Dan Q
This checkin to GC4QADE Penny - bonkers for conkers reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
No difficulty with this QEF; title clue plus a little botany had me stop in exactly the right place. And the tall nettles weren’t any risk to me with long trousers! TFTC.
This checkin to GC4QADB Sheldon reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
No luck here. Couldn’t spare more than a little while to hunt without Ruth and the rest of the Thames Path Source-to-Mouth party getting too far ahead but spent that time getting thoroughly nettled. They’re fierce around here! Maybe another time.
This checkin to GC2W97E Messing about by the river reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found after a brief search while accompanying my partner Ruth on the latest leg of her effort to (by instalments) walk the entire length of the Thames from its source to its mouth. Initially looked in the wrong place but once I was willing to brave the nettles and hack my way off the footpath the cache location became obvious. A bit damp, but serviceable. TFTC!
This checkin to GC4QADR Raj reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Another QEF down this stretch of the Thames Path. Having to jog to catch up with my party now! Cache container camouflage slightly damaged but still plenty good for concealment so long as it’s stored the right way up! TFTC, nice one!
OMG VaultPress Jetpack Backup to the rescue.
One of the best Internet people drew me a picture and when I replied to it, it got scrambled. 😱
But even though I had to modify core WordPress columns to store drawings, the backup respected that and I was able to restore it.
I used to pay for VaultPress. Nowadays I get it for free as one of the many awesome perks of my job. But I’d probably still pay for it because it’s a lifesaver.
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
Observant readers might have noticed that some of my recent blog posts – like the one about special roads, my idea for pressure-cooking tea, and the one looking at the history of window tax in two countries1 – are also available as podcast.
Like my occasional video content, this isn’t designed to replace any of my blogging: it’s just a different medium for those that might prefer it.
For some stories, I guess that audio might be a better way to find out what I’ve been thinking about. Just like how the vlog version of my post about my favourite video game Easter Egg might be preferable because video as a medium is better suited to demonstrating a computer game, perhaps audio’s the right medium for some of the things I write about, too?
But as much as not, it’s just a continuation of my efforts to explore different media over which a WordPress blog can be delivered2. Also, y’know, my ongoing effort to do what I’m bad at in the hope that I might get better at a wider diversity of skills.
Let’s start by understanding what a “podcast” actually is. It is, in essence, just an RSS feed (something you might have heard me talk about before…) with audio enclosures – basically, “attachments” – on each item. The idea was spearheaded by Dave Winer back in 2001 as a way of subscribing to rich media like audio or videos in such a way that slow Internet connections could pre-download content so you didn’t have to wait for it to buffer.3
Here’s what I had to do to add podcasting capability to my theme:
I use a post tag, dancast, to represent posts with accompanying podcast content4.
This way, I can add all the podcast-specific metadata only if the user requests the feed of that tag, and leave my regular feeds untampered . This means that you don’t
get the podcast enclosures in the regular subscription; that might not be what everybody would want, but it suits me to serve podcasts only to people who explicitly ask for
them.
It also means that I’m able to use a template, tag-dancast.php, in my theme to generate a customised page for listing podcast episodes.
Okay, onto the code (which I’ve open-sourced over here). I’ve use a series of standard WordPress hooks to add the functionality I need. The important bits are:
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTuberss2_item – to add the <enclosure>, <itunes:duration>, <itunes:image>, and
<itunes:explicit> elements to the feed, when requesting a feed with my nominated tag. Only <enclosure> is strictly required, but appeasing Apple
Podcasts is worthwhile too. These are lifted directly from the post metadata.
the_excerpt_rss – I have another piece of post metadata in which I can add a description of the podcast (in practice, a list of chapter times); this hook
swaps out the existing excerpt for my custom one in podcast feeds.
rss_enclosure – some podcast syndication platforms and players can’t cope with RSS feeds in which an item has multiple enclosures, so as a
safety precaution I strip out any enclosures that WordPress has already added (e.g. the featured image).
