Dan Q

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Double Sausages

This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.

A child slouches in an airport lounge chair. Her right hand is being used to eat a plate of sausages. Her left hand is playing 'Fork N Sausage' on a tablet.

Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?

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My Oldest Article of Clothing

There’s a pretty, lightweight, short-sleeved shirt that I own. If you know me personally, it’s reasonably likely you’ll have seen me wearing it at some point.

Dan wearing an off-white shirt decorated with intricate inky designs reminiscent of dragons.
It’s a perfectly nice casual shirt. And it’s also really quite old.

And I’m confident that it’s the oldest piece of clothing I own. I first got it in the winter of 2001/2002, which makes it a massive 23 years old!

Given that I seem to be incapable of owning clothing without holing it in short order1, why has this shirt lasted so long? Is it imbued with some form of mystical draconic longevity?2

A 23-year-old shirt that’s been worn most months would most-likely already represent good value, but I bought this particular garment second-hand, from a stall in Preston’s Covered Market. For 50 pence! That’s cheap enough that it would have been the best-value shirt I’d ever owned even if it had fallen apart as quickly as my clothes do typically.

That it’s instead lasted over two decades is just… mind-boggling.

Footnotes

1 My socks wear holes within a year or two; my trousers gain crotch tears, possibly as a result of over-aggressive cycling, within a similar timespan; my t-shirts for some reason reliably get holes under the left armpit usually within four years, and so on.

2 With thanks to the Wayback Machine, I found an original web page about my shirt on the designer’s website (in an example of full “early 2000s” web design – look at those image navigation buttons with no alt-text! – as well as other retro touches like being able to order by fax before paying in deutschemarks). They’re still making shirts, I see, although no longer in this design.

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How I Learned to Enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch

Duration

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Right in time for International Crisp Sandwich Day (St. Crispin’s Day) tomorrow, I’ve taught myself to enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch.

Three jars of homemade pickled eggs; one in each of a chilli-spiced vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and white vinegar.
You might reasonably have assumed I’d have already enjoyed pickled onion crisps. After all, I not only enjoy actual pickled onions but also the far more “acquired taste” of pickled eggs, shown.

There’s a need for somebody… anybody… to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin’ Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.

Snack cupboard next to a 12-pack of Monster Munch featuring three flavours: Roast Beef, Flamin' Hot, and Pickled Onion.
Yes, I’m aware that there are multipacks of individual flavours, but none of our local supermarkets seem to stock multipacks of Flamin’ Hot, which is objectively the best flavour of Monster Munch and anybody who claims otherwise is wrong.

My entire life, I’ve claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into “meaty” flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I’d come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it’s from this that I realise that I’m probably being somewhat irrational.

Because if you think about it: if you want to make a “pickled onion” flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste “vinegary” and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste “onioney”. So in summary:

  1. I like pickled onions.
  2. I like salt & vinegar crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste vinegary.
  3. I like cheese & onion crisps, which include an ingredient to make them taste onioney.
  4. Therefore, I ought to like pickled onion crisps, which use two ingredients I like to try to emulate a food I like.
A packet of Pickled Onion Monster Munch, held in a hand.
I should like this. Right?

Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that’s it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!

Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So let’s try it out.

The first time I’ve tried a pickled onion flavour crisp in almost 30 years, captured on camera for your amusement.

It turns out they’re okay!

They’re not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I’m in a position where I can do something about our oversupply.

And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.

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Geohashing expedition 2024-10-22 51 -1

This checkin to geohash 2024-10-22 51 -1 reflects a geohashing expedition. See more of Dan's hash logs.

Location

Harcourt Hill Bridleway, between Cumnor and North Hinksey

Participants

Plans

I’m on sabbatical from work right now, so I’m hoping to be able to get out to this hashpoint while the kids are at school.

Expedition

After dropping the kids off at school, the geopup/hashhound and I set out for the hashpoint. Coming up the “short side” of the bridleway from Botley would be a shorter walk, but we opted to park in Cumnor and come up the “long side” of Harcourt Hill to avoid Oxford’s traffic (and the inevitable fee for parking on the city’s side of the hill).

Harcourt Hill (like my village of Stanton Harcourt) doubtless gets its name from the Harcourt Family, who supported William the Conqueror during his conquest of Great Britain back in 1066 and were ultimately granted huge swathes of land around this part of the world in recognition of their loyalty. To this day, you find “Harcourt” in a lot of place names in this neck of the woods.

The hashpoint was so easy to find, we almost walked right over it: it’s right in the centre of the footpath/bridleway. Even my dog, who often doesn’t like long walks or muddy paths, didn’t get a chance to complain before we got there. We arrived at 09:35 and took the requisite photos, which can be found below. We also kept a GPS tracklog and vlogged our experience, all of which you can see below.

