Dan Q

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.

Photograph of Dan, his ponytail hanging over the shoulder of his black t-shirt, smiling from behind his beard and waving to the camera.

  • LGBT+ History Month

    Here in the UK we celebrate LGBT+ History Month in February. This year, I'd encourage you to look at the history of queer rights in the UK, and use it to celebrate what we've achieved so far... but more-importantly, as a reminder that there's more to do (especially lately). Read more →

  • Reducing Phantom Obligation in FreshRSS

    Terry Godier's fantastic article last week introduced us to the term 'phantom obligation' and reiterated something I've been saying for years: that 'RSS zero', unlike 'inbox zero', is not an admirable goal. And that reminded me to share with you how I personally make my FreshRSS installation feel more like a tool that serves me, not the other way around. Read more →

  • OpenBenches reaches Tenerife

    This weekend, I helped OpenBenches extend its reach to Tenerife, by finding and photographing a bench in the memorial garden for the Dan-Air Flight 1008 disaster. Almost-simultaneously, Terence Eden shared a blog post about the cost of running the OpenBenches service. Taken together, that feels like an excuse for me to plug the project (again)! Read more →

  • Gamified... Pornography?

    When the Online Safety Act came into effect, I considered writing a blog post investigating exactly how difficult it made it to access Pornhub. But it turned out to be boringly easy (it's not NOW, of course!), so I didn't. So here's a different discovery I made about the site... Read more →

  • Postcard from San Diego

    Another postcard for my collection; this time from an indieweb blogger who was previously JUST outside of my circle - Joe from ArtLung. There's something in this. Read more →

  • Without Bloganuary

    Bloganuary died since last time I took part in it (and I can speculate about why), but that didn't stop me writing something for every day in January 2026. Man, I've been blogging a lot lately in general... what's that about, eh? Read more →

  • How an RM Nimbus Taught Me a Hacker Mentality

    Thirty to thirty-five years ago, as a young and curious hacker, I broke out of the restrictions on my secondary school's computer lab and briefly achieved rockstar popularity amongst peers who, through my tools, could now play videogames instead of doing their coursework. But their interest in the results of my exploits were incompatible with my interest in the sheet joy of discovery... and, inevitably, this meant trouble. Read more →

  • That's Not How Email Works, HSBC

    A confusing letter from HSBC informed me that I've not been receiving their emails, and I have to change the email address they use to contact me. Except I've been receiving all of their emails just fine! The problem, it turns out, is that surveillance capitalism is now so-widespread that the bank cannot conceive that their own attempts to spy on their customers might not be 100% reliable... Read more →

  • PHP 8.4 on Caddy on Debian 13... in Three Minutes

    I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. Just the stock package repositories and around five commands and my fresh box and it was serving PHP applications over HTTPS. Read more →

  • More articles →
    (articles are traditional long-form blog posts)

  • RIP James Van Der Beek

    James van der Beek died this week of bowel cancer; he was only a couple of years older than I am. I guess I'm at that point of my life where unexpectedly-early celebrity deaths might start being "around my age".

    I'm neither young nor angsty enough to enjoy a re-watch of Dawson's Creek, but I especially loved him in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 so maybe I'll re-watch that. Read more →

  • Integration contemplation

    What fragments you?
    What defragments you?
    How are you balancing both? Read more →

  • Rebels in the Sky

    I feel like I'm reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting's fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server. Read more →

  • Curious Cones

    Curious Cones is a catalogue of traffic cones in unusual places. How wonderful and weird our World Wide Web is, that such a thing can exist. Read more →

  • Syncthing on Unraid: repairing malformed database disk image

    Mostly as a note to myself, but here's what to do if you're running linuxserver/syncthing via Docker on Unraid and it keeps saying:
    ERR Database error when getting previous version (error="getkv: database disk image is malformed (11)" log.pkg=syncthing)

    The problem is that Syncthing's index has been corrupted. I was able to fix it by getting a shell into the relevant Docker container and moving the index: Syncthing detected it as absent and re-created it, re-indexing everything. Here's what I did:
    docker exec -it syncthing bash
    mv /config/index-v2 /config/index-v2-BROKEN Read more →

  • Post: Methuselah

    My partner and her husband (my metamour) have a tradition that every 5th wedding anniversary they get the “next size up” of champagne bottle.This meant that on yesterday, when we celebrated their 15th, we needed to get through a Methuselah: a massive 6 litre bottle equivalent to nine standard bottles of champagne (rightmost in the […] Read more →