The second lesson I took from my sabbatical was that it's possible to risk burnout (and therefore, it's important to be aware of and ready to counteract it) even when you're not working (in the conventional sense). Fortunately, my coach is on hand to help. | Continue reading
Somebody commented on my blog to say they liked my "BBC News... Without The Crap" script, but still wanted sports news in their RSS feed. Luckily, I know just the person for the job: me! | Continue reading
Possible future presentation concept: using a cafe/dining metaphor to help explain the proximity principle in user interface design (possibly with a “live waitstaffing” demo?). Great idea? Or stupid idea? | Continue reading
On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they’d made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment. It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I p … | Continue reading
I've worked out what convicted felon Donald Trump's endgame strategy is! And I can explain it... through the medium of a comic in the art style of Sid Meier's Civilization! | Continue reading
My blog's tagging is a mess. With posts going back 27 years, an inconsistent taxonomy, and changes in focus, that's pretty-much inevitable. Perhaps an AI can help: reading through old under-tagged posts and suggesting tags that could be added? Let's try it... | Continue reading
Back at work after a three-month break, and it turns out the first thing that I’d missed is my team’s quirky morning ritual. | Continue reading
This checkin to GCA1K70 Oak Protection reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. After claiming the FTF on the new cache to the North East, the geohound and I continued our walk with a wander through thy woods, eventually finding ourselves near this gate. … | Continue reading
This checkin to GCB2FZ4 Family Fun #2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. FTF! It’s been a while since I’ve typed that! Woke this morning slightly hungover and figured a nice walk with the geopup might help me feel better. And what an opportunity: a … | Continue reading
After a night that alternated between raining and freezing winds here, at the edge of Storm Éowyn, this morning my skylight has ice patterns on it that look beautiful and almost organic. | Continue reading
I'm not sure that President Trump knew what she was doing when three days ago she signed a law into effect that declares herself legally-female. But if that's how she identifies, then of course I'm happy to use her correct pronouns. | Continue reading
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Checked in on this cache while on a dog walk to ensure the Storm Éowyn hadn’t trashed it. Good news: it’s fine! I need to update the cache description to reflect … | Continue reading
My 8-year-old asked me "In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽" (I assume the answer is yes!) A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ = U+203D, ⸘ = U+2E18. Nice. ( … | Continue reading
Last year, a colleague introduced me to lazygit, a TUI git client with a wealth of value-added features. Somehow, though, my favourite feature is the animation you see if you nuke the working tree. 😘 Excellent. | Continue reading
My three-month work sabbatical has taught me a lot, perhaps too much to digest in a single blog post, so here's the first lesson: especially in a life-friendly distributed workplace, it's important to set boundaries to make your work/life-balance function properly. | Continue reading
The final weekend of my sabbatical was spent, like the first one, at a Three Rings event. As a side activity to the volunteer work, everybody was asked to put their name on a paper plate and leave it on a particular table, allowing others to semi-anonymously add compliments, than … | Continue reading
Goodbye, Trinidad and Tobago. 🇹🇹 You were wonderful. I hope to visit you again. ❤️ | Continue reading
When you love Jesus but you’re sick of Him blocking your driveway. | Continue reading
I just finished reading We'll Prescribe You A Cat, and while I enjoyed the stories within, I felt like the overarching plot that bound them lacked a satisfying payoff. | Continue reading
This is funny, but I’m confident Wrexham’s potholes have nothing on the Trinbagonian ones I’ve been experiencing all week, which have sometimes spanned most of the width of a road or been deep enough that dipping a wheel into them would strike the road with your underchassis! | Continue reading
Yesterday, Ruth and I made the first ever attempt at a geohashing expedition in Trinidad & Tobago, successfully finding a hashpoint in Chase Village in the West of Trinidad! 🔗 https://danq.link/gh-trinidad | Continue reading
Braving an off-the-beaten-track explore on Trinidad during a State of Emergency, Ruth and I found our way to a geohashpoint on the island, becoming the first people ever to do so not only in this graticule but also in this entire country! | Continue reading
We travelled 7,000km across the ocean only to find, by complete coincidence, that the Caribbean’s biggest cymruphile is the captain of a boat we chartered when we fancied a morning of reef-snorkelling and turtle-spotting. | Continue reading
This checkin to GC71F0E UFO Light (Alien Alphabet) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Cache page no longer shows image, and backup link doesn’t work either. Needs CO attention. | Continue reading
After driving 300 (vertical) metres up a terrifyingly winding road, we find ourself at 'Top if the World', one of Tobago's highest points. Being able to look down the steep sides of this long-extinct volcano to the sea on both sides is quite spectacular, and the Caribbean and Atl … | Continue reading
