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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Waiting patiently at the school gates on a distinctly Autumnal morning, our pupper's squat stature means she's about knee-deep in the season's golden leaves.
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A champagne-coloured French Bulldog stands patiently alongside a post to which her lead is tied. With her short stature she's about knee-deep in Autumn leaf litter.
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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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Geohashing expedition 2024-11-10 51 -1
I finally got my Tron achievement by riding my bike^H^H^H^H lightcycle to a hashpoint in Barnard Gate and back... without crossing my own track!
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Future Arimaa grand masters at practice, this Sunday morning boardgaming session.
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In a cluttered dining room, two children play Arimaa, a chess-like board game.
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In spite of their signage, Costa weren't happy to take my old jockstrap for recycling.
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Sign made from a clipboard, in a coffee shop, reading "All cups welcome. We'll recycle any cup, from anywhere. Just hand to one of our team."
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XPath Scraping AdamKoszary.co.uk
My old colleague Adam's started blogging again, but his blog doesn't have an RSS feed. Which means it's time for some more XPath Scraping in FreshRSS, and an excuse for me to explain the testing and debugging process I use when making XPath Scraping rulesets!
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After a morning of optimising a nonprofit's reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I've earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm...
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Gas stovetop.a frying pan contains a tortilla wrap topped with tomato sauce, cheese, mushrooms, and jalapeños. Beside its a plate containing a completed quesapizza: two crispy tortilla wraps sandwiching their contents.
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Build Colors from Colors with CSS Relative Color Syntax
Caleb Hearth wrote an inspiring piece about CSS's new OKLCH functions, and now I want nothing more than to (re-?)implement something using this colour model!
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My Car is Sad
All! The! Warning! Lights! By the time a car needs to pahinate the error messages it wants to display, something has definitely gone wrong. 😬
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Hey Google, pronounce Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Wait, it isn't supposed to be pronounced "clan via Pokemon Go garage city of cocoa"? I've been saying it wrong my whole life! 😅
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Things my children have gotten out of bed to say to me tonight:
- I don't want to go to school tomorrow
- I can't find [name of toy]
- I want [name of toy I lent to my sibling] back
- if I'm ill, I don't have to go to school tomorrow, right?
- I can't sleep
- I might be ill: I don't think I should go to school tomorrow
- I want a hot water bottle
- I'm too hot
- I've lost my hot water bottle
- I spilt my water1
- I went to the toilet because I thought I was going to throw up but I didn't but I think I'm too ill to go to school tomorrow
- my book is wet
- I forgot to brush my teeth
- I don't like these pyjamas
- I still can't sleep
Footnotes
1 it later turned out to have been spilled on an electrical extension socket! 😱
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As the kids grow older... someday our final soft play session - something we used to do all the time, and now do only rarely - will be in the past.
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A mug of coffee held in front of a view of a multicoloured soft playground.
But for now, at least, it remains a chaotic way to tire them out on a morning!
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Sabbatical Magic
Two weeks into my extended break from work and on my way home from Spain, I've discovered something magical about a sabbatical: it frees me from my compulsion to think about next week's work, at the weekend.
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3D Workers Island
Tony Domenico's 3D Workers Island is a clever application of the retro-Web as a storytelling medium, in sort of a "found footage" way but with webpages instead of, y'know, videotape. The story's not perfect, but the execution is great.
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Bluesky and enshittification
Cory Doctorow's post this week about how Bluesky's model isn't (yet) immune to enshittification matches my reasoning for not using it, too. But also points out a hypocrisy in my own behaviour for so-far failing to apply a "Ulysses Pact" model to Three Rings.