Daniel Durrans
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I know I am not culturally relevant, but I really struggle with the audience voting from the UK #Eurovision
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I can see why this is a favourite to win, but it isn't doing it for me. #TOTP
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I need to stop using the #TOTP hashtag for #Eurovision. Muscle memory
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The best way to score high points with me is to make something fun and eurotrash. #TOTP
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CW: London protests
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CW: London protests
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Continuing my #Wikipedia25 celebrations, the second Random Daily Article I read was about the Argo Wilis, which lead me to learning an unexpected amount about Rail Transport in Indonesia!
🔗 https://danq.me/wp25-rail-in-indonesia
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For Wikipedia's 25th birthday some people are doing the "read 25 different articles on 25 consecutive days" challenge.
I'm going one further, and - where possible (and interesting!) - I'll be blogging (and maybe podcasting!) what I learn each day!
Here's day 1: https://danq.me/wp25-wesley-merritt - I got the random article "Governor-General of the #Philippines" and from there found (and learned a lot about) Wesley Merritt.
#wikipedia25 #wikipedia #history #challenge #colonialism #war
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🥐 I woke up with this image in my head and had to draw it. 🤣
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This plant has sonehow managed to grow through the atrtoturf lawn of our temporary home!
Life... uh... finds a way?
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CW: Comic art of Star Trek characters kissing
Observation:
Media franchises attract fandoms, and many get their fair share of character 'shipping (especially of the attractive characters).
Soccer also attracts huge fandoms... but I don't think I've ever seen or heard of "soccer slash" (even of the attractive players).
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Why, when I change the temperature on the thermostat of my Renault Zoe does it change the fan direction, too? Is this a UI affordance for people who want their faces colder but their feet warmer? I don't understand!
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It's been a long journey for our 9-year-old over the last four years, but today he is - going many others, mostly older and larger than him! - finally trying out for his recommended black belt in taekwondo. 🥋 🤞
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Man, I have missed having a battlestation to work at these last few months. It's nice to sit at one again, even if it's only a 'chicory battlestation'.
#note #deskflow #battlestation #computers #flood2026 #work #office
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My "commute" since moving to the Chicory House isn't much longer than it is at our regular home, but it does involve going outside. Want to see?
🔗 Via: https://danq.me/the-commute-chicory-house-edition
#coffee #dog #dogs #flood2026 #office #telecommuting #teleworking #video #work
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What breaks when one of your developers leaves?
On Friday, I said goodbye to a colleague as she left us after most of a decade with the company. Then this morning, all hell broke loose on some production servers.
It turns out that the API key that connected our application to our feature flag management platform was associated with her account, and hadn't shown up in the exit audit.
Let this be your reminder to go check where, if anywhere, your applications are using person-specific keys where they should be using generic ones!
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As if I hadn't suffered enough "flood damage" this year, I started my first workday since rebuilding my home office setup - hour the first time in months! - in our rental... by pouring a cup of coffee into my keyboard. 😱
#note #keys #keyboard #disaster #flood2026 #coffee #computers #repair
Via: 🔗 https://danq.me/2026/04/16/chicory-house-real-coffee-flooded-keyboard/
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Now that we've finished our move into the Chicory House, I have for the first time in over two months been able to set up my preferred coding environment... with a proper monitor on a proper desk with a proper office chair. Bliss!
#note #telecommuting #teleworking #flood2026 #houses #work #laptop #computers #office
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@adactio Nice! I've shared my salary history too. A few more different employers than you, and a lot more of a rollercoaster-like profile with the ups-and-downs that come with that!
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Today's mission in what we're calling the Chicory House - our home while our actual house gets repaired - was to unpack the kitchen. I think it's looking pretty good!
(The cardboard box you can see contains pans we brought with us that turn out to be incompatible with the induction hobs at the Chicory House, boo!)
Next weekend's mission will be to set myself up a workspace that isn't the conservatory dining table. 😬
#note #flood2026 #teleworking #telecommuting #moving #houses
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It's fifty-five days since my house flooded. Since then, I've lived in hotels, with friends, on volunteering retreats and - mostly - in a series of one- or two-week AirBnB-style short-term lets. It's been wild. It's also been wildly disruptive. To our work. To our kids. To our general stability.