the_content_feed – my RSS feed usually contains the full text of every post, because I don’t like feeds that try to force you to go to the
original web page5
and I don’t want to impose that on others. But for the podcast feed, the text content of the post is somewhat redundant so I drop it.
rss2_ns – of critical importance of course is adding the relevant namespaces to your XML declaration. I use the itunes namespace, which provides the widest compatibility for specifying metadata, but I also use the
newer podcast namespace, which has growing compatibility and provides some modern features, most of which I don’t
use except specifying a license. There’s no harm in supporting both.
rss2_head – here’s where I put in the metadata for the podcast as a whole: license, category, type, and so on. Some of these fields are
effectively essential for best support.
You’re welcome, of course, to lift any of all of the code for your own purposes. WordPress makes a perfectly reasonable platform for podcasting-alongside-blogging, in my experience.
Finally, there’s the question of what to podcast about.
My intention is to use podcasting as an alternative medium to my traditional blog posts. But not every blog post is suitable for conversion into a podcast! Ones that rely on images (like my post about dithering) aren’t a great choice. Ones that have lots of code that you might like to copy-and-paste are especially unsuitable.
Also: sometimes I just can’t be bothered. It’s already some level of effort to write a blog post; it’s like an extra 25% effort on top of that to record, edit, and upload a podcast version of it.
That’s not nothing, so I’ve tended to reserve podcasts for blog posts that I think have a sort-of eccentric “general interest” vibe to them. When I learn something new and feel the need to write a thousand words about it… that’s the kind of content that makes it into a podcast episode.
Which is why I’ve been calling the endeavour “a podcast nobody asked for, about things only Dan Q cares about”. I’m capable of getting nerdsniped easily and can quickly find my way down a rabbit hole of learning. My podcast is, I guess, just a way of sharing my passion for trivial deep dives with the rest of the world.
My episodes are probably shorter than most podcasts: my longest so far is around fifteen minutes, but my shortest is only two and a half minutes and most are about seven. They’re meant to be a bite-size alternative to reading a post for people who prefer to put things in their ears than into their eyes.
Anyway: if you’re not listening already, you can subscribe from here or in your favourite podcasting app. Or you can just follow my blog as normal and look for a streamable copy of podcasts at the top of selected posts (like this one!).
1 I’ve also retroactively recorded a few older ones. Have a look/listen!
2 As well as Web-based non-textual content like audio (podcasts) and video (vlogs), my blog is wholly or partially available over a variety of more-exotic protocols: did you find me yet on Gemini (gemini://danq.me/), Spartan (spartan://danq.me/), Gopher (gopher://danq.me/), and even Finger
(finger://danq.me/, or run e.g. finger blog@danq.me from your command line)? Most of these are powered by my very own tool CapsulePress, and I’m itching to try a few more… how about a WordPress blog that’s accessible over FTP, NNTP, or DNS? I’m not even kidding when I say
I’ve got ideas for these…
3 Nowadays, we have specialised media decoder co-processors which reduce the size of media files. But more-importantly, today’s high-speed always-on Internet connections mean that you probably rarely need to make a conscious choice between streaming or downloading.
4 I actually intended to change the tag to podcast when I went-live,
but then I forgot, and now I can’t be bothered to change it. It’s only for my convenience, after all!
5 I’m very grateful that my favourite feed reader makes it possible to, for example, use a CSS selector to specify the page content it should pre-download for you! It means I get to spend more time in my feed reader.
Last month I implemented an alternative mode to view this website “like it’s 1999”, complete with with cursor trails, 88×31 buttons, tables for layout1, tiled backgrounds, and even a (fake) hit counter.
One thing I’d have liked to do for 1999 Mode but didn’t get around to would have been to make the images look like it was the 90s, too.
Back then, many Web users only had graphics hardware capable of displaying 256 distinct colours. Across different platforms and operating systems, they weren’t even necessarily the same 256 colours2! But the early Web agreed on a 216-colour palette that all those 8-bit systems could at least approximate pretty well.
