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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Recreating a 1990 Book Cover (in HTML + CSS)
This weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the graphic design of the cover of a manual of a piece of software released in 1990. So I re-created it in HTML + CSS, as you do. Read more →
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My piano came home from the hospital
Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it! Read more →
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Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess? Read more →
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Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you...)
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces. Read more →
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Grïgnyr the Ecordian by Geoff Bottone
I read Grïgnyr the Ecordian, Geoff Bottone's retelling of infamously-terrible fantasy novella The Eye of Argon. Which I hadn't read when I started, so I needed to read that first. Bottone's version is an enormous improvement... and that's an incredible achievement. Read more →
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Exploiting Thoughtcrime in LLMs
New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too... Read more →
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A postcard from a distant friend
I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele! Read more →
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You don't have to blog like me
You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here. Read more →
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How the European heatwave fucked me up
I've been somewhat-offline for the last few days, after a heatwave lead to a heat illness lead to an opportunistic infection lead to me lying in bed and groaning. But I'm getting back to normal, slowly. Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
I Regret To Say That GMail is Now a Spam Farm, or, Why You Should Really Get That Dedicated Email Address Now
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already. Read more →
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Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers?
Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to eventually reach profitability. Read more →
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How to Set Up Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account in 2026
James Leighton's provided a quick one-liner to bypass the Windows 11 installer's latest efforts to insist on you having a Microsoft account. I don't anticipate having to install Windows again, but if I do I'll be using this. Read more →
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I bought a Sony Walkman
Andreas bought and restored an old Sony Walkman and the entire journey is a wonderfully-written journey down memory lane, coupled with some learnings about the inner workings of these once-ubiquitous devices. Beautiful. Read more →
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British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me! Read more →
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Taking A Dive
I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well. Read more →
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Trouble brewing at the village carnival’s decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance. × Read more →
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Garbage for humans
unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this... Read more →
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Dad Joke of the Day came to me early when some fellow dog walkers coming the other way said “Hello, gorgeous!”“Ooh, thank you!” I replied, nonchalantly tussling my hair and striking a coquetteish pose. × Read more →
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Maybe "is AI a bubble?" is the wrong question
Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've been watching those clocks and they smell like tulips to me... 🌷 Read more →
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Always reassuring when you fill in a company's contact form and the next page is placeholder text...
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Some mornings... you just gotta make a whole damn litre of coffee.
(for iced coffee purposes, of course; and definitely not just for me!) -
Demmy would like to know why I haven't turned off the UK's heatwave yet. 🥵
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Iced coffee and air con. Possibly the only things that’ll keep me sane, working in the UK’s current heatwave (especially with the schools closed and kids sent home!). × Read more →
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What Was Matt Thinking?
Ernie Smith from Tedium wrote about Matt's Script Archive, which back in the 1990s was a big part of how and why I learned to code in Perl. Let's take a trip down memory lane... Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)