The Nylon Pool is a sandbar in the Buccoo Reef, off the coast of Tobago. Despite the distance from the shore, it's only about waist-deep. Truly mind-boggling. | Continue reading
Came half way around the world to find a surprising boat with a non-English name I understand. (“Cariad” is Welsh for “love”) | Continue reading
A fun website that aims to educate the visitor on the dangers of dark patterns is let down only slightly, in an ironic fashion, when it links to its author on LinkedIn, a website plagued with dark patterns. | Continue reading
This checkin to GC3PJYY Paradise reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Found the location and the hint object, but a thorough search did not reveal the cache. I think it might be missing, and the previous log (erroneously tagged as if it were found bu … | Continue reading
James Acaster's Classic Scrapes - which I received during our Christmas Eve book exchange - was an enjoyable, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, series of anecdotes with thematic links connecting them. It's perhaps not for everybody, but it was a great gift for me! | Continue reading
A couple of hours into our ferry journey, we just got our first glimpse of the island of Tobago, where we’ll be staying for the next few days. | Continue reading
Just visited the Logos Hope, an ocean-going, volunteer-staffed floating book fair (run by a Christian charity, but it’s not-TOO-religiousy inside, if that’s not your jam) that’s coincidentally docked for a fortnight right next door to my hotel on Trinidad! What a strange concept. … | Continue reading
My 12:55 flight is, according to this departure board, delayed to… 12:55!? Either it’s running a full 24 hours late, or this board is untrustworthy. | Continue reading
Except to children, I don't really give Christmas presents to (or expect to receive them from) others any more. But that didn't stop my buying myself a gift of a particularly fun Lego set to build over the festive period (with a little help from the eldest child!). | Continue reading
I’m pretty impressed with running WordPress on Caddy so far. It took a little jiggerypokery to configure it with an equivalent of the Nginx configuration I use for DanQ.me. But off the back of it I get the capability for HTTP/3, 103 Early Hints, and built-in “batteries included” … | Continue reading
Entitled is a bleak and sometimes uncomfortable pop-sci dive into the issue of male entitlement. Covering a variety of different areas in which our patriarchal society somehow continues to disenfranchise women in particular and injure everybody by proxy, it provides neither a 'qu … | Continue reading
This checkin to GC8KR7D Motorway Mayhem (another one) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. The geohound and I braved an explore of this litter-filled GZ but couldn’t spot a cache among the copious detritus before the whiny little thing started fighti … | Continue reading
Given that I already routinely run my SSH servers on unusual ports, I'm surprised it took me until today before I discovered Endlessh, an SSH tarpit you can install on the conventional port to waste the time of anybody attempting a brute-force attack. Here's how I set it up on a … | Continue reading
Compared to the children, the dog is Not So Impressed by the deep snowfall we’ve just received. To be fair, it’s basically up to get armpits! (leg-pits? I don’t know what the right word is for a canine!) | Continue reading
I’m staying in a lodge in the Yorkshire Dales National Park to celebrate the eldest kid’s birthday and we’ve just received a huge dump of snow, overnight. What was grass is now a thick white carpet of fresh powder. Sounds like a great birthday present for an excited kid I can jus … | Continue reading
This checkin to GC8TK41 05 - Willow's Wanders - Eshington Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. An extended search over two visits today by the eldest child and I couldn’t reveal this one. Very frustrating, given that it’s clearly there somewhe … | Continue reading
This checkin to GC80592 Coffee, Cache and Dash reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. QEF while stopped for a confort break on a long journey North from Oxford. The dog wanted to go with the others into the services, but had to stay outdoors with me an … | Continue reading
One of my dog's favourite games is 'My Ball', in which my role is to want the toy that she is guarding. It's all about the motivation, you see! Which is like some of the games I used to play with our eldest, when she was a toddler, I realise. | Continue reading
Our family tradition on New Year’s Day is to go to the Rollright Stones. Legend has it that you can’t count the standing stones and get the same answer twice. This year the younger child counted 37, the elder 67… so wide a difference that you can see how one might ascribe a mysti … | Continue reading
This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip). It worked out pretty well. Micro-recipe: 1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done. 2. Meanwhile, make a batt … | Continue reading
Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me? Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out… | Continue reading
The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast. | Continue reading
On a midnight train back from a London theatre trip, somehow the 8-year-old is still awake (and reading comics to me!); the 10-year-old is understandably wiped-out. A fun night out though! | Continue reading