Today I’m introducing the next generation of code editor. A modern app to satiate the needs of the discerning coder. We’re talkin’ blazing fast collaboration
between man and machine.
…
Yeah so um… have you noticed that all modern software is teetering on the enshitty cliff? Everything in my dock is an Electron-ified enshittybomb one update from disaster. There used to be alternatives. Now those suck too.
…
You probably saw this one already; I forgot to share it in July, but it’s done the rounds a-plenty. It’s worth experiencing on David’s website where the “Modern Editor”
is interactive (kinda: it’s still about as much use as it looks like it’s gonna be… and that’s kind-of the point).
The enshittification of modern apps is very real. Simple tools that ought to work offline don’t start without an Internet connection (or, worse yet, a slow Internet
connection means that they stall during their self-update check or phone-home analytics). AI “features” get stitched in to everything, whether you want them or not. Desktop applications
are constructed using the same super-heavyweight React + Tailwind + whatever else stacks under which the Web creaks, but because they’re now long-running system tray/notification area
processes their gradual memory leaks make them painfully slow. Updates change the UI without warning and you need to work to find where your favourite features have gone, if they even
still exist. You’re nagged to “create an account” and “log in” even if you have no use for the connectivity “features”. Kebab menus everywhere make for a whole new level of mystery meat
navigation, once you eventually find the right to click out of the three that are typically visible at any given time. And every application acts like it’s the single-most
important thing on your screen, competing for real estate and attention.
So yeah, I feel David’s pain.
Anyway: go play with his interactive modern editor.
Wombat sent me the above picture: A physical ad by Apple on a big canvas. Pictured is a person hiding their face with their iPhone, but
therefore actually pointing the camera at the people seeing the ad. It says: “Safari. A browser that’s actually private.” and “Privacy. That’s iPhone.“
It’s accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private,
but not people in general, especially not the people the users point these devices at.
Privacy, as it is commonly practiced and advertised, is for the person inflicting the damage onto their surroundings, not their surroundings.
…
A wonderful take on big tech privacy culture that’s better-expressed than I could have ever put it. That Apple poster shows a particularly ironic lack of self-awareness!
Techbros seem to want to sell individual privacy while simultaneously undermining society‘s privacy: you get “privacy settings”, but we’re still
tracking-by-default everybody else. They deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that the latter – in our age of big data processing – undermines the former: there are countless
examples now of people finding new ways to interpret leaked corporate datasets in order to extract personally-identifiable information, and it’s a problem that only seems to get worse.
“Privacy settings” are important, but wouldn’t it be nicer if privacy was the default?
And yeah: smart glasses can get fucked. I don’t want a world in which having a conversation with somebody in specs requires that I allow Facebook to watch and listen-in as well.
Just wear some Normal Fucking Sunglasses, ‘k?
Despite immediately honing in on exactly the right host, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to find this cache. This, despite having found – and even hidden – cache contsibers
of exactly this type before!
My usual technique for lazily finding them, which involves swooping my phone through likely hiding spots with the camera in ‘selfie’ mode, as a mirror, somehow didn’t help me spot this
one and it took until I bothered to crouch down (in the rain, in my already-wet trousers) and felt around free host before I reached it!
Found the grave, but this is now the second offset I’ve found here that’s asked me to double-back on my walk.
Nope! I’m just going to save the calculated coordinates for the next time I’m in the area! Looking forward to returning!
Found the clues and solved the coordinates, but I’ve JUST walked past the final location a while ago and don’t feel like doubling back today!
A=How many letters in the word underneath Knoxville?
B=A*2
C=Number of letters in place where “Beckett” came from.
D=C+1
E=F Number of letters in the word underneath Knoxville divided by 2
I should have worked out the likely location before I set out. Given that A must be a single digit number that can be doubled (B) to get a single digit number and halved (E, F) to get a
second, there’s only one possible value for those four clues! The other two C and D are related to one another as well, resulting in a grand total of only 9 possible pairs of
coordinates at which this cache could live (of which I’ll bet the “right” one stands out as the most-likely, even without making assumptions about the length of place names!). So yeah,
I’m kicking myself slightly for not solving this before I visited.