I had an idea that I could make my images look “216-colour”-ish by using CSS to apply an SVG filter, but didn’t implement it.
But Spencer, a long-running source of excellent blog comments, stepped up and wrote an SVG filter for me! I’ve tweaked 1999 Mode already to use it… and I’ve just got to say it’s excellent: huge thanks, Spencer!
The filter coerces colours to their nearest colour in the “Web safe” palette, resulting in things like this:
Plenty of pictures genuinely looked like that on the Web of the 1990s, especially if you happened to be using a computer only capable of 8-bit colour to view a page built by somebody who hadn’t realised that not everybody would experience 24-bit colour like they did3.
But not all images in the “Web safe” palette looked like this, because savvy web developers knew to dither their images when converting them to a limited palette. Let’s have another go:
Dithering introduces random noise to media4 in order to reduce the likelihood that a “block” will all be rounded to the same value. Instead; in our picture, a block of what would otherwise be the same colour ends up being rounded to maybe half a dozen different colours, clustered together such that the ratio in a given part of the picture is, on average, a better approximation of the correct colour.
The result is analogous to how halftone printing – the aesthetic of old comics and newspapers, with different-sized dots made from few colours of ink – produces the illusion of a continuous gradient of colour so long as you look at it from far-enough away.
The other year I read a spectacular article by Surma that explained in a very-approachable way how and why different dithering algorithms produce the results they do. If you’ve any interest whatsoever in a deep dive or just want to know what blue noise is and why you should care, I’d highly recommend it.
You used to see digital dithering everywhere, but nowadays it’s so rare that it leaps out as a revolutionary aesthetic when, for example, it gets used in a video game.
All of which is to say that: I really appreciate Spencer’s work to make my “1999 Mode” impose a 216-colour palette on images. But while it’s closer to the truth, it still doesn’t quite reflect what my website would’ve looked like in the 1990s because I made extensive use of dithering when I saved my images in Web safe palettes5.
Why did I take the time to dither my images, back in the day? Because doing the hard work once, as a creator of graphical Web pages, saves time and computation (and can look better!), compared to making every single Web visitor’s browser do it every single time.
Which, now I think about it, is a lesson that’s still true today (I’m talking to you, developers who send a tonne of JavaScript and ask my browser to generate the HTML for you rather than just sending me the HTML in the first place!).
1 Actually, my “1999 mode” doesn’t use tables for layout; it pretty much only applies a CSS overlay, but it’s deliberately designed to look a lot like my blog did in 1999, which did use tables for layout. For those too young to remember: back before CSS gave us the ability to lay out content in diverse ways, it was commonplace to use a table – often with the borders and cell-padding reduced to zero – to achieve things that today would be simple, like putting a menu down the edge of a page or an image alongside some text content. Using tables for non-tabular data causes problems, though: not only is it hard to make a usable responsive website with them, it also reduces the control you have over the order of the content, which upsets some kinds of accessibility technologies. Oh, and it’s semantically-invalid, of course, to describe something as a table if it’s not.
2 Perhaps as few as 22 colours were defined the same across all widespread colour-capable Web systems. At first that sounds bad. Then you remember that 4-bit (16 colour) palettes used to look look perfectly fine in 90s videogames. But then you realise that the specific 22 “very safe” colours are pretty shit and useless for rendering anything that isn’t composed of black, white, bright red, and maybe one of a few greeny-yellows. Ugh. For your amusement, here’s a copy of the image rendered using only the “very safe” 22 colours.
3 Spencer’s SVG filter does pretty-much the same thing as a computer might if asked to render a 24-bit colour image using only 8-bit colour. Simply “rounding” each pixel’s colour to the nearest available colour is a fast operation, even on older hardware and with larger images.
4 Note that I didn’t say “images”: dithering is also used to produce the same “more natural” feel for audio, too, when reducing its bitrate (i.e. reducing the number of finite states into which the waveform can be quantised for digitisation), for example.
