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.
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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 …
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People are not friction
Dave Rupert has thoughts on GenAI, the Gell-Mann effect, and the danger that fast, "good enough" solutions have on how we think about the humans that these systems are ultimately supposed to serve.
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Found GC79ZK3 Wootton Word Wall
This morning, the younger geokid and I came out for a walk with the geopup. After a little difficulty getting a GPSr fix we eventuality found a good-looking host, and after a few laps we had the well-camouflaged container in our hands. A good sized, well maintained container and an interesting puzzle, even if the way we solved it might be considered by some to have been cheating!
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Did I Cheat?
I solved a puzzle geocache in an unconventional way: by writing a program to permute all the possible solutions and check them for me. Was that cheating? I can see arguments either way...
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Reply to: I'm OK being left behind, thanks!
A reply to Terence Eden's post about not buying in to every cryptocurrency or AI fad, but being happy to 'wait and see'.