Category: Personal
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Did not find GC4Z033 WOW - Walking On Water
This checkin to GC4Z033 WOW - Walking On Water reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Gave up after an extended hunt, aided by the spoiler photo. All that's hidden here is a discarded one food container. Hoping to find one of CO's other nearby caches during my time here in …
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Next stop, Istanbul!*
* not actually next stop; I've got a bus, a walk, a bus, and a plane left on this journey yet!
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Dan, a white man with a trimmed goatee beard and dyed-blue hair tied back in a ponytail, stands alongside a suburban bus shelter and throws a thumbs-up sign. He's carrying a backpack.
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Good morning, Oxfordshire! A freezing-fog farewell for me, this morning, as I get up early to catch a series of buses to the airport.
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A wet rural road, lit by the sun's first light as it rises ahead, it's flanked by fields full of freezing fog.
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Feed Readers Beat Doomscrolling
If you're dodging news media because the alternative is catastrophic doomscrolling... perhaps you ought to be using a feed reader? It's a much healthier way to keep up with the Web.
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There are few moments of self-satisfaction so great as accidentally running a bath to both the perfect depth and the ideal temperature, after forgetting you'd started drawing the water at all.
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Woke up. Had a walk. Now it must be time for a well-earned nap. 💤
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A sleepy-looking French Bulldog, wearing a harness, lying on her side in a dog basket with her eyes mostly-closed and her tongue mostly-in-her-mouth.
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Made a little progress on the game idea I'd been experimenting with. The idea is to do find a series of orthogonal (like a rook in chess!) moves that land on every square exactly once each before returning to the start, dodging walls and jumping pits.
But the squares have arrows (limiting the direction you can move out of them) or numbers (specifying the distance you must travel from them).
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Four sample puzzles, one of them solved.
Every board is solvable, starting from any square. There'll be a playable version to use on your device (with helpful features like "undo") sometime soon, but for now you can give them a go by hand, if you like this kind of puzzle!
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WebDX: Does More Mean Better?
I like the work that the WebDX Community Group have been doing, but I find myself asking: are we at risk of implying that giving the Web 'more' features invariably makes it 'better'?
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When I was a child, we had a cherry blossom tree in our garden. In late Spring, as the flowers began to wilt, I'd enjoy shaking it to make flutters of pink confetti rain down around me.
This tree, though, spotted on the school run this morning, is very early in its bloom. It feels like a happy reminder that Spring is beginning.
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Barely-opened cherry blossom buds against a vibrant blue sky.
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I noticed that automated emails from Steam weren't doing alt-text very well. Some image links had no or inadequate alt-text. (Note that Steam don't support opting for plain text rather than HTML emails.)
I'm fortunate enough to depend upon alt-text never-to-rarely. But I prefer not to load remote images, so I still benefit from alt-text.
I filled out a support request to Steam layout out the specific examples I'd found of where they weren't doing very well, and stressing why it's (morally, legally, etc.) important to do better.
And you know what: they quietly fixed it. When I received an email today telling me that something on my wishlist is on sale, it had reasonably-good alt-text throughout. Neat.
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Voice of America
In light of Trump's attempts to axe Voice of America, because it is, he claims, "anti-Trump" (and because he's so insecure that he can't stand the thought that taxpayer dollars might go to anybody who disagrees with him in any way, for any reason), I've produced a suggested update to the rules of Twilight Struggle for the inevitable 9th printing.
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Found GCAP4MF Church Micro 15127...Curbridge
I had an errand to run in the Windrush Place estate on the other side of the A40, and the geopup needed a walk, so I opted to park the car over in Witney so my four-legged friend and I could walk the remaining way over to Curbridge and find this cache.
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Work Slippers
Last month, the dog ate my slippers, and in the week it took me to replace them my work productivity took a dip. Coincidence? Nope! They were my 'work slippers', and it turns out I needed them!
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Possibly I'm a little late for the "casual daily puzzle game" party. (Did Wordle already get invented in this timeline; I forget?)
I think there's something in an idea I've been toying with. Bring on the weekend, when I can throw some brainpower at the frontend code!
![Full image of A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2025/03/20250313_100059-scaled.jpg)
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A notebook is held in front of terminal output. The terminal begins with 'Start position: [0,4]' and then shows a series of 5×5 grids containing numbers: one, labelled 'Route:', shows random grid of the numbers 0 through 24; the second, labelled 'Puzzle:', contains 1s, 2s, and 3s, corresponding perhaps to the orthagonal distances between consecutive numbers from the first grid; the third, whose title is obscured by the notebook, shows the same thing again but with 'walls' drawn in ASCII art between some of the numbers. The notebook in front contains hand-drawn sketches of similar grids with arrows "jumping" around between them.
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It's not cheating if you write the video game solver yourself
Robert Heaton wrote a solver to help him crack a puzzle in a video game, and I'm 100% behind this as a valid approach to playing single-player games, if it's more fun for you than the alternatives.