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.
  • Post: Chicory Battlestation

    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'.

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • My Salary History

    Inspired by Jeremy Keith doing the same, I've made the salary history of my career transparent. Read more →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • Did I Cheat?

    I solved a puzzle geocache in an unconventional way: by writing a program to permute all the possible solutions and check them for me. Was that cheating? I can see arguments either way... Read more →

  • More articles →
    (articles are traditional long-form blog posts)

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • Post: Moving the Internet

    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!

  • Molly guard in reverse

    In his Unsung blog, Marcin Wichary's shared the concept of a 'reverse molly guard', which is awesome. I didn't actually know the originating term 'molly guard' until I saw it, though, although I've definitely seen (and implemented) then before. Hey: d'ya wanna hear about a molly guard I added to Three Rings the other year? Read more →

  • The Dungeon of Dark Patterns

    The latest episode of webcomic Mini Fantasy Theater - The Dungeon of Dark Patterns - is just excellent. Read more →

  • WSL9x

    Hailey Somerville's managed to get something akin to WSL working on Windows 95. Who'd have even thought such a thing was possible? Read more →

  • Post: The Commute (Chicory House Edition)

    My "commute" since moving to the Chicory House isn't much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see? Read more →

  • Reply to: I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad

    Inspired by a mate whose dad recently died, Kev Quirk shared his own experience of his father's death, and a particular ritual of his reminded me of one of my own. Read more →

  • Post: Ghost of a dartboard

    There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻 × Read more →

  • Post: What breaks?

    What breaks when one of your developers leaves?

    On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.

    It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.

    Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!

  • Found GCBN167 Ivy Believe It's Up There!

    This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container! Read more →

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