This checkin to GC6QTWA #13 RUTA PELS VOLTANTS DEL MAS DE SALORT reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Finding the cache was easy. Reaching around to pull it from its hiding place was harder! But soon I had it in hand. This has been a lovely morning walk.
Now I should have some breakfast and make my lazy children get out of bed!
TFTC/GLA. FP for the series in general (as experienced so far). And once more: greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
This checkin to GC6QV11 #15 RUTA PELS VOLTANTS DEL MAS DE SALORT reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I was glad if the shade provided by the trees along this delightful footpath. Working up a bit of a sweat out here! Had to break from the footpath and kick through some undergrowth to reach the GZ this time, but the coordinates were spot on and I soon had the cache in hand.
Logbook has been soaked but then dried out and is… crispy! Hard to write on! Might benefit from fresh paper!
TFTC/GPA, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
This checkin to GC6QTVF #9 RUTA PELS VOLTANTS DEL MAS DE SALORT reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
A quick and easy find once I spotted a likely hiding place. Starting to feel like I should have had breakfast before I set off! TFTC/GPA, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK.
This checkin to GC6QTVM #10 RUTA PELS VOLTANTS DEL MAS DE SALORT reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My family and I are on holiday staying nearby. I came out this morning to explore and try to find a couple of local geocaches while the children were still asleep. This was the first.
I needed to walk around the GZ a few times before I saw the cache, with its vantage point over this beautiful valley. Then it was time for a quick scramble up the tree to retrieve it.
Signed log and returned to its hiding place. TFTC/GPA; greetings from the UK!
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
“Thank you for using RSS.” “I love RSS.” A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging.
I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don’t announce it. You don’t put a sticker in your footer that says “I love packet switching”.
RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don’t love it.
…
I feel targetted (if you subscribe by RSS you’ll know that I share my enjoyment of the format in my <description>s!).
Actually, I do love RSS!
I love it despite its faults; and it’s got plenty of faults. Its brittleness, sure, as unstory observes. But also its insistence upon RFC 822 dates, which are almost the worst imaginable standardised Internet date format. Also the fact that things you wouldn’t want to use it without borrowing features from a different, one might say competing, standard. Also the excessive HTTP-centricity, which makes it theoretically a standards violation to, e.g. make a podcast that’s distributed by Gemini, for example.
But I love what it does. I love how it ties the Web together. And I love how it does it: just a resource, at a URL, that the subscriber can hit as frequently, or not, as they like.
Oh and:
The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand.
I totally would. I absolutely do. I rarely do, because I’m far more-inclined to write software to do it for me, but I still write “raw” RSS a couple of times in a typical year.
I also love HTTP. Maybe I should sing about that more often, too. And yes, I actually love HTTP in the way that unstory gatekeeps “love of a technology”, like I do RSS: I can “survive writing it by hand”.
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, but this current (new) container is a good one: needed to say the hint out loud a few times before I worked out what I was looking for! SL, TNLN, TFTC.
This checkin to geohash 2026-08-07 51 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.
Field near Wallingford.
This afternoon I’m scheduled to drive from West Oxfordshire to Heathrow Airport. I’ll only lose 15 minutes to divert by the backroads and see if this hashpoint is achievable.
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to get out ‘hashing but one’s never shown up somewhere and somewhen that I can make it lately…
…but today, I had to travel from West Oxfordshire to Heathrow Terminal 5. Now there’s a perfectly good highway for that – two options, infact: the A40+M40, or the A34+M4… but I figured that if I took neither route, instead hacking my way cross-country, it probably wouldn’t cost me more than about 15 minutes extra (spoiler: it took me about 30 minutes extra, but it was a bit of a rat run for some commuters) and allow me to see about this hashpoint!
Initial survey showed that it’s in a field, which doesn’t bode too well. I’m certainly not interested in trampling crops or hopping fences.
But to my delight, as I drove alongside the GZ, I saw that it corn had recently been cut and the bales stacked one field over. I turned up the lane alongside and hunted for a place to park, eventually finding one about 700m away from the hashpoint.
A convenient footpath gave me an excuse to start tramping through the parched cut field, until eventually I was upon the hashpoint.
It was a gloriously hot summer’s day and the rolling hills are especially delightful around here. I reached the hashpoint around 18:22.
And then… pressed on to my hotel in Heathrow for dinner, and sleep, and an early flight!
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
These “smart” glasses come with zero AI and zero cameras. Designed to block the sun, not send data to the cloud.
…
Excellent work, DDG. The real magic isn’t on the linked page, though, but on their socials, where they posted this amazing video:
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
No green and only two black wine gums in this bag? Feeling robbed.
