[Note] Chuck Wagon
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. 😂
TechCulture
Dan Q.
Programming, digital privacy, indie web advocacy, and internet culture.
Recent essays
30 of 80[Article] Contactless Transport in London vs Paris
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…
[Reply] Reply to: This blog is written in en-GB
Terence Eden's blog is (like mine!) unapologetically in en-GB. But maybe his particular cultural references need to be slightly more-specific still?
[Article] “You saved my life!” (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)
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.
[Note] Can’t sleep, too much fire
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. (Nobody was injured; the residents wer…
[Article] Hashcard #2
I received my tenth "postcard from the Internet", which also happens to be my second geohashing "hashcard". How lovely!
[Reply] Reply to: Deleting Systems You Don’t Understand
Ibrahim Diallo shared his experience of deleting all his family PC's .ini files when he was 10, not knowing they were important, and compares it to what some developers do when they refactor-out something that seems insignificant. I reply with a story from ear…
[Article] The secret API I used to tell LeShuttle about different outbound and return passengers
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 d…
[Article] How I (Don’t) Collect Blog Statistics
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.
[Note] F-Day plus 151
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 that…
[Repost] I Regret To Say That GMail is Now a Spam Farm, or, Why You Should Really Get That Dedicated Email Address Now
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't al…
[Repost] Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to e…
[Article] Recreating a 1990 Book Cover (in HTML + CSS)
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.
[Repost] How to Set Up Windows 11 Without a Microsoft Account in 2026
James Leighton's provided a quick one-liner to bypass the Windows 11 installer's latest efforts to insist on you having a Microsoft account. I don't anticipate having to install Windows again, but if I do I'll be using this.
[Article] My piano came home from the hospital
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!
[Article] Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
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,…
[Article] Your ‘App’ Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you…)
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 way t…
[Article] Grïgnyr the Ecordian by Geoff Bottone
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 achieve…
[Repost] I bought a Sony Walkman
Andreas bought and restored an old Sony Walkman and the entire journey is a wonderfully-written journey down memory lane, coupled with some learnings about the inner workings of these once-ubiquitous devices. Beautiful.
[Repost] British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
In March 8, 2026, British Columbia moved their clocks to a year-round Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and doubtless broke a lot of software. Every time I work on better timezone support for Three Rings, this is the kind of story that terrifies me!
[Article] Exploiting Thoughtcrime in LLMs
New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too...
[Repost] Taking A Dive
I had a second submission accepted to Curious Cones, one of the most-wonderful but also silly blogs I follow. But my third attempt came out blurry and didn't make it to the blog; ah well.
[Note] Ramming speed!
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.
[Article] A postcard from a distant friend
I received another postcard-from-the-Internet... this one, with a chunky Kererū on it, from my antipodal real-life friend Ele!
[Article] You don’t have to blog like me
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.
[Repost] Garbage for humans
unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this.…
[Note] Doggone Gorgeous
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.
[Reply] Re: How do I go back to the library? [RSS Exclusive!]
Evan's done with Twitter and Reddit. But where should he go next? I make some suggestions.
[Repost] Maybe “is AI a bubble?” is the wrong question
Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've b…
[Note] Lorem Ipsum Thank You For Your Enquiry
Always reassuring when you fill in a company's contact form and the next page is placeholder text...