Skip to content

Dan Q

    • Articles
    • Everything
    • Notes
    • Reposts (shares)
    • Checkins (geo*)
    • Videos
    • Reviews
    • Comics
    • Tags
    • Stats
    • Subscribe
    • Blogroll
  • About
    • Hide posts of type:
    • Choose how Dan's dressed:
    • Hair
    • T-Shirt
  • Contact
  • Podcast

Kind: Articles

Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.

  • Colour wheel diagram showing the transformation from a light blue into a medium purple.

    Styling :visited links using hue-rotation

    My new site theme offers a :visited link style, but for convenience it's based on a CSS hsl-transformation. Here's how it works...

    Read more (223 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 26 September, 2026
  • Screenshot showing Opera's vertical tabs, showing a semi-readable DanQ.me page.

    Browser vertical tabs are great (and they're older than you think!)

    A conversation about the invention of browsers with (the option of) vertical tabs reminded me of how brilliant they are. I used them back in 2000, and (with a break in the middle) I use them again today, and they're wonderful. Let me tell you why!

    Read more (388 words)

    • Article
    • posted 21 September, 2026
  • Edited Champ'd Up screenshot showing the battle for The Champion of Editing Videogame Metadata, pitting Friendly Dan against Hacker Dan.

    Things Champ'd Up thinks are uniquely American

    When I play Jackbox Games with my friends, I enable the 'filter US-centric content'. But what does that actually do? Let's swiftly do a bit of easy reverse-engineering on one of my favourite games in the series, Champ'd Up, and find out... what the developer thinks "US-centric" means!

    Read more - about 5 minutes (1125 words)

    • Article
    • posted 19 September, 2026
  • An email in Outlook 365, showing 'DanQ.me' in gold-gradient WordArt with a drop shadow.

    WordArt is still supported... in Microsoft Outlook!

    25 years ago, WordArt was everywhere. Nowadays, it's been quietly expunged from Microsoft Office. Except... Outlook, via a series of complicated hacks, can still render WordArt to this day! And I'm pretty curious exactly how it does so...

    Read more - about 5 minutes (996 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 16 September, 2026
  • Composite photo showing front and rear of a postcard, showing an aerial photograph of Toronto on one side and a hand-drawn labyrinth on the other.

    A Postcard from a Labyrinth Artist

    Another Postcard From The Internet landed on my doormat this week... and it's from a real-life labyrinth designer and artist based in Canada. So cool!

    Read more (394 words)

    • Article
    • posted 15 September, 2026
  • Adapted framegrab. Simplistic colourful art showing a person in an unfastened bike helmet hanging onto the shoulder of a robot and pointing at the words 'taco bot' on its chest, while tacos rain down behind. It's overlaid with the text 'Taco Bot 3000: when you need a whole lot of tacos expertly created by a robot at the highest level of quality'.

    Hot take: AI peaked with Taco Bot 3000

    AI peaked in 2014 with the invention of the Taco Bot 3000. With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see again.

    Read more (379 words)

    • Article
    • posted 9 September, 2026
  • Cover of The Husbands by Holly Gramazio, with tagline 'you wait ages for The One... then 203 come along at once'. Five-colour poster art shows a woman wearing a sleeveless top, long skirt, and trainers using a hand saw to cut through a ladder which stretches up through the title and at the top of which we can just make out the trousered legs of a man, climbing past a pendant light.

    The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

    One of the best books I've read so far this year (although my review is about three months late!) was Holly Gramazio's debut novel, The Husbands. A proper page-turner that keeps you engaged through all of its twists and turns, I can't recommend it strongly enough.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (524 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 7 September, 2026
  • A dilapidated living room with damaged lower walls and missing flooring, filled with tools and bags of rubbish.

    F-Day plus 204 (no content??)

    HTTP status code 204 means "no content". No update. Nothing to tell you. F-Day plus 204 brings the same meaning: a disappointing lack of updates to the efforts to repair our house following getting flooded-out in February.

    Read more (386 words)

    • Article
    • 1 comment
    • posted 4 September, 2026
  • Screenshot of a gov.uk web page, showing the error "You cannot add this vehicle to your account. DVLA cannot match your details to the registered keeper details on the V5C (logbook) for the vehicle DQ26 ABC"

    It took 13 years to notice my invalid vehicle registration certificate!

