Blog – Dan Q

Dan Q found GCBMAGF #07 Northmoor Loop

This checkin to GCBMAGF #07 Northmoor Loop reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Imagine my surprise when the geohound and I are out for a walk from Appleton to find the Rainbow Bridge cache, to receive a notification of a new cache series at Northmoor. All we need to do is extend our walk a short way, I figure, and we can claim an FTF!

But it was not to be! By the time the little doggo’s legs could carry her this far, we’d been pipped to the post. STF it is, then, after the joint victory just half an hour ahead of us.

And with that, it’s time for the pupper and I to turn around and head back to Appleton. Hopefully we can return to do the rest of this series sometime soon! TFTC.

Dan Q found GC8B4J5 Rainbow Bridge

This checkin to GC8B4J5 Rainbow Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Our taeget cache got the geopup and I: I’ve coated under this bridge, I think, but never found an excuse to go over it into today.

The doggo is running out of steam and the afternoon looks likely to be too hot for her, but we’ll make a quick run at one of the new Nortmoor Loop series before we turn back. Might even score a FTF!

Dan Q found GCBB3J9 Appleton Wharf

This checkin to GCBB3J9 Appleton Wharf reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

What a beautiful spot for a geocache, which the geopup and I quickly found in the second host we checked. Then, we enjoyed a delightful few minutes of peace, sitting on the riverbank, before continuing our morning’s adventure.

TFTC, FP awarded for this amazing hidden gem.

Dan Q did not find GCBBDDV To The Thames

This checkin to GCBBDDV To The Thames reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geohound wouldn’t let me search as long as I’d have liked, and my GPS must’ve been off because I couldn’t really find anything that matched the hint description. One for another day, perhaps.

Dan Q found GC8JWW9 Aslan’s Spring

This checkin to GC8JWW9 Aslan's Spring reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

The geopup tested the waters while I retrieved the cache. What a wonderful spring on a delightful footpath!

TFTC, and FP for the wonderful location and proper-sized cache container.

Dan Q found GCBAZZN The Big Dipper

This checkin to GCBAZZN The Big Dipper reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF for the geohound and I on a walk around Appleton this morning. Excellent container with a fantastic hint, FP awarded. TFTC!

Chicory Battlestation

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’.

Moving the Internet

The “regular” house’s Internet connection finally switched-off last night, so I zipped around this morning and moved my NAS across to the Chicory House.

Dan, a white man with a ponytail and a goatee beard, carries a large black cube-shaped computer down a staircase. — This was a challenging selfie to take.

Unfortunately, Gigaclear haven’t yet managed to fulfil their promise to reassign our static IP address to our new line, so this was swiftly followed by some DNS reconfiguration, sigh!

Molly guard in reverse

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance.

Anecdotally, this is named after Molly, an engineer’s daughter who was invited to a datacenter and promptly pressed a big red button, as one would.

Then she did it again later the same day.

…

Marcin Wichary (Unsung), in Molly guard in reverse

This article from UX expert Marcin Wichary is intended to be a vehicle to talk about the thoughtful design that goes into “reverse molly guards”: pieces of user interface that will proceed by themselves if you do nothing, but can be stopped by user interaction. He provides the example of MacOS’s “Are you sure you want to restart your computer?” dialog, which includes a countdown to automatically going ahead with the restart in 60 seconds unless told not to.

From my perspective, though: this was the first time I’ve ever come across the term “molly guard”, and I love it (especially with its accompanying anecdote). I’ve seen them all over the place, though. In fact, I’d love to share with you a particularly-aggressive molly guard I implemented into Three Rings a couple of years ago:

A problem we occasionally faced in Three Rings was administrators – especially new administrators, gaining lots of powers for the first time – managing to delete entire rotas, without realising that this would delete all of the shifts (and the signups) within those rotas too. This is a hard operation to un-do, so we added a basic molly guard: an “are you sure?” interstitial page that explained exactly how much damage would be done.

But it didn’t work well enough! We watched users who would see a blocker and rush straight to the big, red, delete button on the other side of all the warnings. I guess that the dark patterns that are now everywhere in software have trained users to click-through every wall that gets in their way as fast as possible and with the minimum interaction. But now that “training” was working against the safety of charity data!

