Dan Q – Dan Q

The internet’s hidden creative renaissance (and how to find it)

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Have you ever wished there were more to the internet than the same handful of apps and sites you toggle between every day? Then you’re in for a treat.

Welcome to the indie web, a vibrant and underrated part of the internet, aesthetically evocative of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here, the focus is on personal websites, authentic self-expression, and slow, intentional exploration driven by curiosity and interest.

These kinds of sites took a backseat to the mainstream web around the advent of big social media platforms, but recently the indie web has been experiencing a revival, as more netizens look for connection outside the walled gardens created by tech giants. And with renewed interest comes a new generation of website owner-operators, intent on reclaiming their online experience from mainstream social media imperatives of growth and profit.

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BlogTherapy and Josh Kramer, in The internet’s hidden creative renaissance (and how to find it)

I want to like this article. It draws attention to the indieweb, smolweb, independent modern personal web, or whatever you want to call it. It does so in a way that inspires interest. And by way of example, it features several of my favourite retronauts. Awesome.

But it feels painfully ironic to read this article… on Substack!

Substack goes… let’s say half-way… to representing the opposite of what the indieweb movement is about! Sure, Substack isn’t Facebook or Twitter… but it’s still very much in the same place as, say, Medium, in that it’s a place where you go if you want other people to be in total control of your Web presence.

The very things that the author praises of the indieweb – its individuality and personality, its freedom control by opaque corporate policies, its separation from the “same handful of apps and sites you toggle between every day” – are exactly the kinds of things that Substack fails to provide.

It’s hardly the biggest thing to hate about Substack, mind – that’d probably be their continued platforming of Covid conspriacy theorists and white nationalist hate groups. But it’s still a pretty big irony to hear the indieweb praised there!

Soo… nice article, shame about the platform it’s published on, I guess?

Who Is the Winking Chef?

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One of my goals was to uncover the origin of the ubiquitous Winking Chef. We’ve all seen him – the chubby mustachioed man wearing a chef’s hat and often making a gesture of approval with his hand. I dug around as much as I could – searching old magazines and websites looking for the origin of the image. Of course generic chef images go way back in print advertising but I was looking for one image in particular, the one I grew up with on my pizza boxes in New Jersey. Who was this guy? Was the image based on a real person? What’s the deal????

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Scott Wiener, in Who Is the Winking Chef?

There are few people in this world who are more-obsessed with pizza than I, but Scott’s gotta be one of them. Since discovering this blog post of his I now really want to go on one of his pizza-themed walking tours of New York City. But you might have guessed that.

Anyway: Scott – who has a collection of pizza boxes, by the way (in case you needed evidence that he’s even more pizza-fixated than me) – noticed the “winking chef” image, traced its origin, and would love to tell you about it. An enjoyable little read.

Universal Cosplay

As previously indicated, I’m not anticipating cosplaying anybody. But I think I could do Greg Universe.

Not young Greg Universe, the Star Child of ‘Story for Steven’… which seems to be the only variety anybody’s ever cosplayed as before if an image search is to be believed. No, I mean: overweight old balding Greg Universe. I could totally pull that look off.

Fake tan lines, white t-shirt (I’d probably make a ‘guitar dad’ one!), sweatpants, carrying a guitar. Easy.

Again, not that I’m planning to. Just saying that I could…

Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

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Further analysis on a smaller pcap pointed to these mysterious packets arriving ~20ms apart.

This was baffling to me (and to Claude Code). We kicked around several ideas like:

SSH flow control messages

PTY size polling or other status checks

Some quirk of bubbletea or wish

One thing stood out – these exchanges were initiated by my ssh client (stock ssh installed on MacOS) – not by my server.

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In 2023, ssh added keystroke timing obfuscation. The idea is that the speed at which you type different letters betrays some information about which letters you’re typing. So ssh sends lots of “chaff” packets along with your keystrokes to make it hard for an attacker to determine when you’re actually entering keys.

That makes a lot of sense for regular ssh sessions, where privacy is critical. But it’s a lot of overhead for an open-to-the-whole-internet game where latency is critical.

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Nolen Royalty, in Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

Keystroke timing obfuscation: I could’ve told you that! Although I wouldn’t necessarily have leapt to the possibility of mitigating it server-side by patching-out support for (or at least: the telegraphing of support for!) it; that’s pretty clever.

Altogether this is a wonderful piece demonstrating the whole “engineer mindset”. Detecting a problem, identifying it, understanding it, fixing it, all tied-up in an engaging narrative.

And after playing with his earlier work, ssh tiny.christmas – which itself inspired me to learn a little Bubble Tea/Wish (I’ve got Some Ideas™️) – I’m quite excited to see where this new ssh-based project of Royalty’s is headed!

