@dan@danq.me
@dan@danq.me avatar

dan

@dan@danq.me

Magician Automattician on a Geoposition Mission. Blogs at https://danq.me. Founded https://threerings.org.uk. Based between Oxford and Witney, UK. Queerer than the average bear.

Blog auto-syndicates to @blog.

:heart_pride: :bisexual_flag: :polyamory_flag: :europe: :automattic: :wordpress: :firefoxnew:

#IndieWeb #WordPress #InfoSec #Magic #Geohashing #Geocaching #DnD #Pizza #WebDev #IndieWeb #Queer #Polyamory #Bisexual #Automattic #Volunteer #Volunteering #Oxford #Witney #UK

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Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

I've added to https://openbenches.org/

I don't know if anyone still uses oEmbed - but I like to keep those old open standards alive waiting for a better, more interoperable time.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent I ocassionally use it by accident: WordPress has pretty good support for it.

Edent, to fediverse
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

My provider seems to have died. Amy recommendations for a new one?

I picked https://lemmy.one/ at random. Probably should have done some more research!

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent said "At least centralised services usually have a modicum of awareness of basic privacy."

Awareness, sure. Respect? Lol.

Edent, to accessibility
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

🆕 blog! “Should you embed alt text inside image metadata?”

Not everyone can see the images you post online. They may have vision problems, they may have a slow connection, or they might be using a text-only browser. How can we let them know what the image shows? The answer is alt text. In HTML we can add a snippet of text to aid accessibility. […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/should-you-embed-alt-text-inside-image-metadata/
⸻

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent This post got me thinking about the "thumbnail" images that get embedded in RSS feeds, and how they don't have alt-text. So (among other RSS changes I was making anyway today) I started adding <media:description />s to my blog's RSS feeds!

Thanks for the inspiration. Here's the result: https://danq.me/better-wordpress-rss-feeds

Edent, (edited ) to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

How do you pronounce EULA?

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent Ooh-lah, like a Martian.

hacks4pancakes, to random

I have decided to wallpaper my steampunk / Victorian office to make my video background more exciting, but I have unfortunately also now realized that I’m a millennial and have absolutely no idea how wallpaper is installed, and neither do any of my friends or YouTube feeds. What even is a wallpaper that’s not on a computer, anyway?

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@hacks4pancakes Wallpapering is HARD. It's messy and it's easy to get wrong in ways that look absolutely awful.

You know how if you're up a ladder, hanging a picture, you can't always tell if you've hung it straight or in the right place until you climb down and step back a bit. Now imagine that except the picture is ten feet tall, four feet wide, covered in glue that pretty-much can't be re-stuck if you get it wrong, and needs to line up perfectly with the pictures on both sides.

Still want to give it a go? Okay, you'll need:

  1. A friend. Seriously, don't do this alone.
  2. Rolls of wallpaper. You can do the maths to work out how many rolls you need. Then buy an extra roll for when you muck it up.
  3. Planning. Line up the rolls. Unrol them slightly. Look at them a moment to understand how the patterns line up. You're going to be doing this again later while you're sticky, tired, and against the clock, so you're going to want a head start.
  4. A table to paste on. Trestle tables are a great choice. Don't use one you care about.
  5. A big, heavy, stiff paintbrush. You can use the same brush to apply paste and to smooth out the paper once it's up if you're careful, or you can use two brushes if not.
  6. Wallpaper paste. Mix it up in a big bucket in accordance with the instructions.
  7. A good stepladder than you can get up and down and balance on.

Unroll a roll face-down on your trestle table. Paste up the back. Lift carefully, align with the ceiling, and stick from the top downwards. Use the brush to smooth it out. If you have BIG air bubbles, don't try to smooth them, just admit you ruined it and pull that roll down before you make anything any worse. When you get to the skirting board, use a craft knife to cut off the excess. If it's patterned paper, discard the excess: the chance you can actually reuse it is really slim.

