Month: September 2026
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Your phone is not the problem
Following the discussions in the blogsphere lately about our relationships with our phones, I'd like to echo Antonio Santos' sentiments, and add a few supporting thoughts of my own.
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Every time I see Sainsburys comparing the value-for-money of different brands of toilet roll, the abbreviation they use catches me out and I think they're telling me how much paper I should be "using".
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Online supermarket showing several brands of toilet paper with the price displayed alongside a breakdown showing the price (in pence) per hundred sheets (of toilet paper), but "sheet" is abbreviated to "sht" which looks like... a different word I associate with the product.
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WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!
25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...
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F-Day plus 214
It's been 214 days since I had to evacuate my house following a flood, and repair work is (intermittently) underway. And there are so-many moving pieces to this dance that... it's little wonder that people are getting confused.
Like:
Our insurance company appointed a relocations specialist to handle our temporary accommodation needs (moving โฆ -
A Postcard from a Labyrinth Artist
Another Postcard From The Internet landed on my doormat this week... and it's from a real-life labyrinth designer and artist based in Canada. So cool!
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On Publishing Your Salary
Kev Quirk observes that of folks who (like me) choose to share their salary online, there's likely to be a skew towards higher salaries. What can we do to better-contextualise that, I wonder?
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Re: How I made...
Noah S shared how he used some PHP code to block specific badly-behaved bots from his website. I've got a few suggestions to help him make his block faster, easier-to-maintain, and more-thorough, either using PHP code or webserver configuration.
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Did not find GC3C7FT Woodies
This checkin to GC3C7FT Woodies reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. After seeking (and finding, surprisingly) the 2026-09-13 51 -1 geohashpoint down in the Brook Hill nature reserve, the geohound and I came to try to find this cache, too. After finding the correct way into the nature reserve (access โฆ
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Geohashing expedition 2026-09-13 51 -1
A successful geohashing expedition to a swampy area near Woodstock, despite an incident during which I was attacked by a wasp whom I'd attempted to squash using my genitals. (Yes, really.)
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Opusfived
Miloลก Novoviฤ's experimental interactive fiction is a silly (but with a grain of truth!) simulation of what it feels like to attempt to use vibe-coding to make small, simple, isolated changes to an established codebase. Go play it!
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Hot new laptop features
Earlier this summer Chad Comello's 7-year-old son built a laptop from paint and cardboard and it's got some kickass features that you can't get from anywhere else. Wishlisted.
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Automattic Minus Matt
There's a lot of tech press this morning about the involuntary ousting of my former boss Matt Mullenweg from his CEO position at Automattic. Ernie Smith from Tedium's article is my favourite. Here's my take on why this is good for Automattic (and everybody else!), and why this should be seen not as a power grab... but as an intervention!
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Pixel Area (@pxlarea@mastodon.social) launched a couple of weeks ago, and DanQ.me was selected to be one of the initial "seed" blogs that were there at the outset (I'm at https://pxlarea.com/x38y34).
I'm... honestly not sure what to make of it. Organising personal websites spatially seems like a strange idea (although there's a list view available too). And 'pixel' seems to be a strange name (at my desktop resolution, my 'pixel' comprises... 169 pixels). It's got a little bit of a "million dollar homepage" (remember that) feel to it... though at least it's not operating commercially. In fact, the best thing about it seems to be that it's home-grown indie/smolweb content.
I guess it's a bit like a webring? (Maybe it needs an embeddable component that lets a site show it's "space" and hop to neighbours?)
So... yeah; I'm undecided on this one. But, as always, I love when people do cool, random and experimental stuff with the Web!
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Screenshot from Pixel Area, showing a blue 'pixel' representing Dan Q.
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That moment when you realise that you forgot your sunglasses but figure you'll just squint.
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A fawn-coloured French Bulldog sits on the wooden decking outside a back door, squinting as she looks towards the sun (evident from the direction of the shadows).
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Use Firefox
Ramkumar Shankar says you should use Firefox, and they're right: you should. Not just because it's a great browser, and it is, but because doing so helps protect the freedom and openness of the Web. Use Firefox.