Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

31 January 2026
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Gathered to Go

Gathered to Go is going to be the title of the next album released by Jubilate. I know that not just because the organisation comes under the umbrella of the Song and Hymn Writers Foundation, who I now work for as a web developer, but because I drove down to Luton today to volunteer as part of the choir that will feature on this new collection of songs.

Being employed and being involved mean that I can’t offer an entirely impartial view on what I expect the results to be but I do think it will be worth watching out for. There are some excellent songs, one of which I’m going to draw on when I provide the welcome at our church service tomorrow morning. A lot of the music is completely new but there are also several songs at the end of the album which draw on very familiar tunes to provide a setting for the words.

I’ve not been a recording session quite like this before. We met in a church with about 50 singers, split across the regular SATB roles (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) and a group of musicians. In the morning we rehearsed each of the 13 songs and then we recorded them in the afternoon. In the last section, the choir sang several of the pieces again to the backing of the earlier recording so it should sound like an absolutely massive ensemble on some of the songs!

It was quite a drive but I’m looking forward to hearing the results and hearing about how they are used to support worship in churches across the UK and beyond.

30 January 2026
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Data Backlog

I’ve finally managed to get all my gardening data, which was scribbled on a series of calendars, into an electronic form (my Folia project). Since I want every sowing, every harvest (with weights) and everything else, that was quite a task! Now I just need to stay on top of feeding in new data, with the seed starting part of the year kicking off soon, and work out better ways to both enter and examine the data.

Oh… and perhaps I should turn my attention to my backlog of unprocessed photos which now goes back almost a decade!

29 January 2026
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Debian 13

One of the my projects this week has been getting Debian 13 (the current release) installed on a new external SSD. It would be fair to say that it has made use of my technical skills but it is up and working now. Two particular wrinkles that I note for future reference:

  1. I tried running a net install from a small USB stick and a live install on the drive itself. What I finally had to do (on attempt #3, a live install from a larger USB stick with the new drive connected) was to install GParted on the running version and format the new drive to ext4. Finally I was able to select it as the target for partitioning with the installer (including putting the Linux MBR on the SSD so as not to interfere with the Windows install on the laptop)
  2. Because it is hooked to the same laptop, it has the same IP address on my network. In turn that creates a problem connecting via SSH as each of my Debian installs has a different host name and internal configuration. Since I want to keep them distinct, I did some experimenting and found that I could connect via SSH using the host name of one and the IP address of the other. They both share that address but only one will be running at a time.

I’m sure I’ll have a few more technical challenges but those were the ones that caused some head scratching but did get solved this week.

28 January 2026
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Bottled it!

This afternoon I finally managed to get the rosé wine bottled. I decided to use my collection of Belgian beer bottles, sealed with crown caps, which means we can open enough for a test without having to use up a 75cl bottle over the next day or so. I got 11 330ml bottles out of the demijohn, so ~3.6l, which would have been about 4.8 regular wine bottles. We’ll probably wait until April or May for the first sample (the last one to be bottled, which may be slightly cloudy) and leave a month or so between each bottle after that until we decide it is good to drink.

In the end, I chose not to backsweeten any of the bottles by adding a sugar syrup. If my potassium sorbate dose didn’t kill off any residual yeast, there should still be nothing for it to work on to create carbonation. One tip I did see online was that you can also sweeten at the point of drinking by adding an easily dissolvable sugar, like icing sugar. If some or all of them turn out too sweet, I’ll try that as a strategy.

27 January 2026
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Tim Sullivan

From time to time, I like to try a new crime novelist, not least because the familiar ones just can’t keep churning out books fast enough to satisfy my appetite or, when they do, it starts to feel formulaic. Because I like to read more about a character I enjoy, I tend to particularly look for books that are parts of a series (more opportunities if I enjoy them) and where the protagonist looks likely to be on the side of justice rather than just on the side of themself.

My most recent discovery is Tim Sullivan. He published his first book about Detective Sergeant George Cross, The Dentist, in 2020 and has followed up with several more. That is a bit of a “comedy” name for the protagonist but it is played with a straight bat and I think I can live with it. After all, Charlie Parker is now in my mind also a fine fictional detective thanks to John Connolly’s long series as well as one of the jazz saxophone greats! Cross is a brilliant detective, based in Bristol and with the quirk of suffering from a relatively severe level of Asperger’s syndrome.

I’ve picked up another one that is a bit later in the series. It will be interesting to see if Sullivan addresses how he describes the outlook of his hero. My understanding is that Asperger’s is now formally diagnosed as a form of autism and the reference to Hans Asperger is often deliberately not used because of his Nazi associations from the mid-20th century (see the autism society website for more). It is still used as a self-description by some people with the condition and I wonder if jumping forward two or three years in the sequence reveals a change of nomenclature.

Anyway, if you can cope with the terminology I’ve found so far, you might enjoy it. It also seems to have come out about the same time as the unrelated McDonald and Dodds ITV series, also set in Bristol and with Dodds being another officer who tends to crack the cases because of his unusual diligence and attention to detail. As far as I can see, the TV series has been cancelled over falling ratings but I’m hoping Sullivan can produce some more books that meet the standard of the first.

26 January 2026
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Rosé Wine Almost Ready to Bottle

Last Friday I managed to get my rosé wine racked into a clean demijohn along with some crushed Campden tablet and potassium sorbate dissolved in water. That concoction is designed to sterilise the solution (Campden tablets kill bacteria) and stop any further fermentation (potassium sorbate finishes off the yeast). Meanwhile, the racking process means there aren’t any lees at the bottom of the new vessel so it should be easier to bottle without any unwanted dregs.

