Unusually, we had no guests this Christmas Day. This meant that my usual level of overcatering went even further than normal. A side effect of this is that a certain little doggo was delighted and surprised by her Boxing Day breakfast of roast goose!

I asked the younger child to “help” me calculate how much Yorkshire pudding batter to make for this Christmas dinner. “Well,” he began, “I’m going to want FIVE Yorkshire puddings, soo…”

I usually agree with Chris Ferdinandi, but he and I aren't entirely in accord about the Shadow DOM. He thinks it's useless. But I think it's MOSTLY useless.

Came out for a walk with my Ruth and the kids. While Ruth sat on a rock and the kids went with their uncle up to explore a small cave above, I broke from the path to find this cache. QEF in the second host I looked at.

A quick and damp scramble from the footpath above brought my right to the cache. SL, TFTC. Container seal has perished and logbook pretty wet; signable, but only barely.

There's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing my unusual name, immediately asks whether that's what's on my birth certificate (with an underlying implication that it's not my 'real' name, whatever that means, if it isn't). Well: as of this week, thanks to a quirk in Scottish law, the name I've used every day for almost two decades DOES appear my birth certificate. Fuck the haters.

CSS is all grown-up, and the combination of nested selectors, variables, :not, and :has unlocks a wealth of potential for interactivity and customisation without resorting to (the slower and brittler approach of) JavaScript. Let me show you two examples from my recent editor history.

Waiting for the ideal time to finally do that thing you've been procrastinating on? Greg's clever new micro-site will help you decide the perfect time to do it (and no, it doesn't necessarily just say "now!").

I’m not sure which of our children was last in this bath, but the configuration in which they’ve left their toys makes me feel as though I’m the subject of some kind of waterfowl-related shunning. Perhaps they finally got wind or my heretical opinions on the God of Ducks (may he throw us bread) and […]

A few pockets of the morning’s freezing fog still cling to the hedgerows as the dog and I set out on a chilly West Oxfordshire morning walk.

Obviously I wasn’t planning on going to the US anytime soon, but if I did… they might struggle with my visa application when I put every “email address I’ve used for the last 10 years” on, because I actively use a variety of catch-all domains/subdomains. I’ve probably missed some addresses (e.g. to which I’ve only […]

Off the back of my details/summary-based semantic HTML+CSS lightbox, I've come up with a way to add Mastodon-like 'show alt text' widgets in the same way, and I'll be applying both to images on my blog's new theme, in the New Year.

Since I relaunched freedeedpoll.org.uk three months ago (with new features) and made an explanatory demo video, the volume and kinds of questions I’ve been emailed has… become larger and more diverse. I still get questions about childrens’ names and citizenship and gender recognition certificates and things. But now I also get questions like “how do […]

Not sure I’m a fan of these new ultra-minimalist Christmas trees.

Not sure I’m a fan of these new ultra-minimalist Christmas trees.

For the last few years I’ve been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news. This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more […]

Girlguiding UK recently opted not to modernise their articles, meaning that their interpretation of the Supreme Court's misguided decision necessarily excludes trans girls and young women from Girlguiding. So it was heartening to read this statement from Woodcraft Folk, reaffirming that their support for trans kids is fundamental and unwavering.

We got our dog a Christmas jumper.
My favourite thing about it is that its coat hanger contains instructions for use:
"Please insert dog"

I find a lot of these "this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases" emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They're a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying "No, please help protect my brand identity, I'll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!"

But I've always wondered - what happens if you reply and say "Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains." I'd know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)... but they can't admit that they know that.

Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)

I already understand how using a threshold map to perform dithering works... and yet I still appreciated this amazing visual explainer from Damar Berlari.

Fellow folks at the interest-intersection of "public transport" and "queer activism" (I know you're out there!): I had an idea for a t-shirt.

Do I print it? Or give up on graphic design and go back to backend programming where I belong?

After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends.

Coyote's written some solid words about how well Dreamwidth are standing up for user privacy and liberty against an increasingly hostile and censorship-ridden environment.

This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club! It’s Thanksgiving, and so the vast majority of my team and wider colleagues – who are based in the […]

Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying "ethical non-monogamy"?

Nobody feels the need to say "ethical monogamy"; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.

I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word "ethical" and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)

Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be!

I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids.

This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut?

Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!?

Back in July Vincent D. Warmerdam shared a great tip on screen-recording terminals into small, scalable animated SVG files, and I only just got around to reading it. Amazing stuff!

Happy Polyamory Day y’all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I’d have forgotten about it, like most years.) Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn’t always […]