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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Flood
My house is under water.
Well, fuck. -
RIP James Van Der Beek
James van der Beek died this week of bowel cancer; he was only a couple of years older than I am. I guess I'm at that point of my life where unexpectedly-early celebrity deaths might start being "around my age".
I'm neither young nor angsty enough to enjoy a re-watch of Dawson's Creek, but I especially loved him in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 so maybe I'll re-watch that. -
Integration contemplation
What fragments you?
What defragments you?
How are you balancing both? -
Rebels in the Sky
I feel like I'm reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting's fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.
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Curious Cones
Curious Cones is a catalogue of traffic cones in unusual places. How wonderful and weird our World Wide Web is, that such a thing can exist.
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Syncthing on Unraid: repairing malformed database disk image
Mostly as a note to myself, but here's what to do if you're running linuxserver/syncthing via Docker on Unraid and it keeps saying:
ERR Database error when getting previous version (error="getkv: database disk image is malformed (11)" log.pkg=syncthing)
The problem is that Syncthing's index has been corrupted. I was able to fix it by getting a shell into the relevant Docker container and moving the index: Syncthing detected it as absent and re-created it, re-indexing everything. Here's what I did:
docker exec -it syncthing bash
mv /config/index-v2 /config/index-v2-BROKEN -
My partner and her husband (my metamour) have a tradition that every 5th wedding anniversary they get the "next size up" of champagne bottle.
This meant that on yesterday, when we celebrated their 15th, we needed to get through a Methuselah: a massive 6 litre bottle equivalent to nine standard bottles of champagne (rightmost in the attached picture).
Alt
A half bottle, standard bottle, magnum, Jeroboam, and Methuselah of Bollinger champagne lined up on a window ledge, with a banana for scale.
It's times like these you're glad of friends you can call on to help you drink such a monster!
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Found GC8X84J Crawley to Minster Loop - #1 Acrux
This checkin to GC8X84J Crawley to Minster Loop - #1 Acrux reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. One last cache on this afternoon's walk before I had to take the geopup off for a doggy bath! We tried a couple of obvious hosts near the GZ before expanding our search …
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Found GC7YHDV One with the tree
This checkin to GC7YHDV One with the tree reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. QEF in the third host I tried. SL. TFTC!
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Found GC8X88R Crawley to Minster Loop - #12 Zosma
This checkin to GC8X88R Crawley to Minster Loop - #12 Zosma reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Walking backwards and forwards past the GZ eventually enabled the geopup and I to spot this very-visible but high-up cache. Soon it was retrieved, the log signed, and returned. Logbook is very full; …
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Did not find GC8X888 Crawley to Minster Loop - #11 Wasat
This checkin to GC8X888 Crawley to Minster Loop - #11 Wasat reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. The dog's walk needed extending to make sure she's well worn-out and not too-excited for some guests we're having over this evening, so she and I came and parked on Dry Lane (ironically-named, …
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LGBT+ History Month
Here in the UK we celebrate LGBT+ History Month in February. This year, I'd encourage you to look at the history of queer rights in the UK, and use it to celebrate what we've achieved so far... but more-importantly, as a reminder that there's more to do (especially lately).
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Why there’s no European Google?
Lionel Dricot explains why the big tech companies are mostly American, not European (and why that's a good thing). It's a cultural difference that also results in Europeans being behind so many of the most-important open source and open standards projects in the world.
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Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS
Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around.
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I've had my itch.io account for about six years; I think I first created it to buy a copy of We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I've since made several purchases, donations, reviews, and comments, but never really used my account as a "creator".
I changed that today when I realised that there was nothing to stop me re-publishing games like DNDle and Axe Feather 2021 via my itch.io profile as well as on their current homes (and on GitHub, I suppose). For some folks, itch.io's discovery features might be the best way for them to discover worthwhile content weird stuff like this.
I might republish some other "things" I've made on itch.io too. It's not like there haven't been lots of them over the years!