Tag: deed poll
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![Screengrab from a YouTube video showing a white woman with brown-and-red hair saying "please see the FAQs for any questions you have have around deed polls[sic] and the rules." alongside a logo for "Change Names".](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2026/06/changenames-youtube-video-978x480.jpg#29349)
The "ChangeNames.co.uk" Scam
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow.
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Actually, Yes! (that IS what my birth certificate says)
There's a certain kind of person who, upon hearing my unusual name, immediately asks whether that's what's on my birth certificate (with an underlying implication that it's not my 'real' name, whatever that means, if it isn't). Well: as of this week, thanks to a quirk in Scottish law, the name I've used every day for almost two decades DOES appear my birth certificate. Fuck the haters.
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Since I relaunched freedeedpoll.org.uk three months ago (with new features) and made an explanatory demo video, the volume and kinds of questions I've been emailed has... become larger and more diverse.
I still get questions about childrens' names and citizenship and gender recognition certificates and things.
But now I also get questions like "how do I print multiple copies of the PDF?" and "why does my homemade deed poll not have a serial number?" 😂
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SVGs that feel like GIFs
Back in July Vincent D. Warmerdam shared a great tip on screen-recording terminals into small, scalable animated SVG files, and I only just got around to reading it. Amazing stuff!
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Free Deed Poll - Demo Video
At the weekend I realaunched FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, fixing it after it recently broke and adding a ton of new features. And by the time I was going that far, I figured, I might as well make one of those video tutorials that are all the rage, too...
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I've just enumerated my personal domain names. There's a lot fewer of them than there used to be!1
Anyway: here's the list -
- danq.me and a variety of aliases (danq.uk, danq.dev, danq.link, danq.blog, scatmania.org); there's also like a billion subdomains in use of course, like things.danq.me and find.danq.me
- freedeedpoll.org.uk, which I really ought to update at some point but which still clearly helps many people
- dndle.app, a D&D-inspired Wordle-clone which I still get bug reports and pull requests for so clearly somebody's using it
- geohashing.site, the central hub of Geohashing activity worldwide
- egxchange.org, which hosts the most environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency wallet you'll ever see
- abnib.co.uk, a community of friends (also with about a billion subdomains)
- q-t-a.uk, my family website, which exists mostly to facilitate addressing for a stack of internal/selfhosted services
- rockmonkey.org.uk, which doesn't do much nowadays
- fleeblewidget.co.uk, my partner's blog, but I look after the domain registration
- textplain.blog, my plain-text blog
- levellers.blog, the blog of my D&D group
- theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner's brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures
I think that's all of them, but it's hard to be sure...
Footnotes
1 Maybe I've finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything. Or maybe it's just that I've embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.
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Digital Dustbusting
I've been doing a bit of tidying-up of the mess that is my personal Internet hosting. I've made a lot of progress, but the rest is probably going to have to wait until later in the year.
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[Bloganuary] What's in a name?
My name is Dan. But it wasn't always. For today's Bloganuary, let's look at the history, significance, and meaning of my name (and how I've changed it over the years!).
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FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, Punk Rock Edition
A Birmingham-based punky trio, Luxury Nan Smell, have released a song named "freedeedpoll.org.uk", in reference to my website of the same name. This was just the kind of uplifting thing I needed to hear about.
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Santander to Accept Homemade Deeds Poll
Santander are one of two banks who've been a thorn in Dan's side since he started helping people to change their name by deed poll. But no longer, perhaps.
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Just One Q
With the recent announcement that his friend Jimmy and his ex- Claire are engaged, Dan realises that he might somebody become the only person in the world with his surname.
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On This Day In 2011
As part of the On This Day series, Dan looks back over the last year that he's been running FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a service that makes it easy and painless for British citizens to change their name (and have that name legally-recognised)
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Hello, Facebook; Goodbye, Facebook
Inspired mostly by his experiences with Facebook over the last few weeks, Dan decides that it's time to hang up his Wall and quit. Goodbye, Facebook. There's also instructions in this post about how to keep in touch with him, if you've forgotten how to do that outside of repeatedly clicking "Poke" on his page.
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My Name Is Me
Dan goes by his full name online, and has a few issues (mostly related to the length and uncommonness of his name). But these are nothing compared to the issued faced by whistleblowers, political activists, transgendered people, teachers and those who work with children, survivors of abuse, authors with pen names, and more, as the world's social networking sites start to implement "real name" policies.
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Free Deed Poll Generator
Generate yourself a legally-valid UK deed poll to change your name... completely free! A new, open-source project by Dan makes and a web site that anybody can use makes it easy to change your legal name.