On a forum they and I share, Loebas suggested that I should be careful doing portscans in case I hit e.g. fail2ban rules. I counter that such rulesets would be a terrible idea (and are therefore uncommon), and provide a specific demonstration of how an attacker can turn them against the site's legitimate users!

A pre-dawn walk around East Bristol from a Three Rings event took me to within 16 metres... but not quite all the way to... a geohashpoint.

A Three Rings development sub-team seems to have developed a habit of making production server changes at in-person events, right before meals are served. On at least one previous occasion this has led to them missing out on dinner as they monitored and maintained at-risk servers when they ought to be eating. Until the servers […]

This checkin to GC85TVQ Out Of Office reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I expected not to have opportunity for a second attempt at this today, but my schedule opened up somewhat when the fire alarm went off at the hotel and we had to evacuate! As hotel guests and […]

This checkin to GC85TVQ Out Of Office reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I'm spending the weekend in the hotel nearby, for the AGM of a nonprofit I'm involved with. This morning I realised they I had a spare quarter of an hour before a meeting and wondered if I […]

Sean Goedecke puts forward a few arguments why people shouldn't play at 'torturing' LLMs. I disagree with many of his arguments, but I agree with his conclusion because of a different argument: one made by animal rights activists for hundreds of years now: that people who 'practice' abuse are more-likely to go on to commit (further) abuse.

For Jeff Johnson, Reddit's ecosystem becoming yet-more closed-down and enshittified, with them dropping RSS support, is the last straw. For me, it would have been too (if I hadn't already abandoned ship nine years prior!).

Firefox 157's new UI engine Nova made my previously-beautiful vertical tabs into a pile of hot garbage. Ugh.

TIL that I dance Argentine Tango with Ruth better... when I close my eyes. It's a fundamentally intuitive and semi-improvised dance built on connection and communication and it turns out that, for me at least, the best way to stop trying to visually predict what a partner (I know well enough to "read" visually) is […]

While bemoaning the rising cost of domain names, Michael also observed that blogging and personal websites are suffering a lack of young newcomers. In my reply I disagree, saying that they're there... just not where he's looking for them!

Akshay Chugh misses wired headphones for the anti-feature that they'd inevitably tangle up in your pocket. I echo his sentiment, and add a few other observations about things we've traded away in exchange for the convenience of wireless buds.

I'm now in the top-hundred geohashers! But the exciting achievement is that I upgraded geohashing.site from MediaWiki 1.31 to 1.43, after leaving it somewhat technically-neglected for about seven years!

My newly-revamped personal site has an almost full suite of slash pages; something I'd been meaning to do for a while: https://danq.me/slashes Still no /now, but I'll get that sorted someday, perhaps!

This checkin to GC46YDF Second Row - Ball Retention reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Found lying on the ground, in the open. Based on the previous log, I guess that, without its magnets, it quickly fell down. Re-hid, visibly, in a large crack in the wall which I hope […]

This checkin to GC46YCV Lock - Hanging Bison reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. A quick find for the geohound and I while walking back to Tackley (via the TP6298 trigpoint up on the rise to the North) from the 2026-09-27 51 -1 geohashpoint. A successful hashing expedition followed by […]

I woke early and grumpy and, to try to shake myself out of a funk, went out with the dog in search of a geohashpoint near a trigpoint in a field near Tackley.

"Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing." is a literal line in the source code of one of my favourite video games, blackle mori observes.

My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...

After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?

Here’s a neat trick. I’ve got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they’re within not-yet-shown popovers). This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says “skip over not-yet open popovers […]

Grant ran a workshop on politics (and law) around polyamory, at a recent event. I wasn't there, but enjoyed reading his notes after-the-fact... and wanted to use the opportunity to share some of my own thoughts and experiences.

A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!

When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!

Following the discussions in the blogsphere lately about our relationships with our phones, I'd like to echo Antonio Santos' sentiments, and add a few supporting thoughts of my own.

Every time I see Sainsburys comparing the value-for-money of different brands of toilet roll, the abbreviation they use catches me out and I think they’re telling me how much paper I should be “using”.

25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...

I'm just doing my annual Preventing Workplace Harassment training at work, and one clip in particular stood out as... especially half-hearted.

It’s been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that… it’s little wonder that people are getting confused. Like: Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving van, sourcing […]

Another Postcard From The Internet landed on my doormat this week... and it's from a real-life labyrinth designer and artist based in Canada. So cool!

Kev Quirk observes that of folks who (like me) choose to share their salary online, there's likely to be a skew towards higher salaries. What can we do to better-contextualise that, I wonder?