For subsequent rolls, you want to simultaneously line up with the ceiling AND with the previous roll's pattern. Your friend should help. Also, it's really important the roll hangs straight down: a little diagonal overlap on roll 2 will magnify into a disaster by roll 5 and it'll be too late.

If you make a mess of it and don't notice quickly, you'll need a wallpaper scraper to get the stuff off again, and it's the most emotionally-tedious of Sisypian jobs you'll ever do.

Consider paying somebody to do it for you. Seriously. Wallpapering, like plastering, is something that anybody CAN learn to do... but nobody should WANT to learn to do.

But if you go ahead and do it anyway, your guide to not-failing-too-badly can be found above.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Do you think there's a way the Internet could've been designed differently, early on, which would've made it better than it is now?

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@ZachWeinersmith SMTP should have had a bidirectional authentication system from day one. Way less spam.

IPv4 ranges should have been treated as a scarce resource from the start. An entire /24 for the loopback address? Mindboggling in hindsight.

The Web should never have had support for third-party cookies. Also certificate authentication / <keygen> etc. should have taken off. Much better privacy and security.

RFC3514 should have been implemented. No Internet worms or malware. 😉

donncha, to random

Tossed 3 binders of college notes from 1997/1998. Bloody hell, I've forgotten more than I know!

I found printed out emails belonging to my old xeer@hotmail.com account that I've since lost. It's pre-Microsoft. Account recovery didn't accept those email addresses and subjects as "recent" enough, I guess. LOL.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@donncha I had [my first name]@hotmail.com back in the day.

I can still remember the day I first spotted the unusual capitalisation of pre-Microsoft "HoTMaiL" and thinking "'Cos it's WEB-based email! That's clever!"

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Amazing UX from !

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent Wait, I can send invitations with LinkedIn that can't be declined?

At last, I'm going to throw a party that people are actually going to turn up to!

rmondello, to random
@rmondello@hachyderm.io avatar

It is quite the thing to present whatever this is as a privacy feature.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@noodlejetski @rmondello FLoC was ditched and Topics API (which is what you're seeing here) was born. They're definitely completely separate things and not just a rebranding, yesiree.

rodhilton, to random
@rodhilton@mastodon.social avatar

revealed the two weirdest features as a pair.

  1. Give a short summary and Google will draft an e-mail for you based on it. You can even click "elaborate" and it will make the e-mail longer.

  2. When opening an e-mail, Gmail can summarize the entire thing for you so you don't have to read all of it.

Does everyone realize how fucking bizarre this is?

Both people in the conversation want to work with directness and brevity, and Google is doing textual steganography in the middle.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@rodhilton I was pretty sure I saw a webcomic that basically predicted this. In the first frame, somebody wanted to sound smarter and like they'd put more work into an email, so they asked an AI to expand it into something more-verbose. In the second frame, the recipient didn't want to read such a long email, so they asked the AI to summarise it for them.

When I first saw it, I felt inspired and considered writing a blog post about how, through being a compatibiity layer, the interface between different AI agents in the future might well be... natural human language. Which is crazy. Then I remembered I actually already WROTE that blog post back in 2020: https://danq.me/sandwichware

Anyway: I wanted to share said comic with you, in case you hadn't seen it, but this morning I couldn't find it again. My first thought was that I was written by @ZachWeinersmith, so I started trying to find it. I tried using my favourite Web search engine, scoped to SMBC, but I wasn't finding it, so instead I started poking around the edges of the site to try to find a search interface. It has tags, so there's something LIKE one. Then I found a minor XSS vulnerability.

Anyway, the short of it is that now I'm neglecting my breakfast (and my dog, who wants a walk) on a Sunday morning... because I'm writing a proof-of-concept for a security issue that I found while failing to find a comic that almost inspired a blog post that it turned out I'd already written but thought of when I saw your toot.

The Internet's truly a magical place.

molly0xfff, to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

the weather's beautiful, pls send me your best grilling recipes

(omnivore, no allergies/dietary restrictions, novice but eager griller with a charcoal grill)

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@molly0xfff Corn! Whole cob, rubbed in oil and generously seasoned with whatever-you-like.