    Thirteen years ago, it seems, a DVLA form processor decided that my name must have been a company name, and incorrectly registered my car's keeper as being a non-existent company imagined to share my name. And I only just found out.

    Read more - about 5 minutes (1082 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 2 September, 2026
  • Terminal in which 'dig danq.me @`dig NS me +short | head -n1`' has been run, outputting NS responses ns1.danq.me through ns4.danq.me, with additional section records for A and AAAA records for each.

    Vanity Nameservers (White-Label DNS) in 2026

    Back in 2006, adding vanity nameservers to my personal domains was just something I did as a matter of course, but - like most of the Internet - I don't bother any more. Until today, when I switched danq.me's nameservers to four subdomains of danq.me. For the sake of nostalgia!

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1271 words)

    • Article
    • 4 comments
    • posted 28 August, 2026
  • Composite photograph showing the front and rear of a postcard written on the cardboard packaging of a Canadian boil-in-the-bag food product.

    A Postcard from Tony (who the heck is Tonyβ€½)

    I received another Postcard From The Internet; this one's written on a very unusual medium, and that's not the only thing that's odd about it... another thing is that I can't work out who its from, beyond the first-name-only with which they've signed the card. Who are you, Tony?

    Read more (302 words)

    • Article
    • 3 comments
    • posted 26 August, 2026
  • Two crumpled pillows at the head of a double bed.

    Boring Polyamory: Equality and Bedrooms

    The other month, I described my polyamory as 'boring', which attracted lots of interesting questions and feedback. Let's address the first one - why does my partner not have a bedroom of 'her own', even though both of her partners get one?

    Read more - about 6 minutes (1312 words)

    • Article
    • 5 comments
    • posted 25 August, 2026
  • The sun completely occluded by the moon.

    Three(ish) Weeks In Spain

    With exceptions for those of us who had work to do at the start or end, my family and I just spent three weeks hopping around the East of Spain, featuring surfing, a theme park, exploring, dodging the heat, and - of course - a total solar eclipse.

    Read more - about 9 minutes (2030 words)

    • Article
    • posted 23 August, 2026
  • User information area from the top of a website, showing Dan Q with no incoming messages and, crucially," 1,035 finds".

    Geocaching.com Can't Count? (my 1000+ geocache finds!)

    After finding over a thousand geocaches, I wanted to check my total with the largest of the geocache listing sites I use, and discovered that you can't get the same answer twice from it even if you ask it three times for an answer. Wot?

    Read more - about 3 minutes (608 words)

    • Article
    • posted 14 August, 2026
  • A red and orange sunset with beams reaching up over the hilly horizon of climatically- Mediterranean farmlands.

    Casa Ventola

    I'm spending the week on the East coast of Spain, hoping to see the imminent solar eclipse. And in the meantime, I've been finding local geocaches (including my thousandth!) and exploring the local sights with my family.

    Read more - about 3 minutes (551 words)

    • Article
    • 2 comments
    • posted 12 August, 2026

Posts navigation

Older posts

Get in Touch

I'd love to hear from you! Why not...

  • email me on blog@danq.me?
    (my spam filter is aggressive, so use a good subject line, i.e. not just "hello"; encrypt your email if you like)
  • say hi on Mastodon, where I'm @dan@danq.me?
  • send a letter or postcard to
    Dan Q, Unit 159610, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, UK
  • reach out some other way?
  • Β© Dan Q 1998-2026
  • Creative CommonsAttributionNon-Commercial except where stated (how to use)
  • powered by BloqClassicPressHTML5CSS3
  • privacy
  • Read articles, checkins, notes, reposts, and more...
  • @dan@danq.me
  • contact
  • subscribe
  • Dan Q
  • Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license
  • ClassicPress
  • CSS is awesome
  • Created by a human, not by AI
  • LGBTQ+ pride flag (2018 progress variant)
  • Polyamory flag
  • Say no to Web3
  • Mastodon (it's like email... no, come back!)
  • Tested on Firefox
  • Best viewed on the Internet
  • PHP
  • Ruby
  • Debian
  • Caddy (webserver)
  • Find me on Melonland
  • Check out my GitHub
  • Three Rings - by volunteers, for volunteers, since 2002
  • I'm a fucking webmaster
  • Looks best at: any resolution!