This checkin to GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
After hearing of my failure to find this cache the other day, the younger geokid persuaded me to come back and try again. We poked into every hidey-hole we could find and even extended our search to the next candidate oak tree (just in case the coordinates were off), but still had no success despite an extended search.
This checkin to GCARTJ6 The Pylon King reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
It took the geokid and I a moment or two to work out why this pylon was king, but once we had it was easy to find this (good-sized) cache. What a delightful Spring afternoon it was! And then the geokid found a tree under which the banks had eroded, making a perfect “hobbit hole” cave within its exposed roots (where he ate his ice cream).
This checkin to GCARTJB Stop, Look... er... Listen? reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’m volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities… among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the clear telegraphing in the description, aided by our direction of approach. It’s a wonderful large bridge, and we got to watch a train zoom along the tracks beneath us as we crossed.
Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities.
But just ocassionally it’s about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know… to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities.
Either way, a walk in the garden can lead to the insight that gets you to the solution.
Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning… before starting work on a new Three Rings feature!
This checkin to GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
This one’s going to bug me! The second nearest cache to this week’s volunteering event accommodation and I had to DNF it!? Poked my fingers into every hidey hole I could find (while a nearby goose honked at me: maybe it was mocking me, or perhaps it was saying “it’s on your left” – afraid I don’t speak goose) before giving up. It’s right on my doorstep, though, so I may well be back for another attempt!
This checkin to GCARTJE 1602 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
When I drove along this lane yesterday evening I didn’t appreciate how wonderful it’d look under the morning sun. An easy find with thanks to the cache title! TFTC!
This checkin to GCARTJK Hencote Lane reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Some fellow volunteers and I are staying in the nearby Hencote Farm for a week of work on software that helps charities work more efficiently. As has become a longstanding tradition for me at these events, I woke early for a walk and this morning was treated, as I made my way through the vineyards, to the especially wonderful view across the valley.
I’m not sure I was supposed to exit the farm grounds the way I did, but I was eventually able to get out and was pleased to discover this cache was nearby. QEF once I’d chosen the correct host. TFTC.
Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional “receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries” activity.
Most-often when a toaster has a ‘cancel’ button it’s simply labelled ‘cancel’, ‘stop’, or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the ‘eject’ icon – like you’d find on a VHS tape recorder – on its button.
At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I’m coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.
But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say ‘hey, that’s cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out’.
I was pretty ill yesterday. It’s probably a combination of post-flood stress and my shitty lungs’ ability to take a sore throat and turn it into something that leaves me lying in bed and groaning.
I spent most of the morning in and out of a fitful sleep, during which I dreamed up the most-bizarre application: a GPS tracker app that, after being told your destination and what you were eating, reported your journey progress to social media by describing where you were going and how much of your food was left1.
I should be clear that in the dream, I wasn’t the one that invented this concept; in fact, I didn’t even understand it at first (maybe I still don’t!). In the dream I was at some kind of unconference event with a variety of “make art with the Web” types, and I missed a session by falling asleep2. I woke (within the dream) right before the session ended and rushed in to see what was being presented, and only got the tail-end of the explanation of how a project – this project – worked, after which I felt rushed to try to understand it before somebody inevitably tried to talk to me about it.
But it could work, couldn’t it? If you’re one of those people who routinely tracks and shares their location (like Aaron Parecki, whose heatmapping inspired my own) or journeys (like Jeremy Keith does), it’s a way to add a bit of silliness to that sharing.
I’m probably not going to implement this. It is, in the end, the kind of stupidity that could (should?) only appear in the dreams of somebody who’s got a bad head cold.
But if you manage to take this idea and turn it into something… actually good?… let me know!
Or if you’ve just got a cool, “Web 2.0-ey” idea for the name of an app that tracks both your journey progress and your meal consumption, I’d love to hear that too.
1 Under the assumption that its consumption would be evenly distributed throughout the journey. Because everybody does that, right? Counting the number of steps they make before taking another equal-sized bite. Right?
2 Even in my dreams, I can dream of falling asleep. And, sometimes, of dreaming. A fever probably helps.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
That’s all you need to know. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. If you have decided to reclaim ownership of your place on the web, you’re doing it right. It doesn’t matter how you did it. It doesn’t matter if you’re self-hosting or using a SAAS. It doesn’t matter if your content lives on a database or in a TXT file. It doesn’t matter if you did everything yourself or you paid someone to do it for you. It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a year. What matters is that you’re doing it. Your effort is commendable. You deserve to be thanked so, thank you.
Wonderful words from Manu, there, that I think every blogger needs to be told once in a while. You have permission to write stuff. There isn’t a wrong way.
Also worth reading is his “2-step process for AI-free blogging”.
I wish I could be as pithy as Manu. But I’mma keep blogging anyway. After all; I’m doing it right!
Like many in the UK, I’m dismayed every time I see the plague of St. George’s Cross (flag of England) that nationalists have been hanging on lamp posts on recent years.
So it gave me great joy to see that this lamp post had recently acquired a (larger!) pride flag. 🏳️🌈
If we’re going to become a country that hangs flags everywhere… I’d much rather that they be flags that speak of inclusivity and diversity. ❤️
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
hey @dan –
how do you find things you want to blog about? is it just about letting out one’s thoughts and feelings and some sort of catch-up to one’s latest projects?
probably will start a blog of my own soon™ :3
What an interesting question, and not one I’ve heard before.
I’ve not heard it before… probably because my blogging is… eclectic! Sometimes I blog about technology. Sometimes I blog about geocaching and geohashing. Sometimes I blog about what’s going on in my life. Sometimes I blog about news, politics, and what’s going on in the world. Sometimes I blog just to share weird things I’ve seen on the Internet.
(I’ve sometimes worried that my approach to blogging alienates every conceivable audience. I mean: who wants to read all the topics above? But it helped me a lot to remind myself that I blog, primarily, for myself. I am my own target audience! Everybody else comes second.)
I certainly have more things that I want to blog about than that I actually do. And even for the things I start, I often don’t finish: I’ve got literally hundreds of incomplete drafts, and perhaps even more “concepts” noted down in Obsidian that I’ve never even started writing about.
It’s all a little skewed right now because I’ve kinda been trying to achieve the #100DaysToOffload challenge – which I’ve achieved for six consecutive years so far – in the first hundred days of 2026! Given that it’s called “100 Days To Offload” I don’t feel like it’s legitimate to claim it for 100 blog posts that aren’t on different days (otherwise I’d have achieved it already, with about 149 in the first 82 days of this year).
So yeah: I’m currently working towards a hundred-day streak, and that’s almost certainly having me blog more than I might “organically”. To that end, I’m often digging out old drafts and finalising them, right now, or else being more “impulsive” in my blogging, compared to the norm. This lunchtime, for example, I took a cycle, and it gave me a sense of normalcy that’s been somewhat missing in my life recently, and I considered writing a blog post about the experience. Impulsive, y’see!
But in general… my “process”, such as it is… is that I just look at what interests me today. There’s no secret to blogging as prolifically as I do: you’ve just got to start writing, and then keep writing. That’s all there is to it.
It’s 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today’s the first of our ‘BER’ assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to ‘write off’: to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with an equivalent new one.
So today, while I work, I’m watching a trio of men carry all of the soft furnishings, white goods, and rugs, plus any plywood/MDF-based furniture that got soaked into a pair of vans on the driveway, making notes where possible of the makes and models of things as they go.
My home is rapidly becoming more cavernous and echoey.