I'm Dan Q (he/him). I've spent the last 26+ years creating and writing online.
While I'm considering a new paid role, I continue to 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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Firstup Recruitment
I'll soon by starting in my new role at Firstup, after a rollercoaster of a recruitment process that rocketed through all the usual tech job steps... but in barely over a week. What a rush! Read more →
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The Huge Grey Area in the Anthropic Ruling
The court ruling that declares Anthropic's use of (purchased) books as training material leaves a curious sorites paradox. If we assume that an LLM trained on only one book (and so only capable of producing content directly inspired by that book) would necessarily be copyright-infringing, at what number of books does that cease to be the case? Read more →
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Smug Interview Moment
Recently, I got to answer a technical interview question with "Coincidentally, I implemented exactly what you're describing two weeks ago. For fun. Can I show you the code and the blog post I wrote to explain my design choices?" Read more →
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Scarecrows
As part of the Village Festival, there's a scarecrow competition around my way with a televisual theme. I love that my local community works so hard to carve out an individual identity and personality for itself! Read more →
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Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella
I recently read Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella. I guess it's got a 'werewolf'. It barely feels 'gay'. It certainly left me 'bored', at times. Turns out that it's a very middle-of-the-road story about Gen Z folks growing into their identities, using sexuality and lycanthropy as loosely-fitting framing devices. Read more →
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I Wrote the Same Code Six Times!
Could I rock an interview tech-test in a programming language I haven't touched in a decade? I wanted to know, so I found a tech-test... then solved it in six different programming languages in a single sitting. Read more →
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The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one! Read more →
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Google Shared My Phone Number!
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google? Read more →
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Dynamic Filters in Pure CSS
CSS is powerful and performant. Let's implement client-side list filtering (with the user's choice of AND and OR modes) in CSS, without a line of JavaScript. Read more →
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More articles →
(articles are traditional long-form blog posts) -
Doxxing an Imaginary Person?
This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.
Apparently the video - which is a demo of some Three Rings features - apparently fell foul of Google's anti-doxxing rules. I'm glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course. But in this case, the person we 'doxxed' lives on Some Street, Somewhereville. Which I'd like to imagine is clearly a made-up address, but maybe not! Read more → -
Found GCA6CCW Purple door
It’s possible that cycling this path wasn’t the wisest idea, I realised, as I dodged brambles on both sides. So focused was I on riding safely that I forgot which GPSr I’d brought with me and listening for the beep it gives when I get close to my target… only realised 120m after the fact […] Read more →
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Found GCADCWF Treasure island
After an appointment in Witney I opted to divert my cycle home to find this and the other cache on the same path. Read more →
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Historical Tech Tree
Étienne Fortier-Dubois's excellent Historical Tech Tree is fun and informative, and worth an explore. Read more →
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The unrepentant bleppy face of a dog who, without fail, steals the warm spot I’ve left behind on the sofa within like three seconds of me standing up.× Read more →
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Have I posted this joke before? It's all a Blur. Read more →
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"Founder at WordPress viewed your profile."
Sometimes LinkedIn's approach to anonymising who looks you up isn't very effective.
I wonder who THAT could be? 😂 Read more → -
The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?
Fellow Nightline enthusiast James Buller has written a stirring piece about his decades of volunteering for and around Nightlines, and - as usual - underplays the importance and significance of his work. Here's my take. Read more →
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On Being
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he'd written. It's simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it. Read more →
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Sometimes all you need to complete the perfect offset geocache is a GPSr, some hand tools... and the willingness to unilaterally declare a remote bench to be a memorial to a fictional person, just to get a particular set of numbers out into the world! Read more →
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Pretty sure there isn’t a prize for Throwing Wet Sponges At Children during the graduating year’s “fun run” at the school sports day… but just like the kids are asked to, I’m going to try my best. 😁 Read more →
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Not just a global issue but a local one too. A local one… almost everywhere. #ShowYourStripes× Read more →
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Did not find GC81KDC Standardisation Roundabout
Deciphered this puzzle when it was first published: so long ago that I’d forgotten the specifics of how exactly I did so (although I’m pretty confident I remember the gist of it). But I don’t find myself over this side of Oxford often, these days, and so it took until today that an errand brought […] Read more →
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Found GC7ZA2Z My Friend Dotty
In Marston on an errand, I found myself with enough free time to try to find another few local caches. This puzzle wasn’t as easy as Dotty’s other one, fir me, because for a while I was counting the wrong things, but I cracked it in the end. A slow walk past the GZ with […] Read more →
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If this man isn't hired immediately, it's a huge loss
Shortly after I found myself redundant, the other month, my former colleague Kyle wrote some inspiring words on LinkedIn that I've re-read about once a week ever since then. So now I'm going to keep a copy here for posterity. Read more →
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More posts →
(of all kinds:
articles, 
checkins, 
notes, 
reposts...)