Month: March 2026
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Did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree
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.
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Found GCARTJ6 The Pylon King
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).
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Found GCARTJB Stop, Look... er... Listen?
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.
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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.
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A beautiful country house with a huge garden.
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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!
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The sunrise as seen through the gates of a vineyard's courtyard.
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Did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree
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!
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Found GCARTJE 1602
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!
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Found GCARTJK Hencote Lane
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.
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Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional "receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries" activity.
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A large group of people stand around a pile of shopping in the centre of a nicely decorated kitchen.
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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.
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Close up of the side of a toaster, showing an "eject" button (rectangle with an upward-pointing triangle above it).
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'.
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Food divided by Distance
In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal.
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Blogging: you’re doing it right
Manu reminds all bloggers, no matter how they do it, that they're doing it right. I couldn't agree more.
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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. 🏳️🌈
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Two flags hang from a tall lamp post. The smaller upper one is a St. George's Cross, the flag of England.the lower, larger (and much nicer) one is the six-colour Pride rainbow.
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. ❤️
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Reply to: how do you find things you want to blog about?
august asked me how I find things I want to blog about, and I answered... in the form of a blog post, of course!
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F-Day plus 38
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 …