Dan Q

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.

Photograph of Dan, his ponytail hanging over the shoulder of his black t-shirt, smiling from behind his beard and waving to the camera.

  • Postcard from San Diego

    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. Read more →

  • Without Bloganuary

    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? Read more →

  • How an RM Nimbus Taught Me a Hacker Mentality

    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. Read more →

  • That's Not How Email Works, HSBC

    A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that their own attempts to spy on their customers might not be 100% reliable... Read more →

  • PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13... in Three Minutes

    I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. Just the stock package repositories and around five commands and my fresh box and it was serving PHP applications over HTTPS. Read more →

  • Peripheral Vision

    The other night, I encountered an optical illusion by which I could see a particular partially-obstructed light only when it was in my peripheral vision. This put me in mind of the experience of being only peripherally able to see the internalised quirks of your employer that were once obvious to you, and this lead me to reflect a little on my first six months at Firstup. Read more →

  • Nostalgia, Music, and Computers

    It turns out that I get nostalgic about technology in the same way as I get nostalgic about music. Here's some things that take me right back to being nine, eleven, thirteen and fifteen years old. Read more →

  • Imajica by Clive Barker

    I recently finished reading Clive Barker's Imajica for what I think is the fourth time. It remains one of my favourite fantasy novels, and I'd love to tell you why. Read more →

  • Why I Am So Tired

    After dusting off and modernising a joke I first read in a chain email from 1996, I can tell you conclusively that the reason that I'm tired is because I'm overworked. Read more →

  • More articles →
    (articles are traditional long-form blog posts)

  • 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 well […] Read more →

  • Found GC45BDD Mirador La Paz

    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! Read more →

  • Found GC9PMF7 Crossing the street

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

  • Did not find GC1PYFN Parque Taoro

    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. 😔 Read more →

  • Found GC9MCDM The Queen Of Mystery

    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. Read more →

  • Found GC9PVXZ EL CRÁTER DE LA RAMBLETA

    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. Read more →

  • Found GC9P71A El tEidE

    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. Read more →

  • 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 to […] Read more →

  • 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 catch up […] Read more →

  • Post: Bagel Holes

    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. × Read more →

  • I like it when the Internet says "yes, and".
    I like it when the Internet says "yes, but".
    I even like it when the Internet says "no, because".

    I'm not so keen when the Internet says "well, actually",
    (Probably because it reminds me of what
    a shit I was in some not-yet-forgotten time.)

    But I don't like when the Internet rallies a brigade
    To pick apart a character flaw I have, but hate,
    Or to attack something I'm not, and expect me to defend.

    So perhaps next time, start with "yes, and", "yes, but",
    Or even "no, because"... or just say nothing, and
    Remember what it means to connect with a human.

  • Highlight of my workday was debugging an issue that turned out to be nothing like what the reporter had diagnosed.The report suggested that our system was having problems parsing URLs with colons in the pathname, suggesting perhaps an encoding issue. It wasn’t until I took a deep dive into the logs that I realised that […] Read more →

  • This morning it took me three attempts to put on a t-shirt the right way around.I don’t think I slept too well. Read more →

  • The internet’s hidden creative renaissance (and how to find it)

    This article is good and touches on many sites, people, and topics that I care about... but it's painfully ironic that the author has written a post praising the independent Web... using Substack as their platform. Read more →

  • Who Is the Winking Chef?

    Scott Wiener - who is even more pizza-obsessed than me - noticed the 'winking chef' image that's common on pizza boxes. Then he traced its origin, and wrote a blog post to share the story of the artwork. Delightful. Read more →

  • More posts →
    (of all kinds: articles, checkins, notes, reposts...)