Feed - Dan Q

[Article] (Feeling Fucking) Fabulous in Blackpool 🔗

This year, MEEK's Fabulous has been stuck on a loop in my head, but I only just got around to watching the music video. Which, to my delight, is shot [...]

[Note] Shipslasher 🔗

I want to write a successful YA fiction where all the characters are boats. Just ‘cos I want to see people ‘shipping ships. Also, one of my characters [...]

[Note] Chuck Wagon 🔗

Apparently, zero of the imagineers building this Disneyland Paris cafe conceived that “Chuck Wagon” sounds like what a cowboy would call a wheeled vom [...]

[Article] Contactless Transport in London vs Paris 🔗

Paris is rolling-out contactless tap-in payments for its transport network. Sounds like London's... except that Paris's includes a "convenience tax" t [...]

[Reply] Reply to: This blog is written in en-GB 🔗

Terence Eden's blog is (like mine!) unapologetically in en-GB. But maybe his particular cultural references need to be slightly more-specific still? [...]

[Article] “You saved my life!” (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero) 🔗

A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent h [...]

[Note] Can’t sleep, too much fire 🔗

An unexpected start to the kids’ and I’s glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of ou [...]

[Article] Hashcard #2 🔗

I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely! [...]

[Reply] Reply to: Deleting Systems You Don’t Understand 🔗

Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to wh [...]

[Article] The secret API I used to tell LeShuttle about different outbound and return passengers 🔗

Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and [...]

[Article] How I (Don’t) Collect Blog Statistics 🔗

I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple o [...]

[Note] F-Day plus 151 🔗

A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden’s starting to get a little [...]

[Repost] 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 increas [...]

[Repost] 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 ex [...]

[Article] 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 i [...]

[Repost] 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 a [...]

[Article] 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 [...]

[Article] 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 sw [...]

[Article] 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 [...]

[Article] 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 [...]

[Repost] 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 [...]

[Repost] 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 [...]

[Article] 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 fin [...]

[Repost] 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 [...]

[Note] Ramming speed! 🔗

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 [...]

[Article] 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! [...]

[Article] 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. [...]

[Repost] 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 [...]

[Note] Doggone Gorgeous 🔗

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, nonchalant [...]

[Reply] Re: How do I go back to the library? [RSS Exclusive!] 🔗

Evan's done with Twitter and Reddit. But where should he go next? I make some suggestions. [...]