5 I’m aware that my footnotes are capable of nerdsniping Spencer, so by writing this there’s a risk that he’ll, y’know, find a way to express a dithering algorithm as an SVG filter too. Which I suspect isn’t possible, but who knows! 😅
This weekend I invited over a bunch of our old university buddies, and it was great.
We still didn’t feel up to a repeat of the bigger summer party we held the year before last, but we love our Abnib buddies, so put the call out to say: hey, come on over, bring a tent (or be willing to crash on a sofa bed) if you want to stay over; we’ll let the kids run themselves ragged with a water fight and cricket and football and other garden games, then put them in front of a film or two while we hang out and drink and play board games or something.
The entire plan was deliberately low-effort. Drinks? We had a local brewery drop us off a couple of kegs, and encouraged people to BYOB. Food? We threw a stack of pre-assembled snacks onto a table, and later in the day I rotated a dozen or so chilled pizzas through the oven. Entertainments? Give the kids a pile of toys and the adults one another’s company.
We didn’t even do more than the bare minimum of tidying up the place before people arrived. Washing-up done? No major trip hazards on the floor? That’s plenty good enough!
I found myself recalling our university days, when low-effort ad-hoc socialising seemed… easy. We lived close together and we had uncomplicated schedules, which combined to make it socially-acceptable to “just turn up” into one another’s lives and spaces. Many were the times that people would descend upon Claire and I’s house in anticipation that there’d probably be a film night later, for example1.
I remember one occasion a couple of decades ago, chilling with friends2. Somebody – possibly Liz – commented that it’d be great if in the years to come our kids would be able to be friends with one another. I was reminded of it when our eldest asked me, of our weekend guests, “why are all of your friends’ children are so great?”
What pleased me in particular was how relatively-effortless it was for us all to slip back into casually spending time together. With a group of folks who have, for the most part, all known each other for over two decades, even not seeing one another in-person for a couple of years didn’t make a significant dent on our ability to find joy in each other’s company.
Plus, being composed of such laid-back folks, it didn’t feel awkward that we had, let’s face it, half-arsed the party. Minimal effort was the order of the day, but the flipside of that was that the value-for-effort coefficient was pretty-well optimised3.
A delightful weekend that I was glad to be part of.
1 That Claire and I hosted so many social events, both regular and unplanned, eventually lead us to the point that it was the kind of thing we considered whenever we moved house!
2 Perhaps at the Ship & Castle, where we spent a reasonable amount of our education.
3 I’m pretty sure that if I’d have used the term “value-for-effort coefficient” at the party, though, then it’d have immediately sucked 100% of the fun out of the room.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
…
Runners will talk about how much they enjoy the feeling of wind in their hair. Boxers won’t shut up about the grace and art of their profession. Even soccer players can be moved to wax poetical about how enjoyable it is to be part of a truly great game.
But all golfers ever talk about is how little golf they hope to play. A typical pre-match interview will go something like this:
Some guy in a blazer: Great to have you here with us, what are your goals for the first round this morning.
Golfer: Well today I hope to play as little golf as possible. Mathematically speaking the course could be done in 18 shots but that is probably physically impossible. But ideally as close to 18 as I can get. Any additional golf is bad.
Blazer: What is your strategy for avoiding the golf.
Golfer: I have a guy who follows me around to help share the burden of all this damn golf. He is going to help me out by suggesting ways to avoid playing any more golf than we have to. Of course, I pay him but his real motivation is to bring this sorry excuse for a pastime to the speediest conclusion.
Blazer: Better you than me, but good luck out there.
…
Why must a blog comment be text? Why could it not be… a drawing?1
I started hacking about and playing with a few ideas and now, on selected posts including this one, you can draw me a comment instead of typing one.
I opened the feature, experimentally (in a post available only to RSS subscribers2) the other week, but now you get a go! Also, I’ve open-sourced the whole thing, in case you want to pick it apart.
What are you waiting for: scroll down, and draw me a comment!