“I’m glad I’m not the only one”

Still at MegaConLive. I’ve not done this kind of con before (and still wouldn’t, were it not for my tweenager and her various obsessions). Not my jam, and that’s fine.

But if there’s one thing for which I can sing it’s praises: everybody we’ve met is super friendly and nice. Sure, you can loudly telegraph your fandoms and identities via cosplay, accessories, masks, badges, bracelets or whatever… but it’s also just a friendly community of folks to just talk to.

The fashion choices are, more than anything, just an excuse to engage: a way to say “hey, here’s a conversation starter if you’d like to talk to me!”

Overheard a conversation between my kid and another of a similar age, and there was a heartwarming moment where the other kid said, “oh wow, I thought I was the only one!” Adorbs.

It’s Eddie Bowley!

I may have been dragged to MegaConLive London by my multi-fandom loving 12-year-old, but I at least managed to find somebody worth getting a selfie with.

MegaConLive London

My 12-year-old’s persuaded me to take her to MegaConLive London this weekend.

As somebody who doesn’t pay much attention to the pop culture circles represented by such an event (and hasn’t for 15+ years, or whenever it was that Asdfbook came out?)… have you got any advice for me, Internet?

How You Read My Content (The Answers)

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What this tells me?

Well, quite a lot, actually. It tells me that there’s loads of you fine people reading the content on this site, which is very heart-warming. It also tells me that RSS is by far the main way people consume my content. Which is also fantastic, as I think RSS is very important and should always be a first class citizen when it comes to delivering content to people.

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Kev Quirk, in How You Read My Content (The Answers)

I didn’t get a chance to participate in Kev’s survey because, well, I don’t target “RSS Zero” and I don’t always catch up on new articles – even by authors I follow closely – until up to a few weeks after they’re published¹. But needless to say, I’d have been in the majority: I follow Kev via my feed reader².

But I was really interested by this approach to understanding your readership: like Kev, I don’t run any kind of analytics on my personal sites. But he’s onto something! If you want to learn about people, why not just ask them?

Okay, there’s going to be a bias: maybe readers who subscribe by RSS are simply more-likely to respond to a survey? Or are more-likely to visit new articles quickly, which was definitely a factor in this short-lived survey? It’s hard to be certain whether these or other factors might have thrown-off Kev’s results.

But then… what isn’t biased? Were Kev running, say, Google Analytics (or Fathom, or Strike, or Hector, or whatever)… then I wouldn’t show up in his results because I block those trackers³ – another, different, kind of bias.

We can’t dodge such bias: not using popular analytics platforms, and not by surveying users. But one of these two options is, at least, respectful of your users’ privacy and bandwidth.

I’m tempted to run a similar survey myself. I might wait until after my long-overdue redesign – teased here – launches, though. Although perhaps that’s just a procrastination stemming from my insecurity that I’ll hear, like, an embarrassingly-low number of responses like three or four and internalise it as failing some kind of popularity contest⁴! Needs more thought.

Footnotes

¹ I’m happy with this approach: I enjoy being able to treat my RSS reader as sort-of a “magazine”, using my categorisations of feeds – which are partially expressed on my Blogroll page – as a theme. Like: “I’m going to spend 20 minutes reading… tech blogs… or personal blogs by people I know personally… or indieweb-centric content… or news (without the sports, of course)…” This approach makes consuming content online feel especially deliberate and intentional: very much like being in control of what I read and when.

² In fact, it’s by doing so – with a little help from Matthias Pfefferle – that I was inspired to put a “thank you” message in my RSS feed, among other “secret” features!

³ In fact, I block all third-party JavaScript (and some first-party JavaScript!) except where explicitly permitted, but even for sites that I do allow to load all such JavaScript I still have to manually enable analytics trackers if I want them, which I don’t. Also… I sandbox almost all cookies, and I treat virtually all persistent cookies as session cookies and I delete virtually all session cookies 15 seconds after I navigate away from a its sandbox domain or close its tab… so I’m moderately well-anonymised even where I do somehow receive a tracking cookie.

⁴ Perhaps something to consider after things have gotten easier and I’ve caught up with my backlog a bit.

PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13… in Three Minutes

I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. I mean: Caddy already makes it pretty easy, but I was delighted to see that, since the last time I did this, the default package repositories had 100% of what I needed!