I’ve not properly hashed in a long while, so it was great to get back out there!

Tracklog

My GPSr kept a tracklog.

Tracklog map showing a route from Stanton Harcourt through to Harcourt Hill (via Cumnor) and back, West of Oxford.

Video

Also available via YouTube.

Photos

A footpath becomes a zebra crossing despite there being no road to cross, just a lawn (probably there USED to be a road).
What’s the point of this crossing? Do rabbits pass very fast through this junction?
A French Bulldog stands derpily on a muddy footpath between fields, under blue-grey skies.
View East from the hashpoint (plus dog).
A footpath vanishes between fields, flanked by wild bushes.
View West from the hashpoint.
A GPS receiver shows "0 metres" to destination.
Right in the middle of the circle of uncertainty.
Dan crouches by his dog to take a selfie.
Silly grin/silly tongue-sticking-out.
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Bad Names for Servers

Six or seven years ago our eldest child, then a preschooler, drew me a picture of the Internet1. I framed it and I keep it on the landing outside my bedroom – y’know, in case I get lost on the Internet and need a map:

Framed child-drawn picture showing multiple circles, connected by lines, each with a number 0 or 1 in it.
Lots of circles, all connected to one another, passing zeroes and ones around. Around this time she’d observed that I wrote my number zeroes “programmer-style” (crossed) and clearly tried to emulate this, too.

I found myself reminded of this piece of childhood art when she once again helped me with a network map, this weekend.

As I kick off my Automattic sabbatical I’m aiming to spend some of this and next month building a new server architecture for Three Rings. To share my plans, this weekend, I’d been drawing network diagrams showing my fellow volunteers what I was planning to implement. Later, our eldest swooped in and decided to “enhance” the picture with faces and names for each server:

Network diagram but with entities having faces and named Chungus, Atul, Summer, Gwen, Alice, Astrid, and Demmy.
I don’t think she intended it, but she’s made the primary application servers look the grumpiest. This might well fit with my experience of those servers, too.

I noted that she named the read-replica database server Demmy2, after our dog.

French Bulldog with her tongue sticking out.
You might have come across our dog before, if you followed me through Bleptember.

It’s a cute name for a server, but I don’t think I’m going to follow it. The last thing I want is for her to overhear me complaining about some possible future server problem and misinterpret what I’m saying. “Demmy is a bit slow; can you give her a kick,” could easily cause distress, not to mention “Demmy’s dying; can we spin up a replacement?”

I’ll stick to more-conventional server names for this new cluster, I think.

Footnotes

1 She spelled it “the Itnet”, but still: max props to her for thinking “what would he like a picture of… oh; he likes the Internet! I’ll draw him that!”

2 She also drew ears and a snout on the Demmy-server, in case the identity wasn’t clear to me!

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Note #24772

Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I’ve mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics… until I got distracted by dndle.app, which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things!

Dan, looking concerned, in front of Github and Dndle.app.

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Nex in CapsulePress

I’ve added Nex support to CapsulePress!

What does that mean?

Screenshot showing DanQ.me homepage via Nex, in Lagrange browser.
Here’s how nex://danq.me/ looks in my favourite desktop Gemini/smolweb browser Lagrange.

Nex is a lightweight Internet protocol reminiscent to me of Spartan (which CapsulePress also supports), but even more lightweight. Without even affordances like host identification, MIME types, response codes, or the expectation that Gemtext might be supported by the client, it’s perhaps more like Gopher than it is like Gemini.

It comes from the ever-entertaining smolweb hub of Nightfall City, whose Web interface clearly states at the top of every page the command you could have run to see that content over the Nex protocol. Lagrange added support for Nex almost a year ago and it’s such a lightweight protocol that I was quickly able to adapt CapsulePress’s implementation of Spartan to support Nex, too. 

require 'gserver'
require 'word_wrap'
require 'word_wrap/core_ext'

class NexServer < GServer
  def initialize
    super(
      (ENV['NEX_PORT'] ? ENV['NEX_PORT'].to_i                           : 1900),
      (ENV['NEX_HOST']                                                 || '0.0.0.0'),
      (ENV['NEX_MAX_CONNECTIONS'] ? ENV['NEX_MAX_CONNECTIONS'].to_i : 4)
    )
  end

  def handle(io, req)
    puts "Nex: handling"
    io.print "\r\n"
    req = '/' if req == ''
    if response = CapsulePress.handle(req, 'nex')
      io.print response[:body].wrap(79)
    else
      io.print "Document not found\r\n"
    end
  end

  def serve(io)
    puts "Nex: client connected"
    req = io.gets.strip
    handle(io, req)
  end
end
This is genuinely the entirety of my implementation of my Nex server, atop CapsulePress. And it’s mostly boilerplate.

