Author: Dan Q
Dan Q is a software engineer, a director of a voluntary organisation, a trainee counsellor, a keen geocacher, and an amateur magician. He lives with his partner and her husband in a polyamorous triad, and occasionally finds time to blog.
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Dithering - Part 1
I already understand how using a threshold map to perform dithering works... and yet I still appreciated this amazing visual explainer from Damar Berlari.
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Fellow folks at the interest-intersection of "public transport" and "queer activism" (I know you're out there!): I had an idea for a t-shirt.
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T-shirt design: a sign in the typographic and graphical style of British road signs, showing the words 'Trams rights at all times' on a background in the blue/pink/white of the trans pride flag, with an outline of a tram whose pantograph is reshaped to resemble the trio of the masculine, feminine, and combined symbols used as a trans symbol.
Do I print it? Or give up on graphic design and go back to backend programming where I belong?
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HTTP is not simple
After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends.
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How Online Privacy Has Been Championed by Dreamwidth
Coyote's written some solid words about how well Dreamwidth are standing up for user privacy and liberty against an increasingly hostile and censorship-ridden environment.
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Can it perhaps be time that we stop saying "ethical non-monogamy"?
Nobody feels the need to say "ethical monogamy"; monogamous folks are given the benefit of the doubt and assumed to be practicing a relationship ethically.
I feel like polyamory, open relationships, relationship anarchy and other forms of non-monogamy are now sufficiently accessible to popular culture that we can drop the word "ethical" and still be understood. (Ideally we do so before it starts to look like virtue-labelling.)
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Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be!
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DOCTYPE
I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids.
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This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut?
Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!?
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A form asking for Surname, Forename and Gender (with options Male, Female, and Both) changes its labels to e.g. Male Surname/Male Forename or Female Surname/Female Forename when the Gender option is changed.
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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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Happy Polyamory Day y'all. (Plus max props to Petra without whom I'd have forgotten about it, like most years.)
Closest thing I did to celebrating it was going out to the pub last night for beer and food with my metamour, while our partner-in-common took our kids to see a film. Polyfam life isn't always glamorous; but it is full of love.
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Pushing RSS to WhatsApp (for free?)
RSS remains the gold standard for subscribing to Web content... but WhatsApp Channels/Newsletters provide another interesting opportunity for syndication. If only somebody had written an RSS-to-WhatApp integration that could run for free in a GitHub Action? Oh wait, that's what I just did!
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Postcards... from the Internet!
A few weeks ago I published a PO Box address to which visitors to my site can post postcards, to try to bridge the gap between my 'Internet friends' and the physical world. Today I received my first two postcards, and I couldn't be more thrilled (not least because I wasn't entire sure anybody would go for my weird suggestion!).
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AI and cigarettes
Chris Ferdinandi draws parallels between people pushing 'less-harmful' AI and those promoting vaping as 'less-harmful' smoking; the latter, of course, ultimately resulted in new people taking up a nicotine habit that might now have otherwise: not what was intended at all!
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I guess I'm never paying DreamHost back
About 17 years ago, I stopped using DreamHost. They later decided I owed them money. I disagreed, but enjoyed watching them incredibly-slowly claw it back via the 'refer and earn' program, from all the people I ever recommended them to. But now, only a few months from the (alleged) debt being settled... they've killed the program, depriving me of the opportunity for... a more-humorous blog post, I guess?
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This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.
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Close-up of a wooden telegraph pole littered with rusted staples and drawing pins of different sizes and ages, with an out-of-focus urban street disappearing into the distance.