Dan Q

Category: Personal

Review of Snozone

This review of Snozone originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

Snozone, 602 Marlborough Gate, Milton Keynes MK9 3XS, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Having been skiing on ‘real’ snow for ~25 years, I was pleasantly surprised by the believability of this indoor artificial slope: slightly icy, crystalline snow but otherwise very much like the real thing. Better yet was the service: owing to an administrative mix up (slightly my fault, slightly their fault) I arrived anticipating an hour’s private snowboard tutoring – as I hadn’t snowboarded in 16 years – a full 24 hours ahead of when I was expected. Nonetheless, they sorted me out with an instructor and honoured the verbal agreement I claimed to have, despite what was written on my ticket!

Compared to an Alp, the slope is extremely short and the lifts painfully slow, but this gem of a site beats dry-sloping by a long, long way, and offer helpful friendly service to boot.

Review of McDonald’s

This review of McDonald's originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

McDonald's, 298 London Rd, Oxford OX3 8DJ, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Just another McDonald’s. Generally fast service and not too busy, but limited parking space and access by car is made challenging by the narrow road – partially through a housing estate: no access from the dual carriageway any more – that provides access to it.

Review of Partyman World Of Play

This review of Partyman World Of Play originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

Partyman World Of Play, Ozone Leisure Park, Grenoble Rd, Oxford OX4 4XP, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Moderately small but well-constructed soft play with plenty to do despite being smaller than some of its competitors. Clean and tidy. Good mixture of food options (and a licensed bar!), although the pizza we had was very salty. Our favourite local soft play area.

Review of Sainsbury’s

This review of Sainsbury's originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

Sainsbury's, 289 Oxford Rd, Kidlington OX5 2PE, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Perfectly reasonable supermarket. Car park sometimes challenging to leave at busy times, with tailbacks stretching into the lanes. Two convenient islands of self-service checkouts.

The Bad Hair, Incorrect Feathering, and Missing Skin Flaps of Dinosaur Art

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

llustrating long-extinct creatures is difficult, but important work. With no living specimens to observe, it’s up to “paleoartists” who draw, paint, or otherwise illustrate the creatures of prehistory as we think they might’ve been. Their work is the reason that when we talk about velociraptors, stegosaurs, or even woolly mammoths, we have some idea of what they looked like.

But since all we have to go on are fossils, deciding how a dinosaur would have looked is as much art as it is science. And there’s at least one paleoartist who thinks we might be getting things wrong…

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

For the love of god, not everything is about cats

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

Earlier this week, the Spanish government raided the Barcelona office of the PuntCat Foundation, the company that administers the .cat domain, and arrested one of its senior executives.

PuntCat means “dot cat” in Catalan, the language spoken in the Catalonian region of Spain as well as places in France, Andorra, and Italy. The office was raided because Catalonia hopes to hold a referendum on October 1 to decide if it should secede from Spain, and in an effort to quash the referendum, the government of Spain ordered puntCat to “block all .cat domain names that may contain any kind of information about the forthcoming independence referendum,” according to a press release from the foundation.

This is an astonishing attempt at censorship by a member of the E.U. but, unfortunately, that aspect is going largely uncovered because the media is idiotically obsessed with cats…

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

git git git git git

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

Ever found you’ve accidentally entered too many gits in your terminal and wondered if there’s a solution to it? I quite often type git then go away and come back, then type a full git status after it. This leads to a lovely (annoying) error out the box: 

$ git git status
git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

What a git.

My initial thought was overriding the git binary in my $PATH and having it strip any leading arguments that match git, so we end up running just the git status at the end of the arguments. An easier way is to just use git-config‘s alias.* functionality to expand the first argument being git to a shell command. 

git config --global alias.git '!exec git'

Which adds the following git config to your .gitconfig file 

[alias]
  git = !exec git

And then you’ll find you can git git to your heart’s content 

$ git sha
cc9c642663c0b63fba3964297c13ce9b61209313

$ git git sha
cc9c642663c0b63fba3964297c13ce9b61209313

$ git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git git sha
cc9c642663c0b63fba3964297c13ce9b61209313

(git sha is an alias for git rev-parse HEAD.)

See what other git alias’ I have in my ~/.gitconfig, and laugh at all the typo corrections I have in there. (Yes, git provides autocorrection if you enable it, but I’m used to these typos working!)

Now git back to doing useful things!

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

Why I Still Use Vim

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

I often get asked about why I use Vim as my primary editor, there is no particular reason for this, except that I ended up learning it when I moved over to Linux full time many years ago. I ended up liking it because I could edit my small source files on my quad-core machine without needing to wait forever for the file to open.

Keyboard with Vim keycaps

Sure Vim isn’t a bad editor, it’s highly extensible, it’s easy to shell out to the, err well shell, its everywhere so when you ssh into some obscure server you can just type vim (or vi) and you’re good to go…

Repost posted at UTC on .

1 mention

Digest for September 2017

Summary

This month I advised people of a well-known but oft-forgotten trick to avoid spam to your GMail account by using a plus-sign and some arbitrary text (or the name of the company you’re dealing with) in your email address, and shared with minimal interpretation a web app I’d developed: fnorders.com. I also made my first attempt to publicly call out the library of the Bilkent University for ripping off the design of the website of the Bodleian Libraries.

I shared posts promoting the upcoming GDPR, discussing the popular (mis-)use of the .cat TLD and the side-effects of that, and a poem for which git was both the medium and the message.

All posts

Posts marked by an asterisk (*) are referenced by the summary above.

Articles

Checkins

Notes

Reposts

Reposts marked with a dagger (†) include my comments or interpretation.

Collection posted at UTC on .

No comments