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) -
Spoon bucket
Jaime Derringer shared that she got a literal bucket of assorted spoons for her birthday, and I'm just delighted to discover that such a thing exists. Read more →
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Found GCBMAMH #22 Northmoor Loop
For a while I was looking way too high, but in the end I caught a glimpse of this surprisingly well-concealed container.And that’s the loop complete! Big thanks to the CO for setting this excellent trail spanning so many gorgeous footpaths, many of them new to me despite being relatively local!Thanks for all the caches, […] Read more →
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Found GCBMAMC #21 Northmoor Loop
A good thematic cache container which we managed to find in a gap between muggle traffic. TFTC. Read more →
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Found GCBMAM5 #20 Northmoor Loop
QEF for the geohound and I as we push on into the final straight of our circular walk. TFTC!× Read more →
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Found GCBMAM2 #19 Northmoor Loop
My GPSr – and my eyes – locked on to a nearby gate post which I searched thoroughly before realising it wasn’t the host: d’oh! Eventually found success while the doggo tried to make more sheepy friends.× Read more →
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Found GCBMAKZ #18 Northmoor Loop
Solid coordinates walked me right into this one, although I’ve still got to give it credit for excellent camouflage! TFTC. Read more →
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Found GCBMAKQ #17 Northmoor Loop
TOTT? Hah! I laugh in the face of your arbitrary requirements. 😂 A little climbing and a big stretch put this cache in my hand with no need for field manufacturing. The dog watched on, bemused, from the path. Read more →
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Found GCBMAJB #16 Northmoor Loop
It’s funny, I’ve cycled down the nearby back road countless times but never known that this footpath was here.Near the GZ the geopup saved the day on this one, spotting the requisite geotrail and bringing me back to it. A bit of hair-pulling from the nearby trees didn’t stop me retrieving this nice, large cache. […] Read more →
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Found GCBMAK0 #15 Northmoor Loop - Little Bridges # 3325
The GZ was awash with sheep and lambs and we weren’t able to even get close to the cache until we’d gently shooed them all away then it was an easy find. TFTC! Read more →
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Found GCBMAK5 #14 Northmoor Loop
Spent a while hunting in entirely the wrong place, got the hint, then searched in a different wrong place before remembering that the hint object is a thing that comes in two halves. Where’s the other half? One I’d found that, retrieving the cache was easy. Although I did get pooped on by a bird […] Read more →
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Found GCBMAJV #13 Northmoor Loop
Another QEF for the doggo and I. I wonder if the Rose is open yet? The dog might be happy quenching her thirst from the river but I’m not! Read more →
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Found GCBMAHA #12 Northmoor Loop
Convenient access to the water here made this an ideal spot for a hot doggo to cool her paws and have a drink while I found the cache.Hint isn’t how I’d describe this object!× Read more →
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Found GCBMAH6 #11 Northmoor Loop
Finding the hiding place was easy, but the cache was a bit deeper than I expected. What a delightfully bright morning it’s turning out to be! TFTC. Read more →
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Found GCBMAH2 #10 Northmoor Loop
The geopup was overheating a little so we took a break in the shade of the nearby pillbox before finding this cache.There’s risk this one will get harder if the bushes grow much in the summer! TFTC.× Read more →
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Found GCBMAGY #09 Northmoor Loop
A bit of a geotrail already starting to develop towards this hiding spot, I see. An easy find, TFTC! Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)