Month: February 2026
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Why thereโs no European Google?
Lionel Dricot explains why the big tech companies are mostly American, not European (and why that's a good thing). It's a cultural difference that also results in Europeans being behind so many of the most-important open source and open standards projects in the world.
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Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS
Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.
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I've had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I've since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but never really used my account as a "creator".
I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io's discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.
I might republish some other "things" I've made on itch.io too. It's not like there haven't been lots of them over the years!
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Introduction to the new HTML element 'geolocation'
Manuel Matuzoviฤ has done a nice write-up on HTML's new 'geolocation' element. It's not exactly what I'd have implemented, but its still an improvement upon the established geolocation API.
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OpenBenches reaches Tenerife
This weekend, I helped OpenBenches extend its reach to Tenerife, by finding and photographing a bench in the memorial garden for the Dan-Air Flight 1008 disaster. Almost-simultaneously, Terence Eden shared a blog post about the cost of running the OpenBenches service. Taken together, that feels like an excuse for me to plug the project (again)!
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Off the back of my project to un-suckify BBC News' RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) by removing non-news content and duplicate items, I received an email this week (addressing me by the wrong name, I might add) from somebody who asked if I could do the same... for the Daily Mail.
I'm so very tempted to provide an empty RSS feed and say "there you go; that's an RSS feed of the Daily Mail but with the crap bits removed".
Turns out my distaste for the Daily Mail is greater than my love of clean RSS.
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Email from Simon G to Dan Q, subject "Dail Mail RSS that doesn't suck", with message: Hey Darren, Iโve come across your BBC RSS feeds and find them really useful over the last few days. Thank you so much for this!! Iโm not sure how easy it is but could you do something similar with the Daily Mail as that has thousands of reposts a week? Happy to contribute/donate.
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Gamified... Pornography?
When the Online Safety Act came into effect, I considered writing a blog post investigating exactly how difficult it made it to access Pornhub. But it turned out to be boringly easy (it's not NOW, of course!), so I didn't. So here's a different discovery I made about the site...
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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.
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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 for the Spanish speakers on this plane!
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Found GC45BDD Mirador La Paz
My partner Ruth and I are staying at the Meliรก hotel down in the city, from which amazingly I was able to get a WiFi connection despite the considerable distance!
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Found GC9PMF7 Crossing the street
QEF while on the way down from Taoro Park with Ruth. SL, TFTC!
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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. ๐
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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.
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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?