I've been somewhat-offline for the last few days, after a heatwave lead to a heat illness lead to an opportunistic infection lead to me lying in bed and groaning. But I'm getting back to normal, slowly.

Always reassuring when you fill in a company's contact form and the next page is placeholder text... <a href="https://danq.me/_q23u/2026/06/Screenshot-2026-06-30-at-14.57.23.png"><img width="640" height="238" src="https://danq.me/_q23u/2026/06/Screenshot…

Dad Joke of the Day came to me early when some fellow dog walkers coming the other way said "Hello, gorgeous!" "Ooh, thank you!" I replied, nonchalantly tussling my hair and striking a coquetteish pose. <a href="https://danq.me/_q23u/2026/07/1000140381.jpg"><img…

You don't have to have a blog like me. You just need to blog. Blog blog blog. Blog possibly should not be used as a verb, as I blog about here.

I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele!

Trouble brewing at the village carnival's decorated-bike competition as, for perhaps the first time in history, a viking longship rams and boards an X-wing of the Rebel Alliance. <a href="https://danq.me/_q23u/2026/07/1000140703.jpg"><img width="640" height="627"…

I read Grïgnyr the Ecordian, Geoff Bottone's retelling of infamously-terrible fantasy novella The Eye of Argon. Which I hadn't read when I started, so I needed to read that first. Bottone's version is an enormous improvement... and that's an incredible achievement.

I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every…

As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah…

Five months ago, my house flooded. This week, the first completed repair work has been completed: fixing the upright piano that filled with water. The piano's back with us, in our temporary accommodation, and I couldn't be happier about it!

This weekend, I became briefly obsessed with the graphic design of the cover of a manual of a piece of software released in 1990. So I re-created it in HTML + CSS, as you do.

A hundred and fifty one days since we were flooded out of our house, and I needed to visit to meet a contractor. The garden's starting to get a little wild, this summer: we've been periodically visiting to mow the lawn, but our hedge seems to have decided…

I used to collect analytics information about visitors to my website, and I've tried a lot of different ways of doing it over the course of a couple of decades. But nowadays I don't collect any at all, and I think that's better.

Channel Tunnel operator LeShuttle's website wouldn't provide a working UI to specify that I'd have different passengers in my car for the outbound and return journeys. So, obviously, I reverse-engineered their API and pushed the information to their database…

An unexpected start to the kids' and I's glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze. <a href="https://danq.me/_q23u/2…

A misunderstanding by my kids this weekend briefly made them think that I'd pulled a stranger from a burning building... when in reality I only lent him a mobile phone charger.

Paris is rolling-out contactless tap-in payments for its transport network. Sounds like London's... except that Paris's includes a "convenience tax" that seems to disproportionately target short-term visitors. What might this say about each city's relationship…

Apparently, zero of the imagineers building this Disneyland Paris cafe conceived that "Chuck Wagon" sounds like what a cowboy would call a wheeled vomit trough. 😂 <a href="https://danq.me/_q23u/2026/07/1000143902-scaled.jpg"><img width="640" height="360"…

I want to write a successful YA fiction where all the characters are boats. Just 'cos I want to see people 'shipping ships. Also, one of my characters will be called Slash.

This year, MEEK's Fabulous has been stuck on a loop in my head, but I only just got around to watching the music video. Which, to my delight, is shot in the region of what I reckon is Britain's gayest pub crawl. Let's take a tour together...