So we came up with something stronger:

Now, the interstitial page not only says what the scale of the damage is… it asks the user to repeat it back to them. Looking at that screenshot, you’ll see that the first line says that 2,056 will be deleted… and then the last line contains a text box to type that number back in again (this page only appears if it looks like a lot of “real” data will be deleted; otherwise we use the old page so as not to scare off people who are throwing together temporary test rotas).

If you read the page, it’s easy to answer the question. But if you just rush to the red button… you’re stuck. You’ll be given a user interface nudge to tell you to fill the box, but until you first line of the page, you won’t be able to answer it.

This molly guard works: since it was implemented, we’ve never had an instance of an accidentally-deleted rota that required us to pull data from the backups on behalf of a charity.

But it’s possible we’ve swung too far the other way and caused some collateral damage to usability: we’ve twice had technical support queries from users who couldn’t work out what they had to type into the box!

This is an acceptable outcome, we decided: it gives us the chance to check that they really mean what they were asking to do (of the two queries: one user did, the other meant to do something else) and point them in the direction the number they need. It works!

Anyway, the key thing I wanted to share was that great article by Marcin Wichary with some great photos of various hardware and software molly guards (and reverse molly guards) for your amusement.

The Dungeon of Dark Patterns

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

David Revoy (Mini Fantasy Theater), in The Dungeon of Dark Patterns

Well this is just excellent.

I’d not come across David Revoy before today, but he’s apparently being doing art and comics since 2014. The Mini Fantasy Theatre series started a couple of years ago, but is totally getting added to my RSS reader. Almost everything’s bilingual English/French too, if that’s something that interests you.

Navigating around the dark patterns of modern UX certainly feels like a dungeon delve, sometimes. Now we just need the episode in which the adventurer has difficulty unsubscribing from requests from their patron…

WSL9x

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling. Run all your favourite applications side by side – no rebooting required!

…

Hailey Somerville, in WSL9x

Well this blew my mind.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is one of the single best things Microsoft have added to Windows in the last decade¹. But, of course, it’s for Windows 10 and 11 only. I would never have conceived that somebody could make the same trick work for, like, Windows 95!

But Hails has done so. And no, this isn’t some kind of emulation; it’s proper cooperative multitasking between the two kernels, just like regular WSL does. Somehow, in a version that came out nine years before Windows even supported the NX bit. Mindboggling.

Footnotes

¹ This ought to be a little embarrassing for them: I mean – if the most-valuable improvement you make to your operating system is to make it… more like a different operating system… – that’s not a great sign, is it?

BBC News RSS… with full-size thumbnails!

I love that my tool for making BBC News RSS feeds “better” continues to help people¹. But I also enjoy that as a platform, it’s still got room to grow.

For instance, at the start of the weekend I received an email from somebody called Phil, who asked:

Could you possibly have an alternative ‘HQ’ version of your feeds which replaces standard/240 with standard/1200 in the URL for each article in the XML?

I am obviously pretty desperate for this feature, hence me reaching out.

Phil’s right. The BBC News RSS feeds contain thumbnail images that look like this:

<media:thumbnail width="240"
                height="135"
                   url="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/240/cpsprodpb/623a/live/5f8c30c0-3d7f-11f1-ac78-2112837ce2aa.jpg"
/>

You see the /240/ in that URL? If you change it to /1200/ then, as Phil observes, you get a much-higher resolution thumbnail. Naturally you ought to correct the width and height attributes accordingly, too.

The difference is pretty significant. See:

Image of an F1 car, half in a low, blocky resolution; half in full resolution. — You’d be forgiven for thinking the left-hand-side of this image was the Lego model of this car.

So I raised Phil’s request as a GitHub issue, like a good maintainer, before realising that – hang on – this would be a really easy improvement and I should just… do it.

