Notes – Dan Q

Watch with Pride

With thanks to Shawn Rast of Pride Bands, my watch/fitness tracker now sports some bi pride.

Crowdsourced Burger Photography

A fast food giant faces a lawsuit because their burgers don’t look like they do in the marketing. It’s not the first time.

Marketing photograph showing Burger King's "Whopper" burger. — Did you ever see a Whopper™️ that looked like this? Me neither.

If I ran a fast food franchise affected by this kind of legal action, do you know what I would do? I’d try to turn it back around into marketing exercise with a bit of crowdsourcing!

Think about it: get your customers to take photos and send them to you. For every franchisee that uses a photo you take, you get a voucher for a free meal (redeemable at any outlet, of course). And where it appears on the digital signage menus they all seem to have nowadays, your photo will have your name on it too.

Most submissions will be… unsuitable, of course. You’ll need a team of people vetting submissions. But for every 50 people who send a blurry picture of an unappetising bit of sludge-meat in a bun; for every 10 people who actually try hard but get too much background in or you can see the logo on their clothing or whatever; for every 5 people that deliberately send something offensive… you might get one genuinely good candid burger picture. Those pics get pushed out to franchisees to use. Sorted.

Now if anybody complains that you fake your photos you can explain that every one of your food pictures was taken by a real-life customer, and their name or handle is on the bottom of each one. Sure, you get to vet them, but they’re still all verifiably genuine pictures of your food.

And you probably only have to do this gimmick for a year and then everybody will forget. Crowdsourcing as a marketing opportunity: that’s what I’d be doing if I were crowned Burger King.

Double-Bluetooth

The problem of “needing to be able to hear from two Bluetooth sources at once” is so real for me that I came up with a solution that I genuinely use all the time. You’re not going to like it, though.

Solution in video (no audio needed; no need to fix your headphones first!):

Originally sent as a Mastodon reply to @NireBryce@hachyderm.io.

Inclusivity

Max credit to garry (@repeattofade) for the original toot. All I did was adapt it into a motivational poster.

The thing I’m wondering is whether that bus lane is one that a bi-cyclist like me can use? 😂

.well-known/feeds

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> is fine, but I feel like there should be a standard for a site, not a page, to share a “list of feeds associated with a site”.

Last night, I dreamed about a way to achieve that: ./well-known/feeds as an OPML document. Here’s mine, and here’s a draft spec.

Interested to hear what Dave Winer thinks…

Batman’s World

I do not claim to have a good explanation nor excuse. See also this terrible idea from 21 years ago.

Bottomings

In his latest Last Month video, TomSka took the “is a hot dog a sandwich” argument into a whole new arena by saying:

I’m a firm believer that the sauce and toppings should go under the dog. And that way, I don’t have to put it all in my moustache when I eat it.

My initial reaction was: What the hell are you doing‽ They’re toppings, not… bottomings, I guess?

But on the other hand:

Previews of other movies you might like to see are still called trailers, even though nowadays they’re normally shown before the film.
This actually looks like it might be good for preventing onions falling off, which is my biggest problem when I eat hot dogs (I don’t mind moustache toppings: they’re a treat for later on).

So yeah, I might try doing this. But if I do, I’m definitely going to start calling them “bottomings”.

512kb.club

Proud to say that danq.me is the newest site to be admitted into Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. Let’s keep the web lean!

Mastodon Re-Introduction

Finally got around to rewriting my Mastodon introduction, now that my selfhosted server’s got enough interconnection that people might actually see it!

If you’re on the Fediverse and you’re not already doing so, you can follow me at @dan@danq.me. Or follow my blog at @blog@danq.me.

Note #21687

Morning walk with Demmy, first of her name, Queen of Stealing Your Spot On The Sofa, Empress of the Farts Of Doom, rightful keeper of That Gross Chew Toy, bringer of snuggles, destroyer of rosebeds, scourge of the mailman.

Threads

Meta are launching Threads tomorrow.

If you’re wondering how this will impact the world and society’s social connections, I direct you to the predictive powers of 1984 British cinema.

Note #21487

I have minus 26 new articles in my RSS reader! Either I’m a time traveller, or there’s a wraparound bug when you neglect your unreads for long enough.

Both seem equally likely, if I’m honest.

Note #21312

Today I learned that the quiet, high-pitched neighing sound horses sometimes make is called “nickering”.

I learned this from a subtitle which read “[horse nickers]”. Which, as a Brit, I can’t help but interpret as somebody making a misspelling while talking about equine underwear. 🤣

Note #21293

Max props to the developer of puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth, who I just bought a coffee for.

The screen-scraper I wrote to bulk-export data from my Garmin sports tracker (because Garmin’s API is “only for corporate partners”, which is a magic spell you can say to make me write and open source a screen-scraper that targets your systems) stopped working today. Turns out Cloudflare could detect my automation.

Installed puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth. Fixed instantly. Awesome.

Note #21196

I bought Zach Weinersmith‘s Bea Wolf for my kids (9 and 6, the elder of them already a fan of Beowulf). It arrived today, but neither of them have had a chance to because I wouldn’t put it down.

My favourite bit is when Bea and her entourage arrive near Treeheart and the shield-bearer who greets them says “Your leader sparkles with power and also with sparkles.” The line’s brilliant, clever, and accompanies the most badass illustration.

I’ll give it to my kids… eventually. But if you’re looking for a book recommendation in the meantime, this is it.