Today, we make a change. Today we're moving into a medium-term let: sonewhere we can stay for the... say... six months or so it'll take to actually repair our house so we can move back in. We'll have our own space again in a way we haven't in a couple of months.
I know the hard work isn't done. Our house is still a wreck! But it feels like, perhaps, we're beginning the second act of the three-act play "The Year Of The Flood". And that feels like progress.
Right, I'd better go move house! (for like the seventh time this year...)
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It's my final day in the cute garden office of the AirBnB we're living in, this week, and every time I step through the door I catch a glimpse of our small, sandy-coloured dog squatting in the garden.
Except the dog isn't even here. My brain keeps getting tricked... by this statue of a pig!
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I've lived in a LOT of different places these last few months while we've been arranging a place to live for the next six months or so of our house repairs. Each new AirBnB has had its pros and cons (and each hasn't felt like "home").
But man, I really like the "garden office" at our current one. So nice to work in the sun!
(I don't like the slow WiFi as much, but yeah... pros and cons!)
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The final of the short term lets we're staying in (before we switch to a medium-term one!) while our flooded house is repaired is also perhaps the prettiest. Our village this week is peak-Cotswolds, for sure!
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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'.
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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 an equivalent new one.
So today, while I work, I'm watching a trio of men carry all of the soft furnishings, white goods, and rugs, plus any plywood/MDF-based furniture that got soaked into a pair of vans on the driveway, making notes where possible of the makes and models of things as they go.
My home is rapidly becoming more cavernous and echoey.
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Is it #cheating to solve a #geocaching #puzzle in an unconventional way? E.g. if I'm uninterested in the puzzle itself, but I'm interested in whether a computer program can be written to solve it, and I solve it using that program, did I #cheat?
🔗 Context: https://danq.me/puzzle-cheating
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It's F-Day plus 35, and I'm spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I'm "between" two AirBnBs.
The dog, who doesn't normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what's happening downstairs.
The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.
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Today, an AI review tool used by my workplace reviewed some code that I wrote, and incorrectly claimed that it would introduce a bug because a global variable I created could "be available to multiple browser tabs" (that's not how browser JavaScript works).
Just in case I was mistaken, I explained to the AI why I thought it was wrong, and asked it to explain itself.
To do so, the LLM wrote a PR to propose adding some code to use our application's save mechanism to pass the data back, via the server, and to any other browser tab, thereby creating the problem that it claimed existed.
This isn't even the most-efficient way to create this problem. localStorage would have been better.
So in other words, today I watched an AI:
(a) claim to have discovered a problem (that doesn't exist),
(b) when challenged, attempt to create the problem (that wasn't needed), and
(c) do so in a way that was suboptimal.Humans aren't perfect. A human could easily make one of these mistakes. Under some circumstances, a human might even have made two of these mistakes. But to make all three? That took an AI.
What's the old saying? "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
#note #ai #work #firstup #programming #javascript
Via: 🔗 https://danq.me/2026/02/25/to-really-foul-things-up-you-need-an-ai/
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Let's go
Pokémon FireRed Version and Pokémon LeafGreen Version - Pokémon FireRed Version and Pokémon LeafGreen Version on Nintendo Switch
#NintendoToday
https://nintendo.today/s/alPrCPir -
With news that the #UK is considering #ageGating #VPNs, here's your periodic reminder that you don't need to pay a #VPN service (and potentially have to do an age-check, in future) to have a VPN.
For the last ten years, I've just been spinning up cheap VMs running #WireGuard on cloud providers when I need a VPN, and then throwing them away afterwards, for a cost of usually less than 8 cents (USD) per hour.
🔗 Here's how: https://danq.me/run-your-own-wireguard-vpn
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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 this was a secondary characteristic of many URLs found in customers' SharePoint installations. And many of those URLs get redirected. And SharePoint often uses relative URLs when it sends redirections. And it turned out that our systems' redirect handler... wasn't correctly handling relative URLs.
It all turned into a hundred line automated test to mock SharePoint and demonstrate the problem... followed by a tiny two-line fix to the actual code. And probably the most-satisfying part of my workday!
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I didn't realise gov.uk already had a web page that told you what day of the week it is… nice!
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In my first few weeks at my new employer, my code contributions have added 218 lines of code, deleted 2,663. Only one of my PRs has resulted in a net increase in the size of their codebases (by two lines).
