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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I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys
Sometimes keyboards come with a 'Fn' key that allows some of their context-sensitive keys to do particular general-purpose functions. Sometimes these are implemented in careful, considerate and configurable ways... and other times they just make me want to throw the keyboard out of the window. Read more →
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So Unbelievable it Sounds Like you Googled It
DeGoogling is so... 2010s. Let's make the 2020s the decade where we redefine Google as a verb. In the age of AI-first search, "to Google" now ought to give a nod to the accuracy and ethical issues posed by making AI into people's first experience of Web search. Read more →
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F-Day plus 113
It's been 113 days since my house flooded and it's almost time for repair work to start! But first, I've got some repair work of my own to do: to a desk that needs moving and to a laptop that's misbehaving. Read more →
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The "ChangeNames.co.uk" Scam
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow. Read more →
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Converting ISO Country Codes to Flag Emojis
Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing around with ISO 3166 and flag emoji. Read more →
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Wikipedia @ 25: Carl Person
As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today's random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history. Read more →
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Wikipedia @ 25: Cirrothauma Murrayi
Today, Wikipedia introduced me to a mysterious deep-dwelling octopus. So cool! Read more →
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A Selfhosted Static Site Editor
Inspired by the way that Nekoweb's editor 'Nekode' works, I came up with a low-effort way to let my eldest get started with HTML and CSS editing, right from her browser, with the results selfhosted directly from the household NAS. Read more →
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F-Day plus 97
It's been 97 days now since we were flooded-out of our home, and repair and rebuild work hasn't really even begun. But it's getting closer, and I'm looking forward to later this year sitting back in my own house (and probably at the piano!). Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
I want my friends to have blogs too
Daniel loves blogs and loves blogging, but wishes that more of the people in his 'real life' blogged too. I get it, Daniel! Read more →
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AI is not a person
And it's important to remember that. Chris Ferdinandi has some direct words, and I expand upon them. Read more →
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115 days since our house flood, the beginnings of the very first of the remedial works are taking place. Today, builders will drill through and lift part of a cracked poured-concrete foundation to work out what's beneath and whether it's stable enough to lay a new floor on top of. Also, somebody's coming around to quote for the laying of new floors (and we'll see if their numbers line up with those estimated by the insurance company). Read more →
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"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm."
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Working with an old codebase today, I moved a method from one file to another. CI was happy.Then I realised the method didn’t have any automated tests, so I wrote one. It turns out its entire (new) file didn’t have any, so my change would improve test coverage. Nice.But it didn’t. CI complained that test […] Read more →
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Got to say, it’s very sporting of AWS to make compliance with their terms of service and acceptable use policy optional. × Read more →
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Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Meta decided to replace a lot of their tech support with a chatbot. Which meant giving that chatbot the power to manipulate data. Which meant, to the surprise of nobody whatsoever, that hackers tricked the chatbot into giving them access to other people's accounts. Read more →
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Note to self: ignore all the search results that say to install a plugin. The absolute fastest way to send a test email from a WordPress/ClassicPress installation, assuming you're using WP-CLI, is just to run something like: wp eval 'wp_mail("recipient@example.com", "Test Email", "A test email from WP-CLI");'
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There are many things I don’t like about the kitchen in the Chicory House where we’re living medium-term following our house flood.But I like the fact that the integrated spice rack makes it much easier to see where we perhaps have a very-specific blind spot for “buying a new one where the last one’s still […] Read more →
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I think I'm probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It's been a surprising amount of work.
But don't think I've stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day... I still don't think I "get" it. I've even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but... nope. It's still all gibberish to me!
Think I need the ELI5 version! -
Disabling AI in WordPress 7.0
Nicholas A. Ferrell explains how to tell WordPress 7.0 to keep its AI features disabled, and I share my alternative approach: use a fork - ClassicPress - that doesn't include the AI features in the first place, and add them using a plugin if that's really what you want. Read more →
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Bringing Three Rings volunteers together: doing remote-first in person, and what to eat in a crisis
JTA wrote a LinkedIn post about Three Rings, its remote-first culture, doing things in person, and crisis management, and it's brilliant. Read more →
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Is AI Profitable Yet?
No surprises from this website, but it's interesting/staggering to see quite how LARGE the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies. Read more →
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I let the elder kid choose her lunch. She chose a pizza so huge that each slice is larger than her entire face. Needless to say, she needed a little help with it! × Read more →
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As both the UK’s heatwave and my up-and-down England road trip continue, I think I’ve finally found a fan big enough to cool me off. × Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)