Dan Q

Author: Dan Q

Dan Q performed maintenance for GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing

This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Dropped by on the way back from the school run to check in on this cache. All is well. Also deposited travel bug TB831BW on the next leg of its intergalactic adventure.

Dan Q found GC6J5MV Church Micro 9613…West Hanney

This checkin to GC6J5MV Church Micro 9613...West Hanney reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Had to stand around looking inconspicuous for a while before the geopup and I could retrieve this cache from its hiding place. There’s a lot going on this morning, presumably in anticipation of a Remembrance Sunday service at the church later. The bench across the road provided us with a place to sit and sign while we waited for an opportunity to return it. Amazingly picturesque spot for a lovely cache. FP awarded. TFTC!

Dan Q couldn’t find GC8XMQN Coming to an end

This checkin to GC8XMQN Coming to an end reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Found the GZ without difficulty and a plethora of great hiding spots, but no luck for me nor the geopup here this morning. The hound enjoyed a quick paddle in the stream at this lovely spot, though, so it’s not a complete failure!

A French Bulldog in a blue jacket stands on a muddy riverbank amongst fallen trees and leaf litter. There are many canine footprints in the mud.

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Wake Me Up When September Ends

Mastodon’s Eternal September begins

In the light of the so-called “Twitter migration”, I’ve spent a lot of the last week helping people new to Mastodon/the Fediverse in general to understand it. Or at least, to understand how it’s different from Twitter.1

If you’re among those jumping ship, by the way, can I recommend that you do two things:

  1. Don’t stop after reading an article about what Mastodon is and how it works (start here!); please also read about the established etiquette, and
  2. Don’t come in with the expectation that it’s “like Twitter but…”, because the ways it’s not like Twitter are more-important (and nobody wants it to be more like Twitter).

The experience has filled me with feelings, for which I really appreciated that Hugh Rundle found such great words to share, comparing the surge of new users to September(ish) 1993:

…

The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. Those people had already started to feel sidelined from their own project when people like me started turning up a few year ago. This isn’t the first time fediverse users have had to deal with a significant state change and feeling of loss. Nevertheless, the basic principles have mostly held up to now: the culture and technical systems were deliberately designed on principles of consent, agency, and community safety.

…

If the people who built the fediverse generally sought to protect users, corporate platforms like Twitter seek to control their users… [Academics and advertisers] can claim that legally Twitter has the right to do whatever it wants with this data, and ethically users gave permission for this data to be used in any way when they ticked “I agree” to the Terms of Service.

…

This attitude has moved with the new influx. Loudly proclaiming that content warnings are censorship, that functionality that has been deliberately unimplemented due to community safety concerns are “missing” or “broken”, and that volunteer-run servers maintaining control over who they allow and under what conditions are “exclusionary”. No consideration is given to why the norms and affordances of Mastodon and the broader fediverse exist, and whether the actor they are designed to protect against might be you.

…

I’d highly recommend you read the whole thing because it’s excellent.

Photo showing fragile dewey spiderwebs on blades of grass.

Part of the solution

I genuinely believe that the fediverse is among our best bets for making a break from the silos of the corporate Web, and to do that it has to scale – it’s only the speed at which it’s being asked to do so that’s problematic.

Aside from what I’m already doing – trying to tutor (tootor?) new fediversians about how to integrate in an appropriate and respectful manner and doing a little to supporting the expansion of the software that makes it tick… I wonder what more I could/should be doing.

Would my effort be best-spent be running a server (one not-just-for-me, I mean: abnib.social, anyone?), or should I use that time and money to support existing instances directly? Should I brush up on my ActivityPub spec so I can be a more-useful developer, or am I better-placed to focus on tending my own digital garden first? Or maybe I’m looking at it all wrong and I should be trying to dissuade people from piling-on to a system that might well not be right for them (nor they for it!)?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I’m hoping to work them out soon.

Addendum

It only occurred to me after the fact that I should mention that you can find me at @dan@danq.me.

Footnotes

1 Important: I’m no expert. I’ve been doing fediverse things for about 3 years but I’m relatively quiet on Mastodon. Also, I’ve never really understood or gotten along with Twitter, so I’m even less an expert on that. Don’t assume that I’m an authority on anything at all, and especially not social media.