My BBC feeds “improver” leverages one of my very favourite RubyGems, Nokogiri, to perform XML parsing and modification. The code you need to tweak these URLs is super simple:

# Iterate through each <media:thumbnail> element in the RSS feed:
rss.xpath('//media:thumbnail').each do |thumb|
  # Skip any that don't start the way we expect:
  next unless thumb['url'] =~ /^https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/ace\/(standard|ws)\/240\//
  # Swap the 240 for 1200 in the url="..." attribute:
  thumb['url'] = thumb['url'].gsub(/\/ace\/(standard|ws)\/240\//, "/ace/\\1/1200/")
  # Set width="1200":
  thumb['width'] = "1200"
  # Set the height="..." proportionally (they're not always the same!):
  thumb['height'] = (thumb['height'].to_f / 240 * 1200).round.to_s
end

In the actual code I wrote the magic numbers 240 and 1200 are constants, of course.

That really is all there is to it, but look at what a difference it makes in an RSS reader:

I got that merged and the GitHub action that makes the magic happen got started on its usual 20-minute schedule soon afterwards. I didn’t even have to finish waiting for my lunchtime ramen to cool down before the change was out there and, hopefully, helping people. Phil emailed me again soon afterwards:

You managed to fix something in your lunch break that has been bugging me for well over a decade. The difference in quality is night and day.

Anyway: it pleased me to discover that my software is out there, helping people.

As with most of my open source work, I put little to no effort into tracking any kind of metrics of usage, which means I only get to find out if I’ve done good in the world when people reach out and tell me. So I was delighted to hear from Phil (as well as to take his suggestion and improve the tool for everybody!).

Footnotes

¹ Specifically, the code I’ve written makes a few improvements to the BBC News RSS feeds: (1) removing duplicate news, (2) removing non-news content such as “nudges” towards the app or to iPlayer content, and (3) optionally removing sports news. If that sounds like a better version of the BBC News RSS feeds, you should take a look!

The Commute (Chicory House Edition)

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?

Reply to: I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

…

For a year or so after he died, I used to call his phone as it would go straight to voicemail and I’d get to hear his voice. Eventually the line was cut though. I wish I’d recorded it, just to have something.

…

Kev Quirk, in I Wish I Could Talk to My Dad

I used to do this too.

My dad died very suddenly and with no warning whatsoever in 2012. Perusing perhaps his favourite pastime, he walked up one last mountain, but his body came back in a helicopter.

His mobile phone was never found. Given our relationships with our phones, it’s easy to imagine it as a piece of him still up there. It may have broken at the time of the accident or may have failed some time later – first when its battery expired; later when it was destroyed by the elements – but it was still the last place it reached out to a cellular tower: made that connection that defines its purpose.

His voicemail, of course, didn’t live on his phone. That it does it an illusion for the convenience of humans, especially those of us who are old enough to remember having to replace the Dictaphone-style microcassette tapes in physical answering machines (remember those?). But the illusion of him living on in that, too, persisted. A few times in the months that followed, I called his mobile number – one of very few etched permanently in my memory – just to hear his voice. Sometimes I’d leave a short message; a message that nobody would hear. It was a strange time.

Later, I learned that my dad’s partner had done the same. She regretted deleting her final received voicemail from him, and calling to hear the outbound message was perhaps the next-closest thing.

Years later, in 2017, I wrote about the experience of calling my dad’s mobile after his death. I’d been reminded of the ritual when listening to a new album – Robert Plant’s Carry Fire – and thinking “gosh, my dad would have loved this; what a shame that he didn’t live long enough to hear it.”

In my experience, that’s the journey you take when you lose a close family member. For a while, you miss them because of what they shared with you: love, care, upbringing, support, company… you regret that they’re not there any longer and you wish you could have them back. But as time goes on, there’s a transition, and the moments that you miss them are about the things that they didn’t live to see. It saddens me that my dad never got to meet our children (our eldest was born between one and two years after his death), for example (and not just because it would have spared me playing a game of re-enacting his demise with one of them!).

Of course, like any grief, it fades and gets easier with time, even if it never goes away.

Anyway: as always, thanks for sharing, Kev.

Edit: I should probably have cross-linked this blog post about remembering him in 2023, too…

Ghost of a dartboard

There was a dartboard here, once. 🎯👻

More than you expected?

Footnotes

Footnotes