This checkin to GC61PA7 In the Lyme light reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
While dropping off my partner’s brother and his friend on their 500 mile “Lyme Regis to Limekilns on a Lime Bike” sponsored cycle ride, I took the opportunity for a quick grab of this nicely hidden cache. Logbook rather wet, needs replacing. TFTC!
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Remember ‘Conquer The Twatts’?
No!?
Fair enough – well last year Magnus, our good friend Sergio and I hitch-hiked from Brick Lane (London) to Twatt (Orkney, Scotland) 766 miles way. We did it in 32 hours thanks to the generous nature of the people that helped out – including drivers, a pilot and a ferry service (thanks again, you amazing humans!!).
We raised 4 x our intended amount and arrived back in London with time to spare and, frankly, a hankering to do it all over again.
So like Shackleton, Fiennes and Thomas Stevens before us, on the 19th April 2019 Magnus and I – dressed in lime green morph suits – will depart Lyme Regis, Dorset on Lime Bikes (Google them, they’re awesome) For Limekilns, Scotland – 500 miles away (sadly Sergio won’t be joining us for this one)
As with last year, we’re raising for the Campaign Against Living Miserably.
Unlike last year we’re working in association with Lime Bike, who have given us their full support for this trip – so a massive thank you to Conor and the UK team for endorsing us two idiots!
…
Ruth‘s brother, whom you may recall me writing about during Challenge Robin I and Challenge Robin II (and the impact the weather had on it, and on me), our New Year’s ascent of Ben Nevis, or my ill-fated bet that he couldn’t jump a river, is on his latest adventure. Following in the footsteps of his effort to conquer the Twatts (which I shared previously), and reminiscent of his cycle to Brighton on a Boris Bike, he’s once again raising money for the Campaign Against Living Miserably with an outrageous adventure well-worthy of your support.
This time around, he and his friend Magnus are riding Lime e-bikes from Lyme Regis, which is almost as far South as you can get in mainland UK, to Limekilns, which is on the “other” side of the Firth of Forth (where the wildlings live). Like Challenge Robin II, there was a fuck-up with the trains and I had to drive him from Oxford to Lyme Regis, but at least I got to find a couple of geocaches while I was down there (one, two).
Anyway: you can follow his adventure via Instagram, but what you really ought to do is go donate money to the cause: or if he’s heading broadly your way: offer him a bed for the night so he doesn’t have to kip in a tent while his batteries charge in the nearest friendly pub.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Big news! This site is no longer using Google Analytics and I’ve switched to a self-hosted version of brand new analytics product Fathom.
Fathom is very simple. It only tracks 4 things:
Unique Visitors,Page Views,Time on Site, andBounce Rate. It shows me a chart of page views and visitors and then gives me a break down of referrers and top performing content. That’s it. And to be quite honest, that’s about all I need from my blog analytics.…
You know what, Dave:me too! I’ve been running Google Analytics since forever and Piwik/Matomo (in parallel with it) for about a year and honestly: I get more than enough of what I need from the latter. So you’ve inspired me to cut the line with Google: after all, all I was doing was selling them my friends’ data in exchange for some analytics I wasn’t really paying attention to… and I’d frankly rather not.
So: for the first time in a decade or so, there’s no Google Analytics on this site. Woop!
Update 2023-12-13: I eventually went further still and dropped all analytics, even self-hosted variants, and it feels great.
Content warning: rape.
You’ve probably seen the news about people taking a technological look at the issue of consent, lately. One thing that’s been getting a lot of attention is the Tulipán Placer Consentido, an Argentinian condom which comes in a packet that requires the cooperation of two pairs of hands to open it.
Naturally, the Internet’s been all over this shit, pointing out how actually you can probably open it with just two hands [YouTube], how it’s inaccessible [YouTube] to people with a variety of disabilities, and how it misses the point by implying that once the condom is on, consent is irrevocable. A significant number of its critics try to make their claims more-sensational by describing the Placer Consentido as “a real product”, which is a bit of an exaggeration: it was a seemingly one-off promotional giveaway by its creators: it doesn’t look to be appearing on their store pages.
One fundamental flaw with the concept that nobody seems to have pointed out (unless perhaps in Spanish), is that – even assuming the clever packaging works perfectly – all that you can actually consent to with such a device is the use of a condom. Given that rape can be and often is committed coercively rather than physically – e.g. through fear, blackmail, or obligation rather than by force – consent to use of a condom by one of the parties shouldn’t be conflated with consent to a sexual act: it may just be preferable to it without, if that seems to be the alternative.
Indeed, all of these technical “solutions” to rape seem to focus on the wrong part of the process. Making sure that an agreement is established isn’t a hard problem, algorithmically-speaking (digital signatures with split-key cryptography has given us perhaps the strongest possible solution to the problem for forty years now)! The hard problem here is in getting people to think about what rape is and to act appropriately to one another. Y’know: it’s a people problem, not a technology problem! (Unshocker.)
But even though they’re perhaps functionally-useless, I’m still glad that people are making these product prototypes. As the news coverage kicked off by the #MeToo movement wanes, its valuable to keep that wave of news going: the issues faced by the victims of sexual assault and rape haven’t gone away! Products like these may well be pointless in the real world, but they’re a vehicle to keep talking about consent and its importance. Keeping the issue in the limelight is helpful, because it forces people to continually re-evaluate their position on sex and consent, which makes for a healthy and progressive society.
