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Dan Q

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Personal blog of Dan Q: hacker, magician, geocacher, gamer...

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[Reply] Reply to: locked-open

Dave Winer asked "What's the opposite of locked-in? Locked-open. Mwhahaa." Which kicked me off on thinking about how we secure the open-source nature of software, standards, and concepts... and the ideas that land in each.

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[Repost] rejecting convenience

[Repost] rejecting convenience

RNotté shares a manifesto to seek out inconvenience in order to seek greater human connection and authentic experiences. And you know what their post reminds me of? The Matrix!

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[Note] Watch it twice

Something’s gone wrong on the Jellyfin server I use to manage my household’s film library, resulting in some unexpectedly-funny repetition…

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[Reply] Reply to: let’s write a blog post about CSS

Dave's struggling to finish his blog post out CSS. I get the feeling... let me tell you about my blog post about pedestrian crossings.

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Pub lunch by the river in the Spring sunshine. ☀️

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[Note] Black Belt

It's been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is - going many others, mostly older and larger than him! - finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞

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[Checkin] Dan Q wrote note for GC9EXXC Shady Seat on The Green

Checked up on this cache, this morning, as I was in the neighbourhood. It's looking healthy, with dry contents including a sharpened pencil for logging plus a couple of tradables that have turned up.

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[Article] Once You’re Asking the Right Question, You Don’t Need To Ask!

[Article] Once You’re Asking the Right Question, You Don’t Need To Ask!

The other week, a coding LLM helped me... without me ever submitting a single prompt to it. I just typed into it all the component parts of my problem, and in doing so the solution revealed itself to me. It's rubberducking... silent AI edition!

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[Checkin] Dan Q found GCBMAGF #07 Northmoor Loop

Imagine my surprise when the geohound and I are out for a walk from Appleton to find the Rainbow Bridge cache, to receive a notification of a new cache series at Northmoor. All we need to do is extend our walk a short way, I figure, and we can claim an FTF! But it was not to be!

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[Checkin] Dan Q found GC8B4J5 Rainbow Bridge

Our taeget cache got the geopup and I: I've coated under this bridge, I think, but never found an excuse to go over it into today. The doggo is running out of steam and the afternoon looks likely to be too hot for her, but we'll make a quick run at one of the new Nortmoor Loop series before we turn back. Might even score a FTF!

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[Checkin] Dan Q found GCBB3J9 Appleton Wharf

What a beautiful spot for a geocache, which the geopup and I quickly found in the second host we checked. Then, we enjoyed a delightful few minutes of peace, sitting on the riverbank, before continuing our morning's adventure.

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[Checkin] Dan Q did not find GCBBDDV To The Thames

The geohound wouldn't let me search as long as I'd have liked, and my GPS must've been off because I couldn't really find anything that matched the hint description. One for another day, perhaps.

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[Checkin] Dan Q found GC8JWW9 Aslan’s Spring

The geopup tested the waters while I retrieved the cache. What a wonderful spring on a delightful footpath! TFTC, and FP for the wonderful location and proper-sized cache container.

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[Checkin] Dan Q found GCBAZZN The Big Dipper

QEF for the geohound and I on a walk around Appleton this morning. Excellent container with a fantastic hint, FP awarded. TFTC!

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[Article] Chicory Battlestation

Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.

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[Note] Moving the Internet

The "regular" house's Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House. Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven't yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!

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[Repost] Molly guard in reverse

[Repost] Molly guard in reverse

In his Unsung blog, Marcin Wichary's shared the concept of a 'reverse molly guard', which is awesome. I didn't actually know the originating term 'molly guard' until I saw it, though, although I've definitely seen (and implemented) then before. Hey: d'ya wanna hear about a molly guard I added to Three Rings the other year?

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[Repost] The Dungeon of Dark Patterns

The latest episode of webcomic Mini Fantasy Theater - The Dungeon of Dark Patterns - is just excellent.

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[Repost] WSL9x

[Repost] WSL9x

Hailey Somerville's managed to get something akin to WSL working on Windows 95. Who'd have even thought such a thing was possible?

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[Article] BBC News RSS… with full-size thumbnails!

[Article] BBC News RSS… with full-size thumbnails!

A user of my Improved BBC News Feeds reached out to suggest that I upgrade the resolution of the thumbnail images. Turns out this was a quick win: my noodles hadn't even cooled before I finished.

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[Video] The Commute (Chicory House Edition)

[Video] The Commute (Chicory House Edition)

My "commute" since moving to the Chicory House isn't much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?

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[Reply] Reply to: I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad

Inspired by a mate whose dad recently died, Kev Quirk shared his own experience of his father's death, and a particular ritual of his reminded me of one of my own.

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[Note] Ghost of a dartboard

There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻

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[Note] What breaks?

What breaks when one of your developers leaves? On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers. It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit. Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!

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[Checkin] Dan Q found GCBN167 Ivy Believe It’s Up There!

This afternoon I'm acting as backup driver for my partner Ruth, who's walking the length of the Thames Path by (very gradual) instalments. A delightful tree climb soon gave me this great cache container!

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[Checkin] Dan Q did not find GC3KQK2 RRR10

A little sad to DNF this cache which is probably just well-hidden, but I've only got limited time to hunt as I'm the backup driver for this segment of a walk down the entire length of the Thames Path.

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[Repost] Finding the right Bottom Hole paper

[Repost] Finding the right Bottom Hole paper

Terence Eden takes us on a rabbithole of trying to work out what actual newspaper formed the basis of the newspaper prop in an episode of Bottom, and it makes an amusing ride-along.

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[Note] Personal Location Tracking FTW

I took the dog out for a walk from the Chicory House yesterday. We found ourselves on a familiar-looking footpath: but Icouldn't place exactly why I'd been there before. Fortunately, I maintain a personal tracklog of virtually everywhere I've been in the last decade or two, so I was able to pluck the relevant records right out of my own database. Personal location tracking continues to be an awesome aides mémoire. It's hard to sell people on the idea, probably because it's a slow-burner - you need lots of data before it starts to pay off! - but I still recommend it.

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[Article] FlipFlop Solitaire’s Deck-Generation Secret

[Article] FlipFlop Solitaire’s Deck-Generation Secret

I enjoy a mobile game called FlipFlop Solitaire, which provides a few thousand pre-seeded decks that are guaranteed "winnable". This blew my mind for a little while - how can you be sure that these shuffles are all winnable? But then I worked out a way to achieve exactly that result... by thinking in reverse!

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[Note] Flossed

Today, for the first time ever, I reached the end of a roll if dental floss without first losing or giving up on it.