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Debugging Mysteries

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Just wanted to share with you something I found ages ago but only just got around to mentioning – Julia Evans‘ (of Wizard Zines fame) Debugging Mysteries:

There are five mysteries here right now:

The Case of the Slow Websites
The Case of the Connection Timeout
The Case of the DNS Update that Didn’t Work
The Case of the 50ms Request
The Case of the Failed Docker Connection

Go back to wizardzines.com

GitHub repository: jvns/twine-stories
Blog post about this project: Notes on building debugging puzzles

Each mystery is a Twine-powered “choose your own adventure” game in which you must diagnose the kind of issue that a software developer might, for real. I think these are potentially excellent tools for beginner programmers, not just because they provide some information about the topic of each, but because they encourage cultivating a mindset of the kind of thinking that’s required to get to the bottom of gnarly problems.

Better yet, she’s open-sourced the entire thing (and I was excited to see she wrote in Twee, which is very dear to my heart).

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Note #20645

Unable to sleep, I found myself wondering whether anybody with a retro-hipster vibe had built a smart pocketwatch. All your smartwatch features, but in pocketwatch format.

Then I realised I was describing a mobile phone on a keychain.

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How to date a recording using background electrical noise

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Matching a target ENF series with a section of a reference series

We’re going to use ENF matching to answer the question “here’s a recording, when was it was (probably) taken?” I say “probably” because all that ENF matching can give us is a statistical best guess, not a guarantee. Mains hum isn’t always present on recordings, and even when it is, our target recording’s ENF can still match with the wrong section of the reference database by statistical misfortune.

Still, even though all ENF matching gives us is a guess, it’s usually a good one. The longer the recording, the more reliable the estimate; in the academic papers that I’ve read 10 minutes is typically given as a lower bound for getting a decent match.

To make our guess, we’ll need to:

  1. Extract the target recording’s ENF values over time
  2. Find a database of reference ENF values, taken directly from the electrical grid serving the area where the recording was made
  3. Find the section of the reference ENF series that best matches the target. This section is our best guess for when the target recording was taken

We’ll start at the top.

…

About a year after Tom Scott did a video summarising how deviation over time (and location!) of the background electrical “hum” produced by AC power can act as a forensic marker on audio recordings, Robert Heaton’s produced an excellent deep-dive into how you can play with it for yourself, including some pretty neat code.

I remember first learning about this technique a few years ago during my masters in digital forensics, and my first thought was about how it might be effectively faked. Faking the time of recording of some audio after the fact (as well as removing the markers) is challenging, mostly because you’ve got to ensure you pick up on the harmonics of the frequencies, but it seems to me that faking it at time-of-recording ought to be reasonably easy: at least, so long as you’re already equipped with a mechanism to protect against recording legitimate electrical hum (isolated quiet-room, etc.):

Taking a known historical hum-pattern, it ought to be reasonably easy to produce a DC-to-AC converter (obviously you want to be running off a DC circuit to begin with, e.g. from batteries, so you don’t pick up legitimate hum) that regulates the hum frequency in a way that matches the historical pattern. Sure, you could simply produce the correct “noise”, but doing it this way helps ensure that the noise behaves appropriately under the widest range of conditions. I almost want to build such a device, perhaps out of an existing portable transformer (they come in big battery packs nowadays, providing a two-for-one!) but of course: who has the time? Plus, if you’d ever seen my soldering skills you’d know why I shouldn’t be allowed to work on anything like this.

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Reply to OpenID for WP

On 14 April 2006, Matt Mullenweg said:

OpenID for WordPress plugin

This weekend I was experimentally reimplenting how my blog displays comments. For testing I needed to find an old post with both trackbacks and pingbacks on it. I found my post that you linked, here, and was delighted to be reminded that despite both of our blogs changing domain name (from photomatt.net to ma.tt and from blog.scatmania.org to danq.me, respectively), all the links back and forth still work perfectly because clearly we share an apporopriate dedication to the principle that Cool URIs Don’t Change, and set up our redirects accordingly. 🙌

Incidentally, this was about the point in time at which I first thought to myself “hey, I like what Matt’s doing with this Automattic thing; I should work there someday”. It took me like a decade to a decade-and-a-half to get around to applying, though… 😅

Anyway: thanks for keeping your URIs cool so I could enjoy this trip down memory lane (and debug an experimental wp_list_comments callback!).

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