I'm Dan Q (he/him). I've spent the last 26+ years creating and writing online.
I work as a software engineer, and I volunteer with Three Rings. I live with my partner, her husband, two kids and a dog. I can sometimes be found geo*ing, performing magic, or recording the most pointless podcast.
I believe in open source, open relationships, and opening doors to marginalised groups. Black lives matter. Trans
rights are human rights.
Be nice to humans, human.
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Letting Games Die
Inspired by Mike Cook's argument that old video games should be allowed to die, I was inspired to jot down some of my own thoughts and experiences in the area of video game preservation. Read more →
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Wood-Fired
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. Read more →
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Food divided by Distance
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. Read more →
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Did I Cheat?
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... Read more →
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A Random List of Silly Things I Hate
Just a list of eleven random silly things that I hate, to various degrees. Read more →
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A Hundred Inconveniences
It's F-Day plus 31, and our flood-disrupted lives have become defined by the hundred or so daily inconveniences that are imposed by our accidentally-nomadic lifestyle. Here's hoping we can sort-out some more stable accommodation sometime soon! Read more →
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Why Security Engineering needs a Hacker Mentality
Security engineering is about a lot of things, but the best security engineers show the 'hacker mindset' characteristics of curiosity and imagination. Here's an example of how I found an XSS vulnerability in a forum, mostly by accident, and how curiosity was the key. Read more →
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Ten Weird Games
This blog post's been sitting incomplete in my drafts since last decade. I think it's finally time to share with you... ten weird games (and game adjacent media) you should see. Read more →
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Cold Giraffe
My mum painted a cold giraffe onto a postcard and sent it to me. Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
100 Days to Offload × 7
I remain a huge fan of Kev Quirk's "100 Days To Offload" blogging challenge. And today... I just completed it for the seventh time!
Kev announced that he completed it again today, too. He uses a different metric to me - he counts "posts over a twelve month period", while I use a slightly more-restrictive subset of that: "posts in a calendar year", because it was easy for me to make a table out of in my blog stats.
After some discussion, Kev agreed that the earliest year I could claim for was 2020.
Personally, I feel like each of the hundred posts should occur on different days too. This is relevant to me, because sometimes I post multiple times in a day... but it's 100 days to offload, not 100 posts to offload, right?
Therefore, by my own restrictions... the soonest I could achieve the goal in a year would be the 100th day of the year. Right?
Which is today.
Which I just did. 🎉 Read more → -
The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.
Minas Karamanis has produced a fantastic article about his experience of the use of LLMs for research in physics, and the concerns that he has about its use by less-experienced researchers just beginning to find their way in the field. I echo his thoughts, from my own field of software engineering, and wonder... how will we allow junior developers to gain experience in a world that may encourage them to use LLMs rather than trying and failing for themselves? Read more →
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The Lost Art of the Amusing WiFi Hotspot Name
Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just "fun" ones.
Has this art form died? Most residential SSIDs nowadays seem to just be the default one that comes with the basic router supplied by the ISP. Most commercial ones are just the name of the business. Sometimes you'll spot a phone configured for tethering but even that's usually just "Alice's iPhone" or similar.
I can't remember the last time I saw a "Chicken Crossed the Road to Steal Our Wifi" or a "Russian Hackers" or a "Routy McRouterface" or a "All Your Bandwidth Belong to Us" (okay, that last one's a bit dated). Has the art form died? Read more → -
The dog is concerned. Why, despite all her warnings, am I still letting these men take all of our (surviving) furniture? × Read more →
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F-Day plus 55
It’s fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I’ve lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and – mostly – in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It’s been wild. It’s also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability.Today, we make a change. Today […] Read more →
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Indian Food
On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.
Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian... Read more → -
It's my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we're living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.
Except the dog isn't even here. My brain keeps getting tricked... by this statue of a pig. -
I’ve lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we’ve been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its pros and cons (and each hasn’t felt like “home”). But man, I really like the “garden office” at […] Read more →
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I guess I’ll need some “assistnace” from Tesco to explain why my (long-neglected!) Clubcard didn’t work when buying some emergency sunscreen this morning. 😂 × Read more →
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Today I had a Cadburys’ Cream Egg… for breakfast.I am a monster. Read more →
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Found GC1FNVT SideTracked - Kingham
Found successfully on an Easter morning dog walk from Bledington. The geopup and I came out across the fields, trying to get outdoors early before the rain that's forecast for later in the day. Careful patience, logical elimination, and a determination not to give up were the keys, here. Read more →
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The final of the short term lets we’re staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure! × Read more →
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Found GC1ZEKG Church Micro 2809 - Bledington
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! Read more →
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Did not find GC4M7C4 Scouting About
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! Read more →
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Did not find GCARTHJ Knock Knock, Who's There!
Ran out of time and had to give up.. Nice view of our accommodation for this week from this hill, though! Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)