But I’m glad I visited anyway. The historical connection is interesting and I enjoyed learning about it.
Maybe I’ll come find the actual cache next time I’m in the area!
Like many before me, from the looks of things, I didn’t find the cache at the published coordinates but about 11 metres away at N 51° 34.086′, W 001° 26.441′. Possibly worth the CO
checking if those coordinates work better for them, too, during their next maintenance visit. TFTC!
A challenging but worthwhile find during a walk along and around the Ridgeway.
My initial attempt to collect the coordinates was way off because I misinterpreted some of the instructions and it yielded a point almost 2km away! My second attempt looked better,
giving a likely-looking spot… but the checksum was out by one!
I triple-checked all the sources and was still out! I was most-confident in my calculated latitude, so I permuted all possible one-point longitude changes that would satisfy the
checksum. This yielded two candidates: one a tenth of a minute out from my original calculation, and one a thousandth of a minute out.
The one that was a tenth of a minute out from my calculation “felt wrong”, being way off the path, so I merely glanced its way as I walked past to the other. The one that was a
thousandth of a minute – which equates to only around a metre! – looked better, and sure enough when I got there I found a multitude of likely hiding spots.
The hide itself was sneaky too: I had to go further from the path than I expected in order to “look back” and spot the cache – very tricky in the thickening undergrowth! But find it I
did, and duly signed the log before returning it to its snug little spot.
This morning I came up to explore the Ridgeway and escape from thinking about Life Stuff for a bit. (Although escaping from the rain wasn’t a possibility! It was real wet up here
today!)
I was wandering this path in a bit of a reverie when I spotted something unusual and thought it a good candidate for a geocache to hide, having momentarily forgotten that this was in
fact the reason I was on this particular footpath in the first place! But my geosense was solid, because when I took my phone out to check I discovered that, sure enough, I’d
stopped right alongside the hiding area.
The cache was an easy find and I appreciated the proper-sized container! The lid is slightly damaged and no longer makes a complete seal but so long as it’s properly returned to its
hiding place it doesn’t need any urgent attention.
Found cache contents first, some of which I was only able to identify thanks to the photo in the previous log. Cache container, minus lid, was found a reasonable distance away, but this
badly-damaged, nearly-destroyed cache is a goner, I feel.
It’s seen no owner maintenance in most of a decade and CO doesn’t seem to have even logged in to GCCOM for 6½ years ,and it’s clearly getting wrecked in between every single attempted
find. It should probably be put to rest.
A few attempts at hacking through the brambles to get near the hint location had me thinking that perhaps this was a wintertime only cache… before I realised that there was a different
route by which I might approach it. Soon I was directly atop the coordinates and immediately sighted what I was looking for.
Unfortunately the cache was in the open, wide open, with a damaged clasp for its lid and its contents strewn about. Possibly somebody had put something ill-advised into the container
and an animal had torn it open? Or else muggles, maybe?
Reassembled everything as best I could and returned it to its hiding place, but the cache container and contents would enjoy some maintenance.
A quick diversion before a hike up Gramp’s Hill and along the Ridgeway. After collecting the required information I pressed on to the cache, meeting some friendly ponies and horses on
the way.
The coordinates were spot on, which surprised me as the location didn’t seem to be accessible! But it is, just a little overgrown! TFTC!
When you buy a domain name, your registrar will typically offer to provide you with a collection of DNS nameservers. For most people, most of the time, that’s plenty sufficient.
A trip back to 2006
My secondary domain danq.dev has three nameservers, operated by its registrar Gandi.