1 I totally know the reasons that a blog comment shouldn’t be a drawing; I’m not completely oblivious. Firstly, it’s less-expressive: words are versatile and you can do a lot with them. Secondly, it’s higher-bandwidth: images take up more space, take longer to transmit, and that effect compounds when – like me – you’re tracking animation data too. But the single biggest reason, and I can’t stress this enough, is… the penises. If you invite people to draw pictures on your blog, you’re gonna see a lot of penises. Short penises, long penises, fat penises, thin penises. Penises of every shape and size. Some erect and some flacid. Some intact and some circumcised. Some with hairy balls and some shaved. Many of them urinating or ejaculating. Maybe even a few with smiley faces. And short of some kind of image-categorisation AI thing, you can’t realistically run an anti-spam tool to detect hand-drawn penises.
2 I’ve copied a few of my favourites of their drawings below. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want early access to any weird shit I make.
To:****@fulwoodacademy.co.ukFrom:“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>Subject:Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997Date:Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:18:07 +0100To Whom It May Concern,
Please supply the personal data you hold about me, per data protection law. Specifically, I’m looking for: a list of all offences for which I was assigned detention at school.
Please find attached a variety of documentation which I feel proves my identity and the legitimacy of this request. If there’s anything else you need or you have further questions, please feel free to email me.
Thanks in advance;
Dan Q
To:“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>From:“Jodie Clayton” <*.*******@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>Subject:Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997Date:Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:48:33 +0100Dear Dan Q,
We do not retain records of detentions of former pupils, and we certainly have no academic records of pupils going back thirty years ago.
Jodie Clayton | Office Manager with Cover and Admissions
Black Bull Lane, Fulwood, Preston, PR2 9YR
+44 (0) 1772 719060
To:“Jodie Clayton” <*********@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>From:“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>Subject:Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997Date:Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:00:49 +0100But, but… I was always told that this would go on my permanent record. Are you telling me that teachers lied to me? What else is fake!?
Maybe I will always have a calculator with me and I won’t actually need to know how to derive a square root using a pen and paper. Maybe nobody will ever care what my GCSE results are for every job I apply for. Maybe my tongue isn’t divided into different taste areas capable of picking out sweet, salty, bitter etc. flavours. Maybe practicing my handwriting won’t be an essential skill I use every day.
And maybe I will amount to something despite never turning in any History homework, Mr. Needham!
Dan Q
Terence Eden, who’s apparently inspiring several posts this week, recently shared a way to attach a hook to WordPress’s
get_the_post_thumbnail() function in order to remove the extraneous “closing mark” from the (self-closing in HTML) <img> element.
By default, WordPress outputs e.g. <img src="..." />, where <img src="..."> would suffice.
It’s an inconsequential difference for most purposes, but apparently it bugs him, so he fixed it… although he went on to observe that he hadn’t managed to successfully tackle all the instances in which WordPress was outputting redundant closing marks.
This is a problem that I’ve already solved here on my blog. My solution’s slightly hacky… but it works!
/>s” isn’t among them.
Tidy is an excellent tool for tiding up HTML! I used to use its predecessor back in the day for all kind of things, but it languished for a few years and struggled with support for modern HTML features. But in 2015 it made a comeback and it’s gone from strength to strength ever since.
I run it on virtually all pages produced by DanQ.me (go on, click “View Source” and see for yourself!), to:
<i>, in my older posts, into a more-modern interpretation, like <em>.
<style> blocks to the <head>, and detect any repeated inline style="..."s to convert to classes.
WordPress isn’t really designed to have Tidy bolted onto it, so anything it likely to be a bit of a hack, but here’s my approach:
libtidy-dev and build the PHP bindings to it.
header.php3, with a callback function: ob_start('tidy_entire_page').
ob_flush or similar, this buffer will close and the function will be called when PHP
finishes generating the page.
function tidy_entire_page($buffer)
$tidy = new tidy) and use $tidy->parseString (with your buffer and Tidy preferences) to tidy the code, then
return $tidy.