Apart from setting the hostname, creating myself a user and adding them to the sudo group, and reconfiguring sshd to my preference, I’d done nothing on this new server. And then to set up a fully-functioning PHP-powered webserver, all I needed to run (for a domain “example.com”) was:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y caddy php8.4-fpm
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com
printf "example.com {\n"                               | sudo tee    /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  root * /var/www/example.com\n"               | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  encode zstd gzip\n"                          | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.4-fpm.sock\n" | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "  file_server\n"                               | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
printf "}\n"                                           | sudo tee -a /etc/caddy/Caddyfile
sudo service caddy restart

After that, I was able to put an index.php file into /var/www/example.com and it just worked.

And when I say “just worked”, I mean with all the bells and whistles you ought to expect from Caddy. HTTPS came as standard (with a solid QualSys grade). HTTP/3 was supported with a 0-RTT handshake.

Mind blown.

Peripheral Vision

As I lay in bed the other night, I became aware of an unusually-bright LED, glowing in the corner of my room¹. Lying still in the dark, I noticed that as I looked directly at the light meant that I couldn’t see it… but when I looked straight ahead – not at it – I could make it out.

This phenomenon seems to be most-pronounced when the thing you’re using a single eye to looking at something small and pointlike (like an LED), and where there’s an obstacle closer to your eye than to the thing you’re looking at. But it’s still a little spooky².

It’s strange how sometimes you might be less-able to see something that you’re looking directly at… than something that’s only in your peripheral vision.

I’m now at six months since I started working for Firstup.³ And as I continue to narrow my focus on the specifics of the company’s technology, processes, and customers… I’m beginning to lose a sight of some of the things that were in my peripheral vision.

Dan, a white man with blue hair, wears headphones and a grey 'Firstup' hoodie, holding a 'Firstup'-branded shoebox. — I’ve not received *quite* so many articles of branded clothing and other swap from my new employer as I did from my previous, but getting useful ‘swag’ still feels cool.

I’m a big believer in the idea that folks who are new to your group (team, organisation, whatever) have a strange superpower that fades over time: the ability to look at “how you work” as an outsider and bring new ideas. It requires a certain boldness to not just accept the status quo but to ask “but why do we do things this way?”. Sure, the answer will often be legitimate and unchallengeable, but by using your superpower and raising the question you bring a chance of bringing valuable change.

That superpower has a sweet spot. A point at which a person knows enough about your new role that they can answer the easy questions, but not so late that they’ve become accustomed to the “quirks” that they can’t see them any longer. The point at which your peripheral vision still reveals where there’s room for improvement, because you’re not yet so-focussed on the routine that you overlook the objectively-unusual.

I feel like I’m close to that sweet spot, right now, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to challenge some of Firstup’s established patterns. Maybe there are things I’ve learned or realised over the course of my career that might help make my new employer stronger and better? Whether not not that turns out to be the case, I’m enjoying poking at the edges to find out!

Footnotes

¹ The LED turned out to be attached to a laptop charger that was normally connected in such a way that it wasn’t visible from my bed.

² Like the first time you realise that you have a retinal blind spot and that your brain is “filling in” the gaps based on what’s around it, like Photoshop’s “smart remove” tool is running within your head.

³ You might recall that I wrote about my incredibly-efficient experience of the recruitment process at Firstup.

gradient.horse

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Honestly I just wanted to play around with gradients. But gradients without anything on the horizon lack something, so I added horses. Since I can’t draw horses, now you can draw them. And watch them parade across the screen alongside horses drawn by people you probably wouldn’t like. Or maybe you would, how should I know?!

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Michail Rybakov, in gradient.horse

I love a good (by which I mean stupid) use of a .horse domain name. I’m not sure anything will ever beat endless.horse, but gradient.horse might be a close second.

Draw a horse. Watch it get animated and run wild and free with the horses that other people have drawn. That is all.

Keep the Internet fun and weird, people.

Dan Q found GC8YPVJ Finn1

This checkin to GC8YPVJ Finn1 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Last time I was caching up this neck of the woods was December 2018 (GLXJJWGN, GLXJJX7P). And despite the fact that I was staying in different accommodation, in a different month of the year, I was still in the vicinity for the exact same reason: attending the Christmas party of my nonprofit.

By longstanding tradition, I get up early in the morning at these kinds of events – well before sunrise, at this point in the year! – for a quick walk to a nearby geocache, which today meant this one! To make my hunt in the dark easier I scoped the GZ on Google Street View first and caught sight of a likely hiding spot which later turned it to be exactly right!

Dan, in the dark, stands in front of a number of road closure signs on a rural road. — Upon reaching the area I soon saw that the road ahead was closed (for HS2 works, I suppose!), but this was no impediment to the cache.

It was soon found – the coordinates aren’t great but the hint sent me right to the object I’d scouted earlier – but extraction was challenging – I needed to manufacture a tool from nearby dead wood with which to pry it from its hiding place!

TFTC.