This wasn’t always the case. In the long-distant past, I’ve registered domains for which I’ve had to run my own nameservers. Or else, where I’ve chosen to run my own
nameservers in order to gain more control, or power, or just to play about with the technologyinevitably break things.
When I transitioned to using third-party DNS around 2006, I used to be a big fan of vanity nameservers. “Vanity nameservers” (or “white-label DNS”) is where your nameservers
are hosted at subdomains of the domain for which they’re the nameserver.
So instead of the nameservers for danq.me being, say, looking like ns-48-a.gandi.net and ns-228-b.gandi.net, they might look like, say,
ns1.danq.me and ns2.danq.me. They might still be provided by the same third-party (or might not!), but you don’t get to see that. DNS protocol doesn’t
care about the hostname it’s connecting to, it just needs the right A/AAAA records and it’s good to go!
Well, once you solve the bootstrapping problem, anyway!
If the nameservers for a domain are at a subdomain of that domain, you’ve got a circular dependency. To solve that, you have the servers one level
higher provide “glue records” in addition to the list of nameservers. The glue records, which are shown in the “additional section:” of dig‘s output, above, solve
the circular dependency. Now, the nameservers can be found without first having to… find the nameservers!
Tada! For the first time in about 20 years I’ve configured “vanity DNS”: danq.me‘s nameservers are now called ns1.danq.me, ns2.danq.me,
ns3.danq.me and ns4.danq.me.
Vanity nameservers in 2026
The essential steps for setting up vanity nameservers are fundamentally the same as they always were. Propagation times are much shorter now and I was able to
have the whole thing done and dusted within a couple of hours. In case you’re looking to follow-along, here’s the broad steps (the specifics depends on your registrar, DNS provider,
etc.):
Set up A (and AAAA, it’s 2026 you know!) records pointing ns1.example.com (or whatever your domain is) to their IP addresses.1
Change the NS records for your domain to point to your new vanity nameservers.
Change the SOA record for your domain to point to the first vanity nameserver2. Bump
your serial.
Have your registrar create glue records mirroring those you created in step 1.
Have your registrar change the authoritative nameservers for your domain to those you created in step 1.
(Optional) 😰 Frantically and repeatedly poke the registry’s DNS servers with dig until you’re confident that you didn’t just make a hideous typo and broke your domain
in a way that would have been a pain in the arse to unpick when you last did this, in 2006. Calm down when you remember that it’s 2026 and nowadays it’s gonna be easy to fix via some
API or web portal of your registrar!
That’s all there is to it.
But… why would anybody do this?
For most folks, this is pointless. Larger companies, especially in tech fields, sometimes do it as a branding exercise, especially if they’re re-selling services atop
somebody else’s infrastructure and don’t want to so-clearly lampshade that3.
But I took a look and… I don’t think people bother any more.
Hit up a handful of corporate domains you know and, with the exception of the few that run their own DNS, you’ll see the same big providers keep cropping up: Cloudflare, Amazon, Google,
Microsoft… I experimentally probed a hundred or so domains that I thought might use “vanity DNS” in front of a third-party DNS service… and found… none4.
Nobody cares any more. You’re either running your own, or you tell the world who’s running it for you, with no in-between.
Bringing back an old tradition
Vanity DNS is a dying art.
Soo… I’m now doing vanity DNS ondanq.me; it’s the first time I’ve run vanity DNS on a personal domain since… I want to say 2010‽
The journey started when Jacob asked me about my DNS setup, and it made me nostalgic for a time when nerdy techies whose nameservers were
provided by a third party would just “do” vanity DNS as a matter of course.
Vanity DNS felt nerdy and fun back in 2006. And I guess that nowadays… it still feels nerdy and fun. It’s still as pointless as it ever was, but I don’t care. I’m doing
something that I thought was cool when I first learned about it in 2001, just for the fun of it.
Type dig NS danq.me in your terminal to see the result: four nameservers, all with a .danq.me suffix5.
Cute!
