Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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A Postcard from Tony (who the heck is Tony‽)
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?
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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BeepAlive - keeping my soundbar from going to sleep
My dog ate the remote for the soundbar on my TV/media centre, and it keeps going into 'sleep mode'. So I wrote a software tool that periodically makes an inaudible noise to trick the soundbar into staying 'awake'. That's how a hacky engineer like me fixes a hardware problem with a software solution!
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(Feeling Fucking) Fabulous in Blackpool
This year, MEEK's Fabulous has been stuck on a loop in my head, but I only just got around to watching the music video. Which, to my delight, is shot in the region of what I reckon is Britain's gayest pub crawl. Let's take a tour together...
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Contactless Transport in London vs Paris
Paris is rolling-out contactless tap-in payments for its transport network. Sounds like London's... except that Paris's includes a "convenience tax" that seems to disproportionately target short-term visitors. What might this say about each city's relationship with tourism?
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"You saved my life!" (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)
A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent him a mobile phone charger.
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Hashcard #2
I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely!
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The secret API I used to tell LeShuttle about different outbound and return passengers
Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database directly.