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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Food divided by Distance
In the kind of dream that only happens when I'm ill, I invented an app that would track both your location and your food consumption, and report to social media your journey progress as a proportion of your remaining meal. Read more →
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Did I Cheat?
I solved a puzzle geocache in an unconventional way: by writing a program to permute all the possible solutions and check them for me. Was that cheating? I can see arguments either way... Read more →
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A Random List of Silly Things I Hate
Just a list of eleven random silly things that I hate, to various degrees. Read more →
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A Hundred Inconveniences
It's F-Day plus 31, and our flood-disrupted lives have become defined by the hundred or so daily inconveniences that are imposed by our accidentally-nomadic lifestyle. Here's hoping we can sort-out some more stable accommodation sometime soon! Read more →
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Why Security Engineering needs a Hacker Mentality
Security engineering is about a lot of things, but the best security engineers show the 'hacker mindset' characteristics of curiosity and imagination. Here's an example of how I found an XSS vulnerability in a forum, mostly by accident, and how curiosity was the key. Read more →
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Ten Weird Games
This blog post's been sitting incomplete in my drafts since last decade. I think it's finally time to share with you... ten weird games (and game adjacent media) you should see. Read more →
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Cold Giraffe
My mum painted a cold giraffe onto a postcard and sent it to me. Read more →
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Subverting AI Agent Logging with a Git Post-Commit Hook
I keep hearing from developer friends who are 'expected' by their employer to demonstrate that they're using AI, even for tasks at which the AI is demonstrably a suboptimal choice. So - as a joke - I came up with a git post-commit hook that makes it look like they're doing so, even when they're not. Read more →
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What can you do with a software privacy polariser?
Samsung's 2026 phones will feature a dynamic privacy filter, blacking-out parts of the screen selectively from shoulder-surfers. I'm so curious about the capabilities of (and API for) this technology: what could I make it do? Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
Fools Mode
I'd completely forgotten that my website pranks visitors on April Fools' Day with a randomly-selected one of a selection of "features" until I went to it myself and got "party mode".
So yeah, this year I managed to April Fools' myself. Read more → -
Did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree
After hearing of my failure to find this cache the other day, the younger geokid persuaded me to come back and try again. We poked into every hidey-hole we could find and even extended our search to the next candidate oak tree (just in case the coordinates were off), but still had no success despite an extended search. Read more →
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Found GCARTJ6 The Pylon King
It took the geokid and I a moment or two to work out why this pylon was king, but once we had it was easy to find this (good-sized) cache. What a delightful Spring afternoon it was! And then the geokid found a tree under which the banks had eroded, making a perfect "hobbit hole" cave within its exposed roots (where he ate his ice cream). Read more →
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Found GCARTJB Stop, Look... er... Listen?
I'm volunteering at the building right next door to this bridge, this week, working on software that helps charities... among them, Samaritans! So finding this thematic cache was a must-do for the younger geokid and I on our lunch break today. A quick and easy find thanks to the clear telegraphing in the description, aided by our direction of approach. It's a wonderful large bridge, and we got to watch a train zoom along the tracks beneath us as we crossed. Read more →
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Some days, developing Three Rings is about being hunched over a keyboard alone in the middle of the night, swearing at Rubygem incompatibilities.But just ocassionally it’s about getting together in beautiful places with some of the most dedicated geeks I know… to swear about Rubygem incompatibilities.Either way, a walk in the garden can lead to […] Read more →
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Not even thanks to Daylight Saving but just because I felt energised and excited, I got up to watch the sunrise this morning… before starting work on a new Three Rings feature! × Read more →
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Did not find GCARTJD 5Gee, Under the Oak Tree
This one's going to bug me! The second nearest cache to this week's volunteering event accommodation and I had to DNF it!? Poked my fingers into every hidey hole I could find (while a nearby goose honked at me: maybe it was mocking me, or perhaps it was saying "it's on your left" - afraid I don't speak goose) before giving up. It's right on my doorstep, though, so I may well be back for another attempt! Read more →
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Found GCARTJE 1602
When I drove along this lane yesterday evening I didn't appreciate how wonderful it'd look under the morning sun. An easy find with thanks to the cache title! TFTC! Read more →
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Found GCARTJK Hencote Lane
Some fellow volunteers and I are staying in the nearby Hencote Farm for a week of work on software that helps charities work more efficiently. As has become a longstanding tradition for me at these events, I woke early for a walk and this morning was treated, as I made my way through the vineyards, to the especially wonderful view across the valley. Read more →
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Kicking off 3Camp 2026, our annual volunteering event, with the traditional “receive and sort a ludicrous amount of groceries” activity. × Read more →
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Most-often when a toaster has a 'cancel' button it's simply labelled 'cancel', 'stop', or with a cross. But this week, I discovered a toaster that uses the 'eject' icon - like you'd find on a VHS tape recorder - on its button.
At first I thought this was an unusual user interface choice, but I'm coming around to it. It feels like a more-accurate and skeuomorphic representation of what actually happens than a cross suggests.
But the existence of toasters like this one does necessarily mean that, some day, some Gen Alpha will see a tape deck in, like, a museum or something, and will say 'hey, that's cute: the button you press to pop the tape out is the same as the one you use to pop your toast out'. -
Blogging: you’re doing it right
Manu reminds all bloggers, no matter how they do it, that they're doing it right. I couldn't agree more. Read more →
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Like many in the UK, I'm dismayed every time I see the plague of St. George's Cross (flag of England) that nationalists have been hanging on lamp posts on recent years.
So it gave me great joy to see that this lamp post had recently acquired a (larger!) pride flag. 🏳️🌈
If we're going to become a country that hangs flags everywhere... I'd much rather that they be flags that speak of inclusivity and diversity. ❤️ -
Reply to: how do you find things you want to blog about?
august asked me how I find things I want to blog about, and I answered... in the form of a blog post, of course! Read more →
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F-Day plus 38
It’s 38 days since our house was damaged in a flash flood, and today’s the first of our ‘BER’ assessment. BER stands for Beyond Economical Repair. It basically means that anything on the list is something that the insurance company intend to ‘write off’: to declare irreparable or not-worth repairing and scrap, replacing it with […] Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)
