Dan Q

Kind: Notes

Goodbye, Slippers

Yesterday, owing to some plot, the dog didn’t get as much outside/walk/play time as she’d like.

Today, she let me know how she felt about that by shredding my slippers. 🙄

A partially-shredded slipper is held in a hand, in front of a French Bulldog, on the wooden floors of the hallway of a house.

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Wavey Dan

I was experimenting with VP8/VP9 WebM video transparency and I made a stupid thing: a URL that, if you go to it, means you’ll he followed around my blog by a video of me just hanging out in the corner of the page – https://danq.me/?fool_id=06

I’ve added it to my list of “stupid/random things that can happen if you visit my blog on April Fools’ Day”: https://danq.me/fools/

Screenshot of DanQ.me, with a transparent video overlay of Dan in the bottom right corner, waving.

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Spring is coming

A lunchtime dog walk was made especially delightful by the growing warmth of the approaching British springtime. It’s really bright and pretty out, this afternoon!

A French Bulldog in a harness but no lead stands in front of a empty field, under bright blue skies with sparse clouds. Bare wintery trees can be seen in the background, bathed in warm yellow light.

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Piano Repair

The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano.

Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend.

But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, and bodged a fix. It sounds great.

I feel accomplished.

Behind the lower front board of an open upright piano, a hand reaches in between the pedal rods and the soundboard to point at the hinge screw of the sustain pedal.

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Step #1

I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.

So obviously step #1 involves a big ol’ coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go…

A wooden kitchen surface containing a red mug full of freshly-brewed coffee alongside a plate painted with fruits on which sits a heart-shaped doughnut, topped with chocolate and decorated with an iced motif of a sunflower. Beneath the plate, out-of-focus, are the pages of a news periodical.

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Note #25737

“I’m only asking for basic respect.” – Dr. Beth Upton, in the face of a hostile courtroom, media, and world.

Her fucking bravery is amazing. 💖

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Note #25736

After “fixing” BBC News’ RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I’d subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I’d been on the Full edition. I’ve corrected it now in my RSS reader, but it was an interesting couple of days.

tl;dr: I accidentally stopped reading international news and I was less stressed

Anyway: if you’re not already using my improved BBC News RSS feeds, they’re at: https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev

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Cafe Proximity Principles

Possible future presentation concept: using a cafe/dining metaphor to help explain the proximity principle in user interface design (possibly with a “live waitstaffing” demo?).

Great idea? Or stupid idea?

Photo looking down on a square wooden table in a cafe environment. Far from the photographer, a plate containing a couple of crumbs is pushed far to the other side of the table. Closer to him is a cup of coffee, two folded napkins, and an open MacBook. Arrows and captions draw attention to the relative distances between the components of the scene, labelling them as follows - "I am finished with this plate..." (refering to its relative distance), "...but I'm keeping this napkin" (which is closer to the coffee than the discarded plate), "I'm keeping the napkin while I finish my drink" (the two are close together), and "I'm working" (based on the relative position of the photographer and his laptop).

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Yr Wyddfa’s First Email

On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they’d made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.

It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.

Nowadays, that’s an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart… well, this isn’t exactly why, but it’s a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:’d to a few friends.

It’s not an exciting story. It’s not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)

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Note #25595

Back at work after a three-month break, and it turns out the first thing that I’d missed is my team’s quirky morning ritual.

Slack screenshot of Dan saying, at 08:57am: 'You know how many people pika-waved at me on a morning while I was on sabbatical? None. None at all. I missed you guys.' The quote is bookended by an animated GIF of Pikachu waving and another of Pikachu dancing around a heart. Five people have reacted with a mixture of Pikachu dances and waves.

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Note #25585

After a night that alternated between raining and freezing winds here, at the edge of Storm Éowyn, this morning my skylight has ice patterns on it that look beautiful and almost organic.

Skylight window viewed from the inside. The outside has a layer of ice punctuated by thinner patches of whirling, seaweed-like patterns that crisscross around it as if formed by a living thing.

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Note #25565

Last year, a colleague introduced me to lazygit, a TUI git client with a wealth of value-added features.

Somehow, though, my favourite feature is the animation you see if you nuke the working tree. 😘 Excellent.

Animation showing lazygit, a command-line git client. The working tree has one changed file, config/routes.rb. With a couple of keypresses, the working tree is nuked, with a colourful ASCII-art animation illustrating the destruction of the changed file (actually, it being reset to the previous version).

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