I'd completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools' Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of "features" until I went to it myself and got "party mode". So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools' myself.

After hearing of my failure to find this cache the other day, the younger geokid persuaded me to come back and try again. We poked into every hidey-hole we could find and even extended our search to the next candidate oak tree (just in case the coordinates were off), but still had no success despite an extended search.

It took the geokid and I a moment or two to work out why this pylon was king, but once we had it was easy to find this (good-sized) cache. What a delightful Spring afternoon it was! And then the geokid found a tree under which the banks had eroded, making a perfect "hobbit hole" cave within its exposed roots (where he ate his ice cream).

I'm volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities... among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the clear telegraphing in the description, aided by our direction of approach. It's a wonderful large bridge, and we got to watch a train zoom along the tracks beneath us as we crossed.

Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities. But just ocassionally it’s about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know… to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities. Either way, a walk in the garden can […]

Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning… before starting work on a new Three Rings feature!

This one's going to bug me! The second nearest cache to this week's volunteering event accommodation and I had to DNF it!? Poked my fingers into every hidey hole I could find (while a nearby goose honked at me: maybe it was mocking me, or perhaps it was saying "it's on your left" - afraid I don't speak goose) before giving up. It's right on my doorstep, though, so I may well be back for another attempt!

When I drove along this lane yesterday evening I didn't appreciate how wonderful it'd look under the morning sun. An easy find with thanks to the cache title! TFTC!

Some fellow volunteers and I are staying in the nearby Hencote Farm for a week of work on software that helps charities work more efficiently. As has become a longstanding tradition for me at these events, I woke early for a walk and this morning was treated, as I made my way through the vineyards, to the especially wonderful view across the valley.

Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional “receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries” activity.

Most-often when a toaster has a ‘cancel’ button it’s simply labelled ‘cancel’, ‘stop’, or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the ‘eject’ icon – like you’d find on a VHS tape recorder – on its button. At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I’m […]

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.

Manu reminds all bloggers, no matter how they do it, that they're doing it right. I couldn't agree more.

Like many in the UK, I’m dismayed every time I see the plague of St. George’s Cross (flag of England) that nationalists have been hanging on lamp posts on recent years. So it gave me great joy to see that this lamp post had recently acquired a (larger!) pride flag. 🏳️‍🌈 If we’re going to […]

august asked me how I find things I want to blog about, and I answered... in the form of a blog post, of course!

It’s 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today’s the first of our ‘BER’ assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to ‘write off’: to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with […]

Dave Rupert has thoughts on GenAI, the Gell-Mann effect, and the danger that fast, "good enough" solutions have on how we think about the humans that these systems are ultimately supposed to serve.

This morning, the younger geokid and I came out for a walk with the geopup. After a little difficulty getting a GPSr fix we eventuality found a good-looking host, and after a few laps we had the well-camouflaged container in our hands. A good sized, well maintained container and an interesting puzzle, even if the way we solved it might be considered by some to have been cheating!

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...

A reply to Terence Eden's post about not buying in to every cryptocurrency or AI fad, but being happy to 'wait and see'.

It's F-Day plus 35, and I'm spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I'm "between" two AirBnBs. The dog, who doesn't normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what's happening downstairs. The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.

Just a list of eleven random silly things that I hate, to various degrees.

Somebody should make a tea cosy but to fit a cafetiere. That sounds like a great idea.

I first found this cache last summer while cycling a circuitous route from Witney to Stanton Harcourt. I happened to be walking the dog nearby, this morning, and so I figured I'd check up on it. The outer container continues to deteriorate and could do with some TLC, but otherwise this cache looks to be okay.

Hint Line 93 is an amazing interactive exhibit about the experience of working on a computer games hint line. It's a deeply-researched, immersive, and clever piece of art... and even though the real experience is in a Australian museum, you can play an approximation of it via the Web. Awesome.

Over on my other (even sillier) blog, I answered Ellane's questionnaire about how and why I use plain text. In plain text, of course.

It's F-Day plus 31, and our flood-disrupted lives have become defined by the hundred or so daily inconveniences that are imposed by our accidentally-nomadic lifestyle. Here's hoping we can sort-out some more stable accommodation sometime soon!

Derek Slivers' post about being online only for an hour or two, every few days, inspired a lot of people. But I'd like to share Rishi Dass's rebuttal, and add my own thoughts about the importance of finding your own solution to some of the distractions and stresses of the always-online world.

This checkin to R’n’R #2 Skinny & Boney reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Coming across from Finstock via R’n’R #9 (we’re absolutely doing this series in the wrong order!), the geokid, geopup and I made a poor choice by hugging the tree line rather than cutting out of the […]

This checkin to GC4MJY0 R’n’R #9 – Thumper reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. The younger geokid and I had a plan, this morning, to drive out from our temporary (post-flood) accommodation in New Yatt, park at St. Peter’s in Wilcote, and then walk the dog around the area between […]