So I’m looking forward to whatever stupid thing we come up with next. Bring it on, innovators! Just don’t take your invention too seriously: you’re not going to “fix” rape with it, but at least you can keep us talking about it.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
…
It is impossible to answer all of these questions simply. They can, however, be framed by the ideological project of the web itself. The web was built to be open, both technologically as a decentralized network, and philosophically as a democratizing medium. These questions are tricky because the web belongs to no one, yet was built for everyone. Maintaining that spirit takes a lot of work, and requires sometimes slow, but always deliberate decisions about the trajectory of web technologies. We should be careful to consider the mountains of legacy code and libraries that will likely remain on the web for its entire existence. Not just because they are often built with the best of intentions, but because many have been woven into the fabric of the web. If we pull on any one thread too hard, we risk unraveling the whole thing.
…
A great story about how Firefox nearly broke tens of thousands of websites by following standards, and then didn’t. tl;dr: Javascript has a messy history.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
…
We here at unlike kinds decided that we had to implement Google AMP. We have to be in the Top Stories section because otherwise we’re punted down the page and away from potential readers. We didn’t really want to; our site is already fast because we made it fast, largely with a combination of clever caching and minimal code. But hey, maybe AMP would speed things up. Maybe Google’s new future is bright.
It isn’t. According to Google’s own Page Speed Insights audit (which Google recommends to check your performance), the AMP version of articles got an average performance score of 87. The non-AMP versions? 95. (Note: I updated these numbers recently with an average after running the test 6 times per version.)
…
I’ve complained about AMP before plenty – starting here, for example – but it’s even harder to try to see the alleged “good sides” of the technology when it doesn’t even deliver the one thing it was supposed to. The Internet should be boycotting this shit, not drinking the Kool-Aid.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
The “polyromantic comedy” series You Me Her opens its fourth season tonight (Tuesday April 9) at 10 on AT&T’s Audience Network. There is no other show like it on television.
Season 1 was about a troubled couple who, independently, fell for the same third person by way of comic flukes: a novelty gimmick. But creator/producer John Scott Shepherd soon realized that the show was onto something bigger. Season 2 began straight off with the three together in a serious, all-around polyamorous relationship, and things have grown from there.
Life, of course, hasn’t been easy for them. Tonight’s opening of Season 4 is titled “Triangular Peg, Meet Round World.” Season 5 is already scheduled for 2020.
…
Joy! I loved the first three seasons of You Me Her, admittedly while – during the first couple of seasons at least – simultaneously bemoaning how long it took the characters to learn lessons that my polycule(s) solved in far shorter order. I was originally watching it with Ruth and JTA but they lagged and I ran ahead, and I really enjoyed this first episode of season 4 too.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Recently, Google officially launched Android 9 Pie, which includes a slew of new features around digital well-being, security, and privacy. If you’ve poked around the network settings on your phone while on the beta or after updating, you may have noticed a new Private DNS Mode now supported by Android.
This new feature simplifies the process of configuring a custom secure DNS resolver on Android, meaning parties between your device and the websites you visit won’t be able to snoop on your DNS queries because they’ll be encrypted. The protocol behind this, TLS, is also responsible for the green lock icon you see in your address bar when visiting websites over HTTPS. The same technology is useful for encrypting DNS queries, ensuring they cannot be tampered with and are unintelligible to ISPs, mobile carriers, and any others in the network path between you and your DNS resolver. These new security protocols are called DNS over HTTPS, and DNS over TLS.
…
Bad: Android Pie makes it harder (than previous versions) to set a custom DNS server on a cellular data connection.
Good: Android Pie supports DNS-over-TLS, so that’s nice.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
It’s likely that the first word ladder puzzles were created by none other than Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), the talented British mathematician, and author of the Alice’s adventures. According to Carroll, he invented them on Christmas Day in 1877.
A word ladder puzzle consists of two end-cap words, and the goal is to derive a series of chain words that change one word to the other. At each stage, adjacent words on the ladder differ by the substitution of just one letter. Each chain word (or rung of the word ladder), also needs to be a valid word. Below is an example of turning TABLE into CROWN (this time, in nine steps):
TABLE → CABLE → CARLE → CARLS → CARPS → CORPS → COOPS → CROPS → CROWS → CROWN
In another example, it take four steps to turn WARM into COLD.
WARM → WARD → CARD → CORD → COLD
(As each letter of the two words in the last example is different, this is the minimum possible number of moves; each move changes one of the letters).
Word ladders are also sometimes referred to as doublets, word-links, paragrams, laddergrams or word golf.
…
Nice one! Nick Berry does something I’ve often considered doing but never found the time by “solving” word ladders and finding longer chains than might have ever been identified before.
You know how sometimes I make a thing and, in hindsight, it doesn’t make much sense? And at best, all it can be said to do is to make the Internet more fun and weird?
I give you: NonStopHammerTi.me.
Things that make it awesome:
stroke-dasharray as a progress bar.
That is all.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
What is your name for the playground game in which one child chases the rest and anyone who is touched becomes the pursuer?
Pretty accurate for me, although my answers to some of the questions – representing the diversity of places around Great Britain that I’ve lived and some of the words I’ve picked up along the way – clearly threw it off from time to time!
This review of Exeter Gardens originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.
Moderately well-tended but short walk between Oxford Road and Exeter Park, squeezed between Exeter Hall and The Key doctors practice. Nice decking and benches, but otherwise nothing to recommend it except as a route to the park itself.
This review of Grovelands Play Area originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.
Small play area with the bare essentials for keeping a small child distracted: swingset, roundabout, small climbing frame with slide. All metal equipment, so gets cold in the winter! Might as well make the extra walk to nearby Exeter Park!
This review of Bowls Club Pavilion originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.
Just another bowls club; nicely placed with convenient access to the rest of Kidlington. If bowls is your thing, you could do worse.