Why, you might ask? Well, the reasons are the same as all the other standards supported by CapsulePress:

  1. The smolweb is awesome.
  2. Making WordPress into a CMS things it was never meant to do is sorta my jam.
  3. It was a quick win while I waited for the pharmacist to shoot me up with 5G microchips my ‘flu and Covid boosters.

If you want to add Nex onto your CapsulePress, just git pull the latest version, ensure TCP port 1900 isn’t firewalled, and don’t add USE_NEX=false to your environment. That’s all!

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Zero

✅ Inbox Zero
✅ Slack Notification Zero
✅ Assigned PR Reviews Zero
✅ Owned PRs… one, but it’s approved and just waiting for the right moment to merge

That’s got the be the first time in… literally years… that I’ve ended a workday so “clean”. Feels amazing.

There’ll be a mess again tomorrow, but hopefully only of a manageable size because I’m particularly clean to finish this week at “Work Zero”.

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Facebook AI Training Opt-Out

And while we’re talking about AI.

It took a disproportionate about of time to find the right (tiny) link, but eventually I managed to opt-out of my content being used to train Facebook’s AI. They don’t make it easy, do they?

Screenshot of a Facebook message, including the text "we will honour your objection... we won't use your public information from Facebook... for future development and improvement of generative AI models"

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Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres

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

…

“The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies,” said Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google.

“This agreement helps accelerate a new technology to meet energy needs cleanly and reliably, and unlock the full potential of AI for everyone.”

The deal with Google “is important to accelerate the commercialisation of advanced nuclear energy by demonstrating the technical and market viability of a solution critical to decarbonising power grids,” said Kairos executive Jeff Olson.

…

Sigh.

First, something lighthearted-if-it-wasn’t-sad. Google’s AI is, of course, the thing that comes up with gems like this:

Google AI, confidently stating that the difference between a sauce and a dressing is that sauces add flavour and texture to dishes, while dressings are used to protect wounds. It goes on to say that a dressing should be large enough to cover a wound: a standard serving size is two tablespoons.
I’ve actually never seen Google do this shit, because I was fortunate enough to have dropped Google Search as my primary search engine long ago, but it hilari-saddens1 me to see it anyway. Screenshot courtesy @devopscats@toot.cat.
But here’s the thing: the optimist in me wants to believe that when the current fad for LLMs passes, we might – if we’re lucky – come out the other side with some fringe benefits in the form of technological advancements.

Western nations have, in general, been under-investing in new nuclear technologies2, instead continuing to operate ageing second-generation reactors for longer and longer timescales3 while flip-flopping over whether or not to construct a new fleet. It sickens me to say so, but if investment by tech companies is what’s needed to unlock the next-generation power plants, and those plants can keep running after LLMs have had its day and go back to being a primarily academic consideration… then that’s fine by me.

Of course, it’s easy to also find plenty of much more-pessimistic viewpoints too. The other week, I had a dream in which we determined the most-likely identity of the “great filter”: a hypothetical resolution to the Fermi paradox that posits that the reason we don’t see evidence of extraterrestrial life is because there’s some common barrier to the development of spacefaring civilisations that most fail to pass. In the dream, we decided that the most-likely cause was energy hunger: that over time, an advancing civilisation would inevitably develop an increasingly energy-hungry series of egoistic technologies (cryptocurrencies, LLMs, whatever comes next…) and, fuelled by the selfish, individualistic forces that ironically allowed them to compete and evolve to this point, destroy their habitat and/or their sources of power and collapsing. I woke from the dream thinking that there’d be a potential short story to be written there, from the perspective of some future human looking back on the path of the technologies that lead them to whatever technology ultimately lead to our energy-hunger downfall, but never got around to writing it.

I think I’ll try to keep a hold of the optimistic viewpoint, for now: that the snake-that-eats-its-own-tail that is contemporary AI will fizzle out of mainstream relevance, but not before big tech makes big investments in next-generation nuclear, renewable, and energy storage technologies. That’d be nice.

Footnotes

1 Hilari-saddening: when you laugh at something until you realise quite how sad it is.

2 I’m a big fan of nuclear power – as I believe that all informed environmentalists should be – as both a stop-gap to decarbonising energy production and potentially as a relatively-clean long-term solution for balancing grids.

3 Consider for example Hartlepool Nuclear Power Station, which supplies 2%-3% of the UK’s electricity. Construction began in the 1960s and was supposed to run until 2007. Which was extended to 2014 (by which point it was clearly showing signs of ageing). Which was extended to 2019. Which was extended to 2024. It’s still running. The site’s approved for a new reactor but construction will probably be a decade-long project and hasn’t started, sooo…

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