Or for something sweet: peel a ripe banana and put it on a square of foil; sprinkle on things that are sweet and/or will caramelise like sugar, raisins, etc... I like dark chocolate chips and cinnamon! A splash of rum's a nice touch too. Wrap loosely but with no air gaps, then toss straight onto the coals after you're done cooking anything else and they're cooling. Remove when hot and mushy, unwrap, and eat with a spoon. (You can also cook them in their own skins, but I find it more faffy.)

Edent, to webdev
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Here's a knotty problem.

Is it possible to apply to <select><options>?

I want my options laid out in a horizontal line (which is possible) and to wrap to a new line if there isn't space (which I think is impossible).

Anyone cleverer than me able to figure it out?

See https://jsfiddle.net/edent/v2qeyfg8/1/

(Horizontal layout doesn't work on Safari.)

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent You're right, it can't be done. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/option#styling_with_css for a list of CSS attributes that CAN be set on <option>s. It's not many.

You can see how this limitation makes sense for regular, single-selection (dropdown) <select>s, but given that a <select multiple> behaves a lot more like other block elements you'd hope it would work like them... but it doesn't.

I thought there might be a hacky workaround by wrapping each <option> in an <optgroup>, but it turns out you can't really style an <optgroup> either.

@simevidas has a good point, although if you want multiple selection checkboxes seem like a better choice IMHO.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent @simevidas Yeah! And your new rendering engine needs to be so good that all the major browser vendors follow suit. Should be easy.

While you're writing it anyway, I've got a few things you should add...

(and this has been the parable of Why New Rendering Engines Don't Happen)

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

All UK addresses can be expressed as:

Name
[Flat No.]
House No.
Postcode

Street and Town/City are not required but are recommended - they help resolve typos and such. But people insist on writing addresses out like this:

Name
[Flat No.] [Building Name]
123 Street Name [or House Name then Street!]
Small District
Larger District
Town/City
County
Postcode

If you don't give them enough fields to do this then they will take a terrible revenge on your data.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@tomw Often, but not always, these database systems are designed with the hope that they'll work in many different countries (with different addressing systems) if there's "enough" fields.

Then when people DO write UK-specific systems, they just copy what they saw elsewhere (CS class, StackOverflow, some other application...) and you end up with all these "address lines" again.

jorijn, to random
@jorijn@toot.community avatar

I built a little weekend project.

It's a cat 🐱. On Mastodon. :mastodon:

Using the API, it consumes the latest news from Slashdot and posts about it at regular intervals. He's very opinionated about it.

The code is written by itself.

You can find him at @LokiTheCat. He might be a little rude, and I'm sorry for that. But you know how cats are.

I'll keep an eye on him and tweak the prompts if needed.

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@jorijn @LokiTheCat This is cool. Any chance of open-sourcing it?

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Congratulations! You found my secret message!

Please reply to this post to claim your incredible* prize.

Thanks for participating.

*Incredible as in "I can't believe my prize is a random emoji. What a con!"

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Edent didn't touch my keyboard even once... 😁​

Screencapture showing Terence Eden's blog post. I use my mouse to right-click near the "secret" link, select "Inspect" from the dropdown, then use the debugger to delect the contents of the "title" attribute of the link ("Top Secret Message") and copy using the right-click menu. Then I right-click the link, click "Edit as HTML", and paste the link text into the link body, allowing me to click it and see the secret message.

Chrishallbeck, to random
@Chrishallbeck@mastodon.social avatar

stranger motions towards my dog

Stranger: Is she friendly?
Me: Well her bark is worse than her bite.

Stranger: Aww, aren't you just the cutest-
My dog: bites

Stranger: Ow! I thought you said-
My dog: barks, shooting wasps into their face

dan,
@dan@danq.me avatar

@Chrishallbeck
Stranger: Does your dog bite?
Me: No, she's very friendly.

Stranger pets dog.
*Dog bites stranger."

Me: This isn't my dog.

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