QEF for the geohound and I as we came out for a walk from the house we're borrowing this week - the latest of many AirBnB-like week-long lets we've had to decamp to after our house was rendered uninhabitable by a flash flood around fifty days ago. Hopefully the last, though, as the insurance company may at last have found us sonewhere to live longer-term while our house is repaired!

The elder geokid and I had a search in all the likely spots we could find after attending her cousin's 2nd birthday party nearby. No luck for us today!

Ran out of time and had to give up.. Nice view of our accommodation for this week from this hill, though!

Found without difficulty while the geokid amused himself on the swing. Shame about the litter near the GZ, may be a CITO opportunity up here! Loving the views: think I can see our accommodation from here! TFTC and for showing us this rope swing!

Not a fan of this kind of container, but I must admit that I enjoy a decent-sized cache! TFTC.

We enjoyed sitting on the nearby bench while we cracked open this decent sized cache (and emptied out the accumulated water!). Log still in good condition, though. TFTC!

Quick find with the boy (thanks to the hint!) as we stopped for a sandwich break. TFTC!

Incredibly easy find for the younger geokid and I: we could see the cache before we even reached the GZ. TFTC!

Two decades ago this month my friend Matt posted five predictions about the future of the world. I've revisited these predictions twice since: ten years later and twenty years later, and "scored" his predictions both times.

I love that the Web's memory (and the persistence of URLs) makes this kind of long-term conversation possible.

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.

There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year's 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.

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...