Month: April 2012
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On This Day In 2004
On this day in 2004, Dan finally handed in his dissertation on the subject of Three Rings. Since then, Three Rings has become the de facto standard for University Nightlines, and has also become the most popular rota management system for Samaritans branches and a variety of other helpline charities, too.
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Visitor Tracking Without Cookies (or How To Abuse HTTP 301s)
A technique for abusing HTTP 301 redirects and random numbers to uniquely track users; even those who have cookies disabled in their web browsers.
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Star Wars - Machete Order
Ruth, JTA, and Dan watch the Star Wars series in Machete Order - that is, episodes IV, V, II, III, then VI.
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One Hundred And Sixty
Dan reminisces about old mobile phones, text messages, and those 160-character limits we learned to work around. Twitter could learn from this...
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If I put a pair of telescopes in parallel, will the effect be multiplicative or additive?
Suppose I have a pair of 15x zoom telescopes (for example, I separated a pair of 15x zoom binoculars) and laid them end-to-end. Naturally there'd be some loss of field-of-vision when looking through them both. But would the resulting zoom level be 152 (i.e. 225x)? Or 15*2 (i.e. 30x)? Or something else entirely? Or … -
Moving Things Around With CSS Transitions
The "pop-up head" in the top-left hand corner of the page is powered entirely by CSS: no Javascript is used at all. Dan explains how.
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Top of the World
This weekend, Dan's father finally made it to the North Pole, as part of his charity trek, albeit in the form of his cremated ashes being carried by another member of his polar team.
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A New Look
Dan redesigns the theme for scatmania.org, returning to sans-serif fonts and shades of blue... plus a few modern CSS features that he'd wanted to play with...
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Personal Effects
Dan's been working on sorting out his late father's estate and his personal effects. Some people have been helpful; others, less so.
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The Performance of Masculinity: What Men Do to fit in The Box
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There’s a difference between having understanding and compassion for the men who are trapped in the Box and cutting them slack. After all, it isn’t as if the dude in the Box is giving any slack to women, queers, transgender or genderqueer folks, or for that matter, heterosexual cisgender men who refuse to pretend to … -
The Meats I Miss
After a year and a bit of being vegetarian, Dan looks back and considers the things that he misses more or less than he expected from eating meat.
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On This Day in 2040
On this day in 2040, Dan built the Internet Time Portal, and - connecting backwards in time through the Internet - made this one-of-a-kind blog post. Wait, what?