Footnotes
1 There’s a convention of naming nameservers ns1, ns2,
ns3 etc., but if you want “fun” names then that’s fine too. Cloudflare’s nameservers have cute names, if you haven’t seen already!
2 Check your dotted-notation hostmaster email while you’re there; everybody forgets to
look at these and so they’re often outdated.
3 Using vanity nameservers to conceal an underlying DNS provider does not conceal the
third-party’s identity because you can always use the IP address of those nameservers to work out who’s behind them. For example, if you’re interested in seeing who’s really
providing the DNS for danq.me, you might run NS_NAME=`dig NS danq.me +short | head -n1` to get the name of a random one of my nameservers, then
NS_IP=`dig ${NS_NAME} +short | head -n1` to get its IP address, and finally do an reverse DNS lookup on that with e.g. dig -x $NS_IP. Often, this canonical
name will be a giveaway and you won’t even have to look at the lists of who owns which blocks of IP addresses. It’s not a secret. (Gotta admit, though I’m not entirely happy with my
provider… maybe it’s time to switch… or even go back to selfhosting DNS once more!)
4whatsapp.com appears to have its own nameservers
a.ns.whatsapp.com through d.ns.whatsapp.com, but their A records point to IP addresses whose reverse DNS names are a.ns.facebook.com through
d.ns.facebook.com. Not terribly exciting, nor surprising, that Meta are running their own DNS services for their various properties (the same thing happens with
instagram.com). paypal.com seems to have both its own DNS servers and some replicas provided by Digicert UltraDNS, which for a moment excited me
when I thought that they might be part-way through a white-labelling exercise, but no: they’re two different services. I thought I’d find something interesting via one of the big
blog, eccomerce, or VPS providers that offer free subdomains: folks like Bearblog, Dreamwidth, Substack or Medium. But nope; some seem to run their own DNS, and others just sit on top
of a big third-party. Sigh.
5 Want to see the glue records? Run dig NS me +short to get the names of the
authoritative nameservers for the .me TLD, e.g. a0.nic.me, and then query it directly with e.g. dig NS danq.me @a0.nic.me: you’ll see not just that I
have four nameservers under .danq.me but also their IP addresses (in the “additional section”) – that’s the glue doing its thing!
After a walk out with the dog to claim the FTF on nearby GCBX0R7, I figured that I still had a little a few minutes
on my hands before the code I’d been writing for my day job finished deploying and testing itself, so I thought I’d try to go two-for-two with this, a second FTF!
Coordinate components A through D were easy to collect, but E posed us a problem: from the way it’s put forward in the cache description, the answer I came up with didn’t make any
sense! I double-checked A through D and, confident in them, mathematically inferred a range of possible values for E, but couldn’t find any way to conceivably get any of
them!1
She’s no good at the counting, but she’s a big fan of getting her nose in to investigate clue objects.
In any case: of the handful of possible values for E, only one made sense/pointed anywhere believable, and it fit the checksum so we set out. The cache was easy to find, and what an
excellent container! Amazing work! The container alone would have been worth a favourite point, if only I hadn’t been completely unable to parse that fifth coordinate component.
Signed log and returned the cache to its hiding place. Hoping the next cacher doesn’t get as confused as I did! TFTC!
Footnotes
1 I’ll message the CO to get to the bottom of my confusion!
After liaising with the CO to get the formula fixed following my previous effort, the geohound and I came
out for a drizzly walk in-between the downpours to have a second attempt at the FTF. We’re living in Standlake temporarily while our house is
repaired following a catastrophic flood earlier in the year, and while the dog – who doesn’t much enjoy rain – was initially hesitant about
coming out with me, she warmed to the idea just in time for us to set out.
Out in the wet.
The cache was an easy find in the second place I looked (if I’d checked the hint it’d have been the first place I looked). SL and returned, before pressing on to attempt a second FTF, this time at GCBX0JC.
TFTC, and for the quick turnaround on correcting the calculation!