I’ve open-sourced a demonstration that implements a child theme to TwentyTwentyOne to do this: there’s a richer set of instructions in the repo’s readme. If you want, you can run my example in Docker and see for yourself how it works before you commit to trying to integrate it into your own WordPress installation!
1 I miss the days when most websites were handwritten and View Source typically looked nice. It was great to learn from, too, especially in an age before we had DOM debuggers. Today: I can’t justify dropping my use of a CMS, but I can make my code readable.
2 For a few of its extensions, some PHP developer made the interesting choice to fail silently if the required extension is missing. For example: if you don’t have the
zip extension enabled you can still use PHP to make ZIP files, but they won’t be
compressed. This can cause a great deal of confusion for developers! A similar issue exists with tidy: if it isn’t installed, you can still call all of the
methods on it… they just don’t do anything. I can see why this decision might have been made – to make the language as portable as possible in production – but I’d
prefer if this were an optional feature, e.g. you had to set try_to_make_do_if_you_are_missing_an_extension=yes in your php.ini to enable it, or if
it at least logged that it had done so.
3 My approach probably isn’t suitable for FSE (“block”) themes, sorry.
There are two particular varieties of email address that I don’t often see, but I’ve been known to ridicule when I have:
OurHouseName@example.com. These always seemed to me to undermine one of the
single-best things about an email address compared to postal mail – that they don’t change when you move house!1
MrAndMrsSmith@example.net. These make me want to scream “You know email addresses are basically
free, right? You don’t have to share one!” Even back when most people got their email address directly from their dial-up provider, most ISPs offered some number of addresses (e.g. five).
If you’ve come across either of the above before, there’s… perhaps a reasonable chance that it was in the possession of somebody born before 1960 (and the older, the more-likely)2.
I found myself thinking about this as I clicked the “No” button on a poll by Terence Eden that asked whether I used a “shared” email address when in a stable long-term relationship.
It wasn’t until after I clicked “No” that I realised that, in actual fact, I have had multiple email addresses that I’ve share with significant other(s). And more than that, sometimes they’ve been geographically-based! What’s going on?
I’ve routinely had domains or subdomains that I’ve used to represent a place that I live. They’re convenient for when you want to give somebody a short web address which’ll take them to a page with directions to you and links to your location in a variety of different services and formats.
And by that point, you might as well have an email alias, e.g. all@myhouse.example.org, that forwards on email to, well, all the adults at the house. What I’ve
described there is, after a fashion, a shared email address tied to a geographical location. But we don’t ever send anything from it. Nor do we use it for any kind of
personal communication with anybody outside the house.
We don’t give out these all@ addresses (or their aliases: every company gets their own) to people willy-nilly. But they’re useful for shared services that send
automated emails to us all. For example:
Sure, the need for most of these solutions would evaporate instantly if more services supported multi-user or delegated access3. But outside of that fantasy world, shared aliases seem to be pretty useful!
1 The most ill-conceived example of geographically-based email addresses I’ve ever seen
came from a a 2003 proposal by then-MP Derek Wyatt, who proposed that the domain name part of every single email address should contain not
only the country of the owner (e.g. .uk) but also their complete postcode. He was under the delusion that this would somehow prevent spam. Even ignoring the
immense technical challenges of his proposal and the impossibility of policing it across the borders of every country that uses email… it probably wouldn’t even be
effective at his stated goal. I’ll let The Register take it from here.
2 No ageism intended: I suspect that the phenomenon actually stems from the fact that as email took off in the noughties this demographic who were significantly more-likely than younger folks to have (a) a very long-term home that they didn’t anticipate moving out of any time soon, and (b) an existing anticipation that people and companies wrote to them as a couple, not individually.
3 I’d love it if the grocery delivery sites would let multiple “accounts”, by mutual consent, share a delivery slot, destination, and payment method. It’d be cool to know that we could e.g. have a houseguest and give them temporary access to a specific order that was scheduled for during their stay. But that’s probably a lot of work for very little payoff if you’re busy running a supermarket.