My living room TV is attached to an ageing Windows box that we use as a media centre and middleweight gaming1 PC. To better fill the room with sound (I hate those tinny flat speakers they like to put into TVs these days!), the TV is also attached to a soundbar.
The problem is that the soundbar keeps shutting itself down. If it doesn’t receive any signals for ~20 minutes, it enters sleep mode2. It automatically turns itself on when the TV turns on, but it turns itself off all by itself.
This is annoying, because if we pause what we’re watching for a conversation or something, the soundbar switches itself off, even though the computer and television are still switched-on. It’s doubly-annoying because we then have to get up and walk over to it to switch it back on again, because the dog ate the remote3.
But what if I could solve this… with software?4
My solution is BeepAlive, a little Go program that runs in a Windows system tray and makes a very quiet noise once every 9 minutes. I’ve tuned the noise so that it’s quiet enough that I can’t hear it unless I’m specifically listening for it… but loud enough that it the soundbar sees that there are still audio signals coming in, so it doesn’t go to sleep.
Now, so long as the media centre computer and TV remain powered-on, the soundbar stays awake. And that’s how a hacky engineer like me can solve a hardware problem with a software tool.
1 Mostly the gaming’s done by the kids, and they’re likely-as-not to use the Switch or Steam Deck instead… or, when we’re not at the Chicory House, Bee, the Bazzite-powered gaming rig I set up in the playroom… but in principle it’s equipped for gaming. I guess we sometimes fire a Jackbox Party Pack on it when we have guests?
2 It doesn’t even seem to save any power to be in sleep mode: my power checker tool says it draws basically the same amount whichever mode it’s in!
3 It’s triply-annoying because our soundbar is the only infrared-controlled device in our house that doesn’t follow the IrDA standard, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to automate switching it on from the TV remote, our Flic hub, any “universal remote” etc. I managed to pull off a replay using my Flipper Zero, but that’s not a solution I want to put into the hands of the kids (or anywhere that the dog might eat it). I suppose I could buy a replacement remote, but I don’t feel like giving any more money to a company that turned their nose up at IrDA.
4 Okay, so technically I solved this with software a few years ago, but I misplaced the software and it, frankly, wasn’t very good. My thinking is that by doing it better, and open-sourcing it, I’ll be able to find it when I need it next. And as a bonus, it might just maybe help somebody else, someday.
5 At our regular house, rather than the Chicory House, the soundbar lives above the TV, close to the ceiling, and it’s hard to even see the annoying LED. So I mounted a tiny mirror, about a quarter of the size of a fingernail, to the ceiling above it to improve its visibility from the sofa. Now that’s a hardware solution!
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!?
Like many others1, MEEK’s Fabulous has been stuck on-loop in my head for most of this year. What a fucking banger of a track, amirite?
And yet… somehow, today was the first time I figured I’d watch the music video. If you’ve not seen it (or perhaps not even heard the song), go do that now; I’ll wait.
The outdoor shots start about 20 seconds in, and… they’re instantly-recognisable by what they aren’t.
They aren’t London, where singer-songwriter Georgia Meek hails from, that’s for sure.
You probably know from the title of this blog post, but the filming location MEEK and her team chose is… Blackpool!
That first outdoor shot is opposite Pier Street Car Park.2
The music video goes indoors, continuing – nay, increasing – how fabulously queer-and-glam it is, through a theatre and arcade/bingo hall3. Eventually, it hits and a series of fast food establishments cumulating in Feast About.
Then there’s some faster and blurrier videography, but it’s clearly the Golden Mile, where she’s heading South and… hey, wait… is this music video actually shot in a geographically-sound order? So far, she seems to have moderately-consistently been moving South through the roads about one or two streets back from the Promenade, from a little North of the North Pier down towards the Central Pier…
Anyway; after her party night out, she finds her way to a late-night chippy, as you do.
She’s still heading South… which makes me think that the ruined steps she’s seen sitting on for literally three seconds might be somewhere between Coral Island and the Crispy Cod. Anybody know?
Anyway, the bottom line is that this music video was – surprisingly but delightfully – set in the area of… what might be the gayest pub crawl in the UK. Which, on top of this already awesome song, leaves me… feeling fucking fabulous.
1 Especially those in queer or adjacent spaces, obvs.
2 Pier Street and York Street Car Park’s are a comfortable walk from Ma Kelly’s Cabaret Bar, which – and I’m less-certain about this one – might be the host of some of the interior shots from the music video. Anyway, if you go around the corner in Google Street View you’ll find Higgitts Arcade and Burger Bar, which – just trust me and go look at it – is the most-Blackpool thing imaginable.
3 I’m almost-certain the arcade is the Higgitts, which I mentioned previously because of its proximity to an earlier shot!
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.
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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