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Notes

Text-based short-form content without individual titles.

I’m On Fire

2 February 2021 09:54 0 comments

P2 user badge for me, showing my job title and team as "Code Magician on Fire"

In 2020 at @automattic my team, Alpha, forked into teams Fuel and Fire (I’ll tell you the story another time). But it took ’til now for me to notice that our internal systems use something like the string ${jobTitle} on ${teamName}. Which leads to this excellent title.

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ twitter.com
  • ​​ facebook.com
Tagged automattic, funny
8 January 2021 16:16 2 comments

Can you tell me how to get in touch with your technical/security team @firstdirecthelp? Apparently my report about a vulnerability in your website contains characters that aren’t “valid” for your sucky feedback form… but it doesn’t say which ones.

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ twitter.com
  • ​​ facebook.com

Best Before

8 January 2021 14:50 2 comments

Thanks, supermarket bagels, for expressing exactly how I was feeing when I reached the kitchen this morning:

Label: Best Before 8 Jan 2021.

Tagged bagels, birthday, funny, photo, picture

Look at Banner, Dan!

8 January 2021 12:35 9 comments

First thing I saw when I came downstairs this morning:

Happy Birthday banner with handwritten cardboard "Dan" sign hung underneath.

Totally a banner especially for my birthday, today, and not a repurposed decoration from Annabel’s yesterday.

Context for the oblivious:

Tagged birthday, photo, pictures

**

10 December 2020 08:00 0 comments

Despite the fact that it’s existed for 11 years, TIL about globstar in Bash. Set shopt -s globstar and ** globs become fully recursive, making that bulk transcode operation much simpler. 🤯

Tagged bash, geeky, technology

Recursively repackaging .mkvs as .mp4s

30 November 2020 12:00 1 comment

A note for my own reference. If you want to repackage a lot of .mkv files as .mp4, without transcoding, here’s a one-liner:

for f in **/*.mkv; do echo "$f"; ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -loglevel panic -i "$f" -c copy "${f%.mkv}.mp4"; rm "$f"; done

Tagged video
18 November 2020 22:08 4 comments

Sometimes, I miss Troma Night. Hanging out with my friends and watching awful/awesome films over pizza and beer.
If only there were a way to do it during lockdown?
Oh wait, there is: danq.me/homa-night/homa-night-2

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ twitter.com
Tagged film, films, troma night
6 November 2020 06:57 3 comments

Watched the pilot of Webbed Briefs by @heydonworks (of Every Layout fame). It’s a sarcastic independent vlog about web technologies, so I immediately fell in love and subscribed to the feed…

Just kidding. It doesn’t have a feed! (Yet?)

Webbed Briefs logo

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ twitter.com
Tagged rss, video, web, webbed-briefs
15 October 2020 14:22 1 comment

Keyboard with Pride rainbow function keys

With thanks to @wasdkeyboards, my new #keyboard can show some #Pride. 🏳️‍🌈

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ twitter.com
Tagged sexuality, technology
13 August 2020 12:12 1 comment

Needed new UPS batteries.
Almost bought from @insight_uk but they require registration to checkout.
Purchased from @SourceUPSLtd instead.
Moral: having no “guest checkout” costs you business.

Tagged computers, electricity, shopping, technology
7 August 2020 14:50 18 comments

Dan with his Masters Degree certificate (Master of Science in Computing: Information Security and Forensics)

I’m unlikely to get a graduation ceremony like last time (on account of social distancing and whatnot), but I get a certificate to acknowledge my most-recent qualification.

Tagged covid-19, education, memorable, university

Dan’s Office (360° Panoramic)

4 August 2020 09:35 4 comments

This week, some colleagues at Automattic and I are sharing pictures of our workspaces. So I made a 360° panoramic with interactive “info points” (apologies for work-specific jargon). Would you like to see it?

Dan in his home office (links to an interactive 360° panoramic photo with info points).

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ twitter.com
  • ​​ facebook.com
  • alphamattic.wordpress.com
Tagged automattic, buying a house, houses, photo, photos, pictures, the green, vr
10 June 2020 20:48 3 comments

With #lockdown guidance as it stands, only six of the seven dwarfs can meet together in the park?
The seventh dwarf won’t be Happy.

In fact, he’ll be Grumpy.

Which is a problem, because that means one of the six is Sneezy.

Elsewhere:
  • ​​ scatmania.livejournal.com
  • ​​ twitter.com
  • ​​ facebook.com
Tagged covid-19, funny, joke
20 May 2020 16:38 5 comments

A new Automattician who started this week looked me up to thank me for the first in my series of blog posts (2, 3) about starting with @automattic. I feel useful! 😍

Jeremy wites: Hi Dan! I know this is a little random, but I wanted to thank you for writing your blog post about the WordPress hiring process. It helped me wrap my head around the whole experience. I started yesterday and I couldn't be more excited.

Tagged automattic, work
13 May 2020 11:35 1 comment

Chafed nipples. But we only have Frozen II-themed plasters in the house. So now I’m wearing an Elsa & Anna pasties. How did my life come to this?

Tagged film, films, injury

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