Year: 2025
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CSS Lightbox with Alt Text Viewer
Off the back of my details/summary-based semantic HTML+CSS lightbox, I've come up with a way to add Mastodon-like 'show alt text' widgets in the same way, and I'll be applying both to images on my blog's new theme, in the New Year.
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Since I relaunched freedeedpoll.org.uk three months ago (with new features) and made an explanatory demo video, the volume and kinds of questions I've been emailed has... become larger and more diverse.
I still get questions about childrens' names and citizenship and gender recognition certificates and things.
But now I also get questions like "how do I print multiple copies of the PDF?" and "why does my homemade deed poll not have a serial number?" 😂
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Not sure I'm a fan of these new ultra-minimalist Christmas trees.
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Display bed of Christmas trees outside a hardware store except each pot, labelled with its species and approximate height, is empty.
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For the last few years I've been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.
This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more difficult, because it's the kind of scope-creep that my "uninterested-in-sports-news" brain couldn't conceive that anybody would want! But I got there in the end.
If anybody's looking for their fill of "BBC News Feeds... But Better!", give it a look.
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Woodcraft Folk statement on the exclusion of trans children from Girlguiding
Girlguiding UK recently opted not to modernise their articles, meaning that their interpretation of the Supreme Court's misguided decision necessarily excludes trans girls and young women from Girlguiding. So it was heartening to read this statement from Woodcraft Folk, reaffirming that their support for trans kids is fundamental and unwavering.
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We got our dog a Christmas jumper.
My favourite thing about it is that its coat hanger contains instructions for use:
"Please insert dog" 🤣
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Christmas jumper for a dog, featuring blue-and-white stripes and sequin Christmas trees; its hanger contains an arrow pointing down alongside the text 'please insert dog'.
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I find a lot of these "this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases" emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They're a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying "No, please help protect my brand identity, I'll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!"
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Screenshot of scam email which begins "Dear CEO, This is a formal email. We are the Domain Registration Service company in Shanghai, China. I have something to confirm with you. Baokang Ltd sent a request on December 3, 2025. They desire to register "danq" as their internet keyword and Chinese domain names..." and goes on to try to bait the recipient into replying and expressing an interest in the domain names mentioned.
But I've always wondered - what happens if you reply and say "Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains." I'd know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)... but they can't admit that they know that.
Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)
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Dithering - Part 1
I already understand how using a threshold map to perform dithering works... and yet I still appreciated this amazing visual explainer from Damar Berlari.
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Fellow folks at the interest-intersection of "public transport" and "queer activism" (I know you're out there!): I had an idea for a t-shirt.
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T-shirt design: a sign in the typographic and graphical style of British road signs, showing the words 'Trams rights at all times' on a background in the blue/pink/white of the trans pride flag, with an outline of a tram whose pantograph is reshaped to resemble the trio of the masculine, feminine, and combined symbols used as a trans symbol.
Do I print it? Or give up on graphic design and go back to backend programming where I belong?
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HTTP is not simple
After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends.
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How Online Privacy Has Been Championed by Dreamwidth
Coyote's written some solid words about how well Dreamwidth are standing up for user privacy and liberty against an increasingly hostile and censorship-ridden environment.
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Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying "ethical non-monogamy"?
Nobody feels the need to say "ethical monogamy"; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word "ethical" and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
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Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be!
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DOCTYPE
I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids.
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This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut?
Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!?
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A form asking for Surname, Forename and Gender (with options Male, Female, and Both) changes its labels to e.g. Male Surname/Male Forename or Female Surname/Female Forename when the Gender option is changed.