I'm Dan Q (he/him). I've spent the last 26+ years creating and writing online.
I work as a software engineer, and I volunteer with Three Rings. I live with my partner, her husband, two kids and a dog. I can sometimes be found geo*ing, performing magic, or recording the most pointless podcast.
I believe in open source, open relationships, and opening doors to marginalised groups. Black lives matter. Trans
rights are human rights.
Be nice to humans, human.
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Without Bloganuary
Bloganuary died since last time I took part in it (and I can speculate about why), but that didn't stop me writing something for every day in January 2026. Man, I've been blogging a lot lately in general... what's that about, eh? Read more →
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How an RM Nimbus Taught Me a Hacker Mentality
Thirty to thirty-five years ago, as a young and curious hacker, I broke out of the restrictions on my secondary school's computer lab and briefly achieved rockstar popularity amongst peers who, through my tools, could now play videogames instead of doing their coursework. But their interest in the results of my exploits were incompatible with my interest in the sheet joy of discovery... and, inevitably, this meant trouble. Read more →
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That's Not How Email Works, HSBC
A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that their own attempts to spy on their customers might not be 100% reliable... Read more →
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PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13... in Three Minutes
I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. Just the stock package repositories and around five commands and my fresh box and it was serving PHP applications over HTTPS. Read more →
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Peripheral Vision
The other night, I encountered an optical illusion by which I could see a particular partially-obstructed light only when it was in my peripheral vision. This put me in mind of the experience of being only peripherally able to see the internalised quirks of your employer that were once obvious to you, and this lead me to reflect a little on my first six months at Firstup. Read more →
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Nostalgia, Music, and Computers
It turns out that I get nostalgic about technology in the same way as I get nostalgic about music. Here's some things that take me right back to being nine, eleven, thirteen and fifteen years old. Read more →
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Imajica by Clive Barker
I recently finished reading Clive Barker's Imajica for what I think is the fourth time. It remains one of my favourite fantasy novels, and I'd love to tell you why. Read more →
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Why I Am So Tired
After dusting off and modernising a joke I first read in a chain email from 1996, I can tell you conclusively that the reason that I'm tired is because I'm overworked. Read more →
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Visualising Forged In The Dark probabilities
Blades in the Dark (and other Forged In The Dark-based games) use a highest-value-from-D6-dice-pool mechanic to resolve actions. I was looking for a visualisation of the resulting probabilities, but couldn't find one... so I made my own. Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
Found GC9PVXZ EL CRÁTER DE LA RAMBLETA
My partner Ruth and I were disappointed not to be able to hike any of the trails up here today - they're all closed - but enjoyed finding both the nearby Virtual and this Earthcache geocaches. The evidence of lava flows (that remain to this day!) are really quite impressive. Read more →
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Found GC9P71A El tEidE
My partner Ruth and I are spending a long weekend in Puerto de la Cruz. We loved coming up to see this beautiful, bleak, stark volcanic landscape. Read more →
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If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to […] Read more →
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RSS readers rock. Having a single place you connect for a low-bandwidth bundle of everything you might want to read means it doesn’t matter how slow the WiFi is on your aeroplane, you can get all the text content in one tap.(I’m using Capy Reader to connect to FreshRSS, by the way.)Time to catch up […] Read more →
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Our kid doesn’t like bagel holes. She’ll eat the rest of the bagel, but not the hole.At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of for finding things like this most mornings. × Read more →
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I like it when the Internet says "yes, and".
I like it when the Internet says "yes, but".
I even like it when the Internet says "no, because".
I'm not so keen when the Internet says "well, actually",
(Probably because it reminds me of what
a shit I was in some not-yet-forgotten time.)
But I don't like when the Internet rallies a brigade
To pick apart a character flaw I have, but hate,
Or to attack something I'm not, and expect me to defend.
So perhaps next time, start with "yes, and", "yes, but",
Or even "no, because"... or just say nothing, and
Remember what it means to connect with a human. -
Highlight of my workday was debugging an issue that turned out to be nothing like what the reporter had diagnosed.The report suggested that our system was having problems parsing URLs with colons in the pathname, suggesting perhaps an encoding issue. It wasn’t until I took a deep dive into the logs that I realised that […] Read more →
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This morning it took me three attempts to put on a t-shirt the right way around.I don’t think I slept too well. Read more →
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The internet’s hidden creative renaissance (and how to find it)
This article is good and touches on many sites, people, and topics that I care about... but it's painfully ironic that the author has written a post praising the independent Web... using Substack as their platform. Read more →
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Who Is the Winking Chef?
Scott Wiener - who is even more pizza-obsessed than me - noticed the 'winking chef' image that's common on pizza boxes. Then he traced its origin, and wrote a blog post to share the story of the artwork. Delightful. Read more →
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As previously indicated, I’m not anticipating cosplaying anybody. But I think I could do Greg Universe.Not young Greg Universe, the Star Child of ‘Story for Steven’… which seems to be the only variety anybody’s ever cosplayed as before if an image search is to be believed. No, I mean: overweight old balding Greg Universe. I […] Read more →
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Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?
Nolen Royalty wrote an interesting piece about diagnosing a quirky SSH-related issue, and I found it both interesting and inspiring. Read more →
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Still at MegaConLive. I’ve not done this kind of con before (and still wouldn’t, were it not for my tweenager and her various obsessions). Not my jam, and that’s fine.But if there’s one thing for which I can sing it’s praises: everybody we’ve met is super friendly and nice. Sure, you can loudly telegraph your […] Read more →
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I may have been dragged to MegaConLive London by my multi-fandom loving 12-year-old, but I at least managed to find somebody worth getting a selfie with. × Read more →
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My 12-year-old's persuaded me to take her to MegaConLive London this weekend.
As somebody who doesn't pay much attention to the pop culture circles represented by such an event (and hasn't for 15+ years, or whenever it was that Asdfbook came out?)... have you got any advice for me, Internet? -
More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)