I need to pick up the pace if I'm going to reach the ultimate goal of deleting ALL of the code within my lifetime. (That's the ultimate aim, right?)
#note #firstup #job #work #programming #github #sourceControl #employment
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I spent most of a day getting my new development environment set up, because I kept hitting issues that nobody at my new employer had experienced before. A "perfect storm" of coincidences that conspired together to completely wreck my chance of a simple setup.
The factors?
- Apple's M4 processors remove the SVE architecture and its instruction set, which was present in the M1 through M3
- The Colima dockerisation tool still reports to arm64 containers that SVE is available
- Java < 24 will, by default, use SVE for some functions if it's told that it's available
- Opensearch 2.x will not run on Java > 23If ANY ONE of those statements were not true, I wouldn't have had any trouble. But the combination of all four of them meant that I was getting proper segfault-death crashes.
I blame Apple. Who removes instructions from a processor within the same family‽ (I'm sure that in reality there's probably some important reason for it that's beyond my ken, but still!)
#note #apple #programming #computers #technology #docker #firstup #job #work #employment #java
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Off to my first day at Firstup. Gotta have an induction: get my ID badge, learn where the toilets are, how to refill the coffee machine, and all that jazz.
Except, of course, none of those steps will be part of my induction. Because, yet again, I've taken a remote-first position. I'm 100% sold that, for me, remote/distributed work helps me bring my most-productive self. It might not be for everybody, but it's great for me.
And now: I'm going to find out where the water cooler is. No, wait... some other thing!
#note #firstup #work #job #employment #telecommuting #teleworking
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Happy Stone Circle Sunday! The youngest and I went out to Avebury Henge, the world's largest neolithic standing stone circle and henge.
#note #stoneCircleSunday #history #walking #archeology #children #parenting
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For the last few weeks, I've been getting frequent #ThreeRings tech support calls to my personal mobile number. We don't offer phone-based tech support, so this was a bit of a surprise, and although I don't mind the odd one, this seemed like a significant ramping-up.
So I asked one of them where they found my number, and they said it came up when they did a #Google search for "Three Rings login".
Turns out they were right. Google had the phone number I gave them... four years ago?... for identity verification. But then a few weeks ago they randomly started serving it to people who searched for Three Rings!
I was able to remove it from #GoogleBusinessProfile, where they admitted that they modified it, but I'm yet to receive any kind of explanation.
🔗 Full story: https://danq.me/2025/05/21/google-shared-my-phone-number/
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Highlights of yesterday's Goodbye Nightline Association party in Manchester:
👨💻 Responded to Three Rings user query in real time by implementing new Directory property while at the event (pictured)
🤝 Met a handful of Nightliners past and present; swapped war stories of fights with students unions, battles for funding, etc. (also got some insights into how they're using various tech tools!)
✍️ Did hilariously awful job of drawing 'Condom Man', Aberystwyth Nightline's mascot circa 2000
🤞 Possibly recruited a couple of new Three Rings volunteersLow points:
😢 It's a shame NLA's dying, but I'm optimistic that Nightlines will survive
#note #nightline #threeRings #volunteering #manchester #nostalgia
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Oxford Station. Catching a train to Manchester for a get-together in memory of the Nightline Association, which will sadly be closing this year (although individual Nightlines will doubtless soldier on just as they did before the Association).
Carrying a big ol' bag of Three Rings swag to give to basically anybody who expresses even the slightest interest. 😅
Three Rings has been supporting Nightlines since before the Nightline Association and nowadays underpins voluntary work by hundreds of other charities including helplines like Samaritans and Childline. Feeling sad that the Nightline Association is going away and looking for a new and rewarding way to volunteer? Come chat to me!
#note #threeRings #nightline #volunteering #oxford #manchester #trains #transport #party
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Never underestimate the power of people who are motivated by the good they can do in the world.
Today I was in awe of this team of unpaid volunteers who, having already given up their bank holiday weekend, worked through dinner and into the night to ensure the continued uptime of a piece software that enables the listening service of emotional support and suicide helplines.
#note #volunteering #nightline #samaritans #threeRings #counselling #suicide
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The Devil's Quoits (Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, UK) looks particularly striking in the bright sunlight of this Spring morning.
#note #stoneCircleSunday #history #geography #archeology #prehistory #spring
Via: 🔗 https://danq.me/2025/04/20/easter-sunday-stone-circle/
