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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Found GCB1918 Peggy Bedford's blocked gate
This checkin to GCB1918 Peggy Bedford's blocked gate reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. I'm staying in the Thistle Hotel around the corner before a flight in the morning, and stepped out to find this cache - and some supper - before bed. Sorry to hear about your muggle troubles, …
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Geohashing expedition 2026-08-07 51 -1
A successful expedition to a hashpoint in a field, while travelling to Heathrow Airport on a Friday evening!
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Normal F***ing Sunglasses
DuckDuckGo have gotten into the smart glasses game, and they've come up with a pair that, dare I say it... I would actually buy!
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You're Pronouncing JPEG Wrong
Fighting about the correct way to pronounce GIF is so last decade. Let's fight about how to pronounce JPEG.
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No green and only two black wine gums in this bag? Feeling robbed.
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On a desk, a packet of Maynards' Wine Gums has been emptied out and its contents sorted by colour: there are five orange, two black, and ten red sweets.
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BeepAlive - keeping my soundbar from going to sleep
My dog ate the remote for the soundbar on my TV/media centre, and it keeps going into 'sleep mode'. So I wrote a software tool that periodically makes an inaudible noise to trick the soundbar into staying 'awake'. That's how a hacky engineer like me fixes a hardware problem with a software solution!
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Sainsburys grapes confuse me.
500g of white grapes are £2. 500g or red grapes are £2.20. So you'd expect 500g of half-red, half-white grapes to be... £2.10, right? But no, that's £2 too.
So buying 500g of white grapes and 500g of red grapes is cheaper if you buy the mixed packs and then separate them. Why!?
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Online shopping screenshot showing four packets of seedless grapes. 500g red grapes are £2.20; 500g white grapes are £2.00; 500g red & white grapes are £2.00; 900g mixed (red, white and black) grapes are £3.95.
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(Feeling Fucking) Fabulous in Blackpool
This year, MEEK's Fabulous has been stuck on a loop in my head, but I only just got around to watching the music video. Which, to my delight, is shot in the region of what I reckon is Britain's gayest pub crawl. Let's take a tour together...
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I want to write a successful YA fiction where all the characters are boats. Just 'cos I want to see people 'shipping ships.
Also, one of my characters will be called Slash.
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Apparently, zero of the imagineers building this Disneyland Paris cafe conceived that "Chuck Wagon" sounds like what a cowboy would call a wheeled vomit trough. 😂
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Faux Old-West building painted with lettering identifying it as the Chuck Wagon Cafe.
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Contactless Transport in London vs Paris
Paris is rolling-out contactless tap-in payments for its transport network. Sounds like London's... except that Paris's includes a "convenience tax" that seems to disproportionately target short-term visitors. What might this say about each city's relationship with tourism?
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Reply to: This blog is written in en-GB
Terence Eden's blog is (like mine!) unapologetically in en-GB. But maybe his particular cultural references need to be slightly more-specific still?
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"You saved my life!" (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)
A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent him a mobile phone charger.
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An unexpected start to the kids' and I's glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze.
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A static caravan is engulfed in flames behind a dome tent, at night.
(Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out of a window.)
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Hashcard #2
I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely!