X1K GH #11 twisted tree
Found cache contents first, some of which I was only able to identify thanks to the photo in the previous log. Cache container, minus lid, was found a reasonable distance away, but this badly-damaged, nearly-destroyed cache is a goner, I feel.
AltA badly damaged geocache with a toy whistle falling out of it.
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Found GC39WVC G h # 10
A few attempts at hacking through the brambles to get near the hint location had me thinking that perhaps this was a wintertime only cache... before I realised that there was a different route by which I might approach it. Soon I was directly atop the coordinates and immediately sighted what I was looking for. β¦
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Found GC4H2N6 Church Micro 4009 ... Letcombe Bassett
A quick diversion before a hike up Gramp's Hill and along the Ridgeway. After collecting the required information I pressed on to the cache, meeting some friendly ponies and horses on the way.
AltIn a yard, a foal and a pony share some hay.
The coordinates were spot on, which surprised me as β¦ -
Vanity Nameservers (White-Label DNS) in 2026
Back in 2006, adding vanity nameservers to my personal domains was just something I did as a matter of course, but - like most of the Internet - I don't bother any more. Until today, when I switched danq.me's nameservers to four subdomains of danq.me. For the sake of nostalgia!
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Found GCBX0JC Church Micro 12106...Standlake
After a walk out with the dog to claim the FTF on nearby GCBX0R7, I figured that I still had a little a few minutes on my hands before the code I'd been writing for my day job finished deploying and testing itself, so I thought I'd try to go two-for-two with this, a second β¦
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Found GCBX0R7 War Memorial #???? ~ Standlake
After liaising with the CO to get the formula fixed following my previous effort, the geohound and I came out for a drizzly walk in-between the downpours to have a second attempt at the FTF. We're living in Standlake temporarily while our house is repaired following a catastrophic flood earlier in the year, and while β¦
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A Postcard from Tony (who the heck is Tonyβ½)
I received another Postcard From The Internet; this one's written on a very unusual medium, and that's not the only thing that's odd about it... another thing is that I can't work out who its from, beyond the first-name-only with which they've signed the card. Who are you, Tony?
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Did not find GCBX0R7 War Memorial #???? ~ Standlake
Well I feel especially thick right now. Probably I've done something stupid, but I rushed down here between-meetings in hope of an FTF, collected all the numbers, did the maths, and got... the same coordinates I started with! Wot?
The checksum even works out with the original coordinates, too! Which of course can happen β¦ -
Boring Polyamory: Equality and Bedrooms
The other month, I described my polyamory as 'boring', which attracted lots of interesting questions and feedback. Let's address the first one - why does my partner not have a bedroom of 'her own', even though both of her partners get one?
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The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto
Jim Mitchell shared The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto. And it's excellent.
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More posts β (of all kinds:
articles, 
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notes, 
reposts, and more...)