Meanwhile, the wine itself was still sitting at the 0.997 gravity reading that I noted back in September. That is a sign that it is done fermenting. At the moment is is still overly acidic but I am hoping it will mellow further once bottled and I might dose some of the bottles with a little sugar (back sweetening), which is another reason for making sure the yeast is dead.

25 January 2026
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Be Ready For a Long Journey

Jane often watches the Sunday output from Kensington Temple in London and I caught a bit this afternoon. Pastor Malcolm Duncan was doing a Q&A session and was asked how to respond to someone who was angry with God after his sister had died. It is a difficult question and, having had his own experiences of bereavement, he took a minute to gather his thoughts. His response was compassionate and wise – turn up to be with the person and turn down your inclination to try and offer words to fix the pain. What particularly struck me was the phrase “be ready for a long journey”.

I wonder if, in part, that was because it meshed with what I was speaking about at St Theo’s this morning? I wasn’t handling such a difficult question but exploring a couple of passages from the Bible, which led me to the title “being called and learning to follow”. The message was that we can treasure the moment we gave our lives to Jesus and all that, looking back, we can realise was happening around us to prepare us for it. However, what is more important today is our choice to continue walking with Jesus, following his lead.

Be ready for a long journey would have been a perfect phrase to drop into what I said. Some people have a very short journey between salvation received and salvation completed. The thief on the cross, to whom Jesus said “today you will be with me in paradise” is the most obvious example. For most of us, the journey is years or even decades in the travelling. Life is a journey and I don’t want to be found attempting it in flip-flops or without a water bottle. Even at this stage, what do I need to stock up on and what excess baggage could I leave behind?

24 January 2026
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The Burns Unit

Today was an unusual sing around session for me, in that I only led one song (You Wreck Me by Tom Petty). That was because a couple of my flautist friends came along and we took the rest of our turns to give us a modicum of rehearsal for the gig we did tonight at The Needle and Pin in Loughborough. Since it was a (slightly) Burns Night flavoured event, someone suggested we could use the moniker “The Burns Unit”.

I’m not sure anyone actually asked what name we were playing under but the gig went well and we reeled (and jigged) through a selection of Scottish folk tunes, with two flutes and me backing them up on acoustic guitar. Lots of fun and the skinny guitar strings will have helped toughen up my finger calluses for sure! Meanwhile, my personal Burns celebration and dose of haggis (Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!) will be tomorrow, on 25 January.

22 January 2026
by wpAdmin
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Catching up on Debian

I’ve been messing around with Linux, with varying degrees of success, for the best part of 30 years. I remember installing an early version of RedHat Linux and then wondering what to do with it. Two or three years later I got a chance to start using it in a webdev job I was doing and, since then, I’ve generally had some kind of Linux box to hand as well as periods of looking after multiple Linux servers. By the time I started at Oxford, I’d got onto Ubuntu Linux and stuck with that for quite a while although I also dallied with Debian when part of the OxCERT team.

Since moving up to Loughborough, my use of Linux began to tail off. I was still using Linux based webservers to host my code but doing less development at home. Mainly I used my MacBook as a Mac rather than to host a Linux client via VirtualBox and then, as the MacBook started to creak with age, I bought a Windows 10 PC. That had the Windows Subsystem for Linux on, which was just enough command line goodness to keep me going but, for a while, that was about it.

I’m getting back in the saddle though. I also picked up a Win11 laptop but discovered that the peril of an older, refurbished machine was that it soon got to the point where I couldn’t apply Windows security updates any more. I got Debian 12 installed on an external hard drive and that was about as far as I’d got… until I secure my new webdev job. Now I’m regularly booting up the laptop alongside using my (upgraded to) Win11 PC and, even on that, I’m making much extensive use of WSL.

One thing I’d never done much of though, until trying it last night, was using Linux for entertainment. In the past, it had always proved to be awkward to get media things running smoothly and I’d never had an incentive to push on that instead of using another OS. However, it turned out that after saying yes to a message allowing the use of some proprietary codecs, it was streaming away on a UK catch up service as well as any other device. That machine is still going to be primarily focused on my work tasks but it is nice to know that Debian – and probably many other distros – have caught up with the times on the media playback side… or maybe it is just me doing the catch up for myself!

21 January 2026
by wpAdmin
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Food to Play With

After visiting the library today, I took the opportunity to pop into Elf Foods (the local health food shop) and picked up a couple of ingredients I’m keen to try.

The first is agar-agar, a gelling agent derived from algae. I think I used to use during my school days in petri dishes but it is edible and has culinary applications. In particular, once it has been used to set a liquid, it will be stable up to the mid-80s Celsius – much hotter than something set with gelatin. I’ve seen a recipe for an agar set “phony baloney” based on cooked red lentils that looked intriguing so that is high up the list of things I want to try.

The other one was nutritional yeast. I’m familiar with yeast from baking and brewing and I am a marmite (yeast extract) lover. As I’ve been browsing recipe books to improve my meat-free repertoire, I’ve noticed that nutritional yeast comes up quite frequently as an ingredient. Among other things, I think it contributes certain vitamins that an omnivorous diet normally gets from meat. I’m looking forward to trying this one and seeing if I love or hate it.