What fragments you? What defragments you? How are you balancing both?

I feel like I'm reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting's fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.

Curious Cones is a catalogue of traffic cones in unusual places. How wonderful and weird our World Wide Web is, that such a thing can exist.

Mostly as a note to myself, but here's what to do if you're running linuxserver/syncthing via Docker on Unraid and it keeps saying: ERR Database error when getting previous version (error="getkv: database disk image is malformed (11)" log.pkg=syncthing) The problem is that Syncthing's index has been corrupted. I was able to fix it by getting a shell into the relevant Docker container and moving the index: Syncthing detected it as absent and re-created it, re-indexing everything. Here's what I did: docker exec -it syncthing bash mv /config/index-v2 /config/index-v2-BROKEN

My partner and her husband (my metamour) have a tradition that every 5th wedding anniversary they get the “next size up” of champagne bottle. This meant that on yesterday, when we celebrated their 15th, we needed to get through a Methuselah: a massive 6 litre bottle equivalent to nine standard bottles of champagne (rightmost in […]

This checkin to GC8X84J Crawley to Minster Loop - #1 Acrux reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. One last cache on this afternoon’s walk before I had to take the geopup off for a doggy bath! We tried a couple of obvious hosts near the GZ before expanding our search […]

This checkin to GC7YHDV One with the tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. QEF in the third host I tried. SL. TFTC!

This checkin to GC8X88R Crawley to Minster Loop - #12 Zosma reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Walking backwards and forwards past the GZ eventually enabled the geopup and I to spot this very-visible but high-up cache. Soon it was retrieved, the log signed, and returned. Logbook is very full; […]

This checkin to GC8X888 Crawley to Minster Loop - #11 Wasat reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. The dog’s walk needed extending to make sure she’s well worn-out and not too-excited for some guests we’re having over this evening, so she and I came and parked on Dry Lane (ironically-named, […]

Here in the UK we celebrate LGBT+ History Month in February. This year, I'd encourage you to look at the history of queer rights in the UK, and use it to celebrate what we've achieved so far... but more-importantly, as a reminder that there's more to do (especially lately).

Lionel Dricot explains why the big tech companies are mostly American, not European (and why that's a good thing). It's a cultural difference that also results in Europeans being behind so many of the most-important open source and open standards projects in the world.

Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.

I've had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I've since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but never really used my account as a "creator". I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io's discovery features might be the best way for them to discover weird stuff like this. I might republish some other "things" I've made on itch.io too. It's not like there haven't been lots of them over the years!

Manuel Matuzović has done a nice write-up on HTML's new 'geolocation' element. It's not exactly what I'd have implemented, but its still an improvement upon the established geolocation API.

This weekend, I helped OpenBenches extend its reach to Tenerife, by finding and photographing a bench in the memorial garden for the Dan-Air Flight 1008 disaster. Almost-simultaneously, Terence Eden shared a blog post about the cost of running the OpenBenches service. Taken together, that feels like an excuse for me to plug the project (again)!

Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News’ RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same… for the Daily Mail. I’m so very tempted to provide […]

When the Online Safety Act came into effect, I considered writing a blog post investigating exactly how difficult it made it to access Pornhub. But it turned out to be boringly easy (it's not NOW, of course!), so I didn't. So here's a different discovery I made about the site...

Another postcard for my collection; this time from an indieweb blogger who was previously JUST outside of my circle - Joe from ArtLung. There's something in this.

Amusing announcement from the captain of my plane out of Tenerife South this afternoon. In place of the usual recommendation to keep your seatbelt fastened while seated in case of turbulence, he advised that there was a “risk of potholes”. I’m sure the analogy makes sense to the Brits aboard, but I hope it translated […]

My partner Ruth and I are staying at the Meliá hotel down in the city, from which amazingly I was able to get a WiFi connection despite the considerable distance!

QEF while on the way down from Taoro Park with Ruth. SL, TFTC!

Ruth and I made several attempts today without success: a muggle was sat nearby in such a way that access to the GZ was obstructed. We took a walk to the nearby Anglican church - whose architecture, if you ignore the volcanic rock, is uncannily like that of Anglican churches in the UK - but then we returned the muggle had very much set up camp and was going nowhere. We attempted to find a way to the cache from the opposite side without luck, and eventually had to give up. 😔

After solving the riddle yesterday, my partner Ruth and I came up from the seafront to find this cache today. What a delightful spot to hide the cache, and what a wonderful puzzle (and spot of local literary history) with which to bring us here.

Bloganuary died since last time I took part in it (and I can speculate about why), but that didn't stop me writing something for every day in January 2026. Man, I've been blogging a lot lately in general... what's that about, eh?

My partner Ruth and I were disappointed not to be able to hike any of the trails up here today - they're all closed - but enjoyed finding both the nearby Virtual and this Earthcache geocaches. The evidence of lava flows (that remain to this day!) are really quite impressive.

My partner Ruth and I are spending a long weekend in Puerto de la Cruz. We loved coming up to see this beautiful, bleak, stark volcanic landscape.

If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home. I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior […]

RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap. (I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.) Time to […]

Thirty to thirty-five years ago, as a young and curious hacker, I broke out of the restrictions on my secondary school's computer lab and briefly achieved rockstar popularity amongst peers who, through my tools, could now play videogames instead of doing their coursework. But their interest in the results of my exploits were incompatible with my interest in the sheet joy of discovery... and, inevitably, this meant trouble.

Our kid doesn’t like bagel holes. She’ll eat the rest of the bagel, but not the hole. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of for finding things like this most mornings.