This checkin to GCA1K70 Oak Protection reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. After claiming the FTF on the new cache to the North East, the geohound and I continued our walk with a wander through thy woods, eventually finding ourselves near this gate. I’d nearly attempted this cache during a […]
This checkin to GCB2FZ4 Family Fun #2 reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. FTF! It’s been a while since I’ve typed that! Woke this morning slightly hungover and figured a nice walk with the geopup might help me feel better. And what an opportunity: a brand new cache only a […]
I'm not sure that President Trump knew what she was doing when three days ago she signed a law into effect that declares herself legally-female. But if that's how she identifies, then of course I'm happy to use her correct pronouns.
My 8-year-old asked me "In Spanish, I need to use an upside-down interrobang at the start of the sentence‽" (I assume the answer is yes!) A little while later, I thought to check whether Unicode defines a codepoint for an inverted interrobang. Yup: ‽ = U+203D, ⸘ = U+2E18. Nice. (And yet we don't have codepoints to differentiate between single-bar...
My three-month work sabbatical has taught me a lot, perhaps too much to digest in a single blog post, so here's the first lesson: especially in a life-friendly distributed workplace, it's important to set boundaries to make your work/life-balance function properly.
I just finished reading We'll Prescribe You A Cat, and while I enjoyed the stories within, I felt like the overarching plot that bound them lacked a satisfying payoff.
Braving an off-the-beaten-track explore on Trinidad during a State of Emergency, Ruth and I found our way to a geohashpoint on the island, becoming the first people ever to do so not only in this graticule but also in this entire country!
We travelled 7,000km across the ocean only to find, by complete coincidence, that the Caribbean’s biggest cymruphile is the captain of a boat we chartered when we fancied a morning of reef-snorkelling and turtle-spotting.
This checkin to GC71F0E UFO Light (Alien Alphabet) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Cache page no longer shows image, and backup link doesn’t work either. Needs CO attention.
After driving 300 (vertical) metres up a terrifyingly winding road, we find ourself at ‘Top if the World’, one of Tobago’s highest points. Being able to look down the steep sides of this long-extinct volcano to the sea on both sides is quite spectacular, and the Caribbean and Atlantic horizons seem so far away that […]
A fun website that aims to educate the visitor on the dangers of dark patterns is let down only slightly, in an ironic fashion, when it links to its author on LinkedIn, a website plagued with dark patterns.
This checkin to GC3PJYY Paradise reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Found the location and the hint object, but a thorough search did not reveal the cache. I think it might be missing, and the previous log (erroneously tagged as if it were found but clearly indicating in the text […]
James Acaster's Classic Scrapes - which I received during our Christmas Eve book exchange - was an enjoyable, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, series of anecdotes with thematic links connecting them. It's perhaps not for everybody, but it was a great gift for me!
Except to children, I don’t really give Christmas presents to (or expect to receive them from) others any more. But that didn’t stop my buying myselfa gift of a particularly fun Lego set to build over the festive period (with a little help from the eldest child!).
I’m pretty impressed with running WordPress on Caddy so far. It took a little jiggerypokery to configure it with an equivalent of the Nginx configuration I use for DanQ.me. But off the back of it I get the capability for HTTP/3, 103 Early Hints, and built-in “batteries included” infrastructure for things like certificate renewal and log rotation.
Entitled is a bleak and sometimes uncomfortable pop-sci dive into the issue of male entitlement. Covering a variety of different areas in which our patriarchal society somehow continues to disenfranchise women in particular and injure everybody by proxy, it provides neither a 'quick fix' nor even an optimistic outlook for the future, but it...
This checkin to GC8KR7D Motorway Mayhem (another one) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. The geohound and I braved an explore of this litter-filled GZ but couldn’t spot a cache among the copious detritus before the whiny little thing started fighting to get back to the warm of the car […]
Given that I already routinely run my SSH servers on unusual ports, I'm surprised it took me until today before I discovered Endlessh, an SSH tarpit you can install on the conventional port to waste the time of anybody attempting a brute-force attack. Here's how I set it up on a Debian 12 server.
This checkin to GC8TK41 05 - Willow's Wanders - Eshington Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. An extended search over two visits today by the eldest child and I couldn’t reveal this one. Very frustrating, given that it’s clearly there somewhere (CO performed maintenance just yesterday!). We’re staying in […]
This checkin to GC80592 Coffee, Cache and Dash reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. QEF while stopped for a confort break on a long journey North from Oxford. The dog wanted to go with the others into the services, but had to stay outdoors with me and hunt for the […]
One of my dog's favourite games is 'My Ball', in which my role is to want the toy that she is guarding. It's all about the motivation, you see! Which is like some of the games I used to play with our eldest, when she was a toddler, I realise.
This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip). It worked out pretty well. Micro-recipe: 1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done. 2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg,...
Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me? Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out…
The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast.
Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I’m not sure…) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange. verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire to bed (first the kids, then – eventually – the adults). […]
At first I thought “Christmas post” had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild.
Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them. Because these were the "lick and stick" kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I've been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.
You know you've stayed up too late when... the milkman arrives and hands you your milk.
This week, I allowed myself to come perilously close to my burnout point (you would never guess I was on sabbatical, would you?), but I'm proud to say I noticed before I hit a point of catastrophe. Now I just need to course-correct and stop picking up 'new' things for a few days. I can do that, right?
Yesterday I achieved one of my primary sabbatical goals and moved Three Rings' primary servers to a new datacentre and a new architecture. But while the visible part happened yesterday, the whole thing's been months in the making and builds upon the effort of an entire team of dedicated volunteers.
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs. Checked up on this cache during a dog walk nearby. All seems good, cache is ready to be found!
When I was ten, I'd have killed to have a secret compartment hidden in my bedroom bookshelves. And once she'd seen the one I built for my own room, earlier this year, my ten-year-old predictably wanted one of her own, too. Luckily I had the spare parts and, now, the experience to make her one. Awesome.
"Install update" Maybe later. An excellent... I want to say poem?... from Ian Eure.
Even when this... even when that... even when the other. Even then, there's still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋
Foone shares that "the world needs more recreational programming". I agree.
It's International Volunteer Day, and thanks to being on sabbatical I got to spend most of the day volunteering with Three Rings. I liveblogged everything I got up to in a series of notes to try to shine a light on what volunteering (in a developer/devops role) with Three Rings can look like; this post is a summary of all that liveblogging, plus...
Robert shares his experience of receiving a birthday greeting from a friend, that had clearly been written by an AI. I echo his sentiment.
Each year, we encourage our two children to each select exactly one new bauble to add to our tree. The result is a decoration that's a celebration of the changing tastes and interests of our two kinds: a mismatched, discordant, crazy mixture of colours and shapes, but in which each and every item is its own story.
mgx shows off a cute use of Javascript to make a fun blog post post more-fun, all the while helping to keep the Internet fun and weird.
TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can’t get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it. Ah well, what’s a chef to do? 🤷🍷
Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village’s hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning.
I've blogged a total of 219 posts spanning 99 consecutive days of blogging, a personal best by a long stretch.
In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks. In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion.
About twenty years ago, I spent three hours playing I-Spy in a broken-down elevator. And in doing so, I learned two things about my friend Fiona.