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Author: Dan Q

Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.

  • Found GC46YDF Second Row - Ball Retention

    This checkin to GC46YDF Second Row - Ball Retention reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Found lying on the ground, in the open. Based on the previous log, I guess that, without its magnets, it quickly fell down. Re-hid, visibly, in a large crack in the wall which I hope โ€ฆ

    Read more (45 words)

    • Checkin
    • to GC46YDF
    • posted 27 September, 2026
  • A happy-looking fawn-coloured French Bulldog on a grassy verge.

    Found GC46YCV Lock - Hanging Bison

    A quick find for the geohound and I while walking back to Tackley (via the TP6298 trigpoint up on the rise to the North) from the 2026-09-27 51 -1 geohashpoint. A successful hashing expedition followed by a successful geocache find, nice!

    Read more (41 words)

    • Checkin
    • to GC46YCV
    • posted 27 September, 2026
  • Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and ponytail, smiles for the camera while holding a French Bulldog whose tongue is lolling as she pants, in a field.

    Geohashing expedition 2026-09-27 51 -1

    I woke early and grumpy and, to try to shake myself out of a funk, went out with the dog in search of a geohashpoint near a trigpoint in a field near Tackley.

    Read more (393 words)

    • Checkin
    • to 2026-09-27 51 -1
    • posted 27 September, 2026
  • Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing

    "Thanking is an action applying to one visible thing." is a literal line in the source code of one of my favourite video games, blackle mori observes.

    Read more (253 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 27 September, 2026
  • Colour wheel diagram showing the transformation from a light blue into a medium purple.

    Styling :visited links using hue-rotation

    My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...

    Read more (223 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 26 September, 2026
  • After months of minor tweaks, on-and-off, I finally bit the bullet and hit "publish" on my new theme for DanQ.me. It's not perfect; it's got all kinds of bugs... but what's the point of having a personal webite if you can't trash it once in a while with an ill-advised "fun" rework, right?

    Full image of Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).
    Alt

    Screenshot of DanQ.me with comic avatars of Dan, pride colours, and a 'fun'-feeling theme (plus semi-retro 'under construction' banner!).

    • Note
    • 3 comments
    • posted 25 September, 2026
  • Here's a neat trick. I've got a web page with many HTML popovers, styled as modals to create a no-JS gallery/lightbox. But LCP suffers because the browser tries to reserve space for the images within (even though they're within not-yet-shown popovers).

    This CSS one-liner saved the day. It basically says "skip over not-yet open popovers on initial page render" -

    [popover]:not(:popover-open) {
      content-visibility: hidden;
    }

    I appreciate that Lighthouse isn't the last word in performance metrics, of course. But this change alone bumped an affected page's score from 76 to 100, so it's not nothing either!

    • Note
    • posted 25 September, 2026
  • Polyday Politics workshop

    Grant ran a workshop on politics (and law) around polyamory, at a recent event. I wasn't there, but enjoyed reading his notes after-the-fact... and wanted to use the opportunity to share some of my own thoughts and experiences.

    Read more - about 7 minutes (1452 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 22 September, 2026
  • Screenshot showing Opera's vertical tabs, showing a semi-readable DanQ.me page.

    Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)

    A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!

    Read more (388 words)

    • Article
    • posted 21 September, 2026
  • Edited Champ'd Up screenshot showing the battle for The Champion of Editing Videogame Metadata, pitting Friendly Dan against Hacker Dan.

    Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American

    When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!

    Read more - about 5 minutes (1125 words)

    • Article
    • posted 19 September, 2026
  • 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.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (554 words)

    • Repost
    • of this original
    • posted 18 September, 2026
  • 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".

    Full image of 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.
    Alt

    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.

    • Note
    • 1 comment
    • posted 17 September, 2026
  • An email in Outlook 365, showing 'DanQ.me' in gold-gradient WordArt with a drop shadow.

    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...

    Read more - about 5 minutes (996 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 16 September, 2026
  • 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 โ€ฆ

    Read more (384 words)

    • Note
    • posted 15 September, 2026
  • Composite photo showing front and rear of a postcard, showing an aerial photograph of Toronto on one side and a hand-drawn labyrinth on the other.

    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!

    Read more (394 words)

    • Article
    • posted 15 September, 2026

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