Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

25 February 2026
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Tempted to get some extra value

I was speaking last Sunday at St Theo’s on the subject of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness (a common lectionary reading for the start of Lent). Since I was leading a Bible study tonight I succumbed to the temptation of reusing my notes although hopefully this is an example of temptation not leading to sin.

My musings started with the general theme of how our society approaches the idea of temptation. In short, with a lot of ambivalence: temptation is actively used in marketing and advertising. In the UK, many will remember the slogan “naughty but nice”, which sums that up well. The Bible doesn’t have as many direct references as I expected (about 20 and all in the New Testament in the modern versions I checked) but does have a fair amount to say about it. For example (James 1) temptation is not sin in itself but the potential start of a dangerous progression; we can expect that God will provide us a way out… if we look for it (1 Cor 10:13). We can also find plenty of people engaging with temptation, such as the stories of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3) and Cain and Abel (Genesis 4). Neither of those ended well but King David fell but repented (read Psalm 51 for his words of repentance).

I finally got to Jesus’s experience, where I concluded that although he has been tempted as we are (Hebrews 4), the temptations in the desert are something different. Coming between the heavenly commendation at his baptism (eg. Matthew 3) and the powerful start of his ministry (eg. Matthew 4:12ff), he faced and easily countered temptations that are much beyond what we normally expect to face. These were not the day to day temptations we have but a demonstration that Jesus was God’s champion.

My conclusion then was that the best response to temptation is to stay well out of it, that when we fall, we should step into God’s abundant mercy and that Jesus is a worthy king, who knows the kinds of things we face but has also dealt with things at a level far beyond us.

24 February 2026
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Cable Winder

Working at home, it becomes more important to keep my desk reasonably tidy. One of the contributors to untidiness was the charging cables sneaking across it so today I’ve printed off some cable winders using a model by squinn from Makerworld:

Cable Winder

It curls things a little tighter than I would ideally like but it does ensure the curves are smooth rather than anything getting tightly kinked and the design is reasonably compact. I’ll keep an eye on the cables in case they stop working but, given there are plenty of similar devices out there, I’m pretty happy that I was able to download and print a solution.

23 February 2026
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Hitting the High(est) Notes

In a minute I’m heading out to another choir rehearsal but I’ve taken the opportunity of a few spare minutes to listen to David Bruce’s latest video on musical themes. This one is all about the highest notes that have been composed and performed for voice and other instruments:

If you have a dog in the house, maybe this is a video to watch while wearing headphones? Unlike some of the examples, I don’t think any of my singing tonight is likely to get into the range that could trouble canines (and nor should it, since I’m in the bass section!). I wonder if he will explore the very low notes in a future episode?

22 February 2026
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First in the Ground 2026

We got our first seeds in the ground yesterday, with a few short rows of spinach, radish and winter lettuce in the protected environ of the polytunnel. The next couple of months are going to be a lot more busy with seed-starting but at least we’ve now begun.

21 February 2026
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Singaround Song – 21 February 2026

I took my double bass to the sing around session this afternoon but just led one song. It was the best attended session in a long while (about 20 performers) so it took a long while to go round the circle and I decided to head home at half time to get a few seeds sown in the polytunnel. We’re due quite a warm week but, although the evenings are getting lighter, it still wouldn’t have been quite light enough by the time I got home.

Anyway, the song I performed was I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free – a jazz classic I’ve used a lot but I wanted to try it in another key as I’ve got a duet with a flautist next month where it has been shifted down from G to F. That cuts out some of the open string options compared to what I’ve been used to but I’m now confident that it works both for the playing and for my vocal range.

20 February 2026
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Red Cabbage and Spinach Traybake

I recently got a book of tray bake recipes out of the library (The Green Roasting Tin by Rukmini Iyer). Round about the same time, our main oven died so I wasn’t able to try it immediately but the replacement finally got fitted about a week and half ago and I got round to trying one of the meals that appealed to me this evening.

I followed it with all the accuracy of my general approach to non-baking recipes – in other words, not very closely! However, the essence was this. Start with an oven warming up to 180°C (fan-assisted) and chop a red cabbage into chunks, peeling apart the leaves. That all goes into a roasting tin to be tossed along with salt, pepper, crushed garlic, small chunks of bread and some olive oil. I didn’t have much bread, so I also used some “scotch pancakes” Jane had bought the other day. The tin (two smaller tins in my case) goes into the oven for 25 minutes and I turned the contents half way through.

While that was cooking, I prepared a dressing with lemon juice and olive oil (about a 1:5 ratio) and more salt and pepper. I also added some lemon zest for a bit of variety. I didn’t have any lambs lettuce but I washed a good handful of baby-leaved spinach, measured out a generous handful of raisins and cored an apple, finely slicing it with a kitchen mandoline. When the trays were done, I emptied the contents of both into a large bowl and tossed them with the other ingredients.

The result was rather delicious and also surprisingly filling. I didn’t think the cabbage was that large but the recipe said a 600g cabbage would serve two and we got what I’d estimate as four generous portions out. I served up with a sprinkle of both nutritional yeast and dried fried onion pieces. With the variety of textures and flavours, it was delicious and I would guess pretty healthy (also probably vegan unless the pancakes contained actual dairy, and I didn’t miss the meat with this one).

19 February 2026
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ROI

ROI is often used to mean “return on investment”. It is a concept I often think about when working with computers – is it quicker to do things by hand or to invest the time in writing a script to handle them automatically. An example of where I’m presently pondering it is the music library I am developing for the training band.

I’ve now got just under 20 pieces added to it, which is more than enough to cover our concert at the end of March. However each one takes about 15 minutes by the time I have copied the source files, renamed them to fit my schema and inserted suitable entries in the database which generates the web pages to give each player the files they need. I’m using a little bit of programming magic, otherwise copying, renaming and inserting each file reference could take twice as long for the fuller sets of pieces but, if I could get it down to 2-3 minutes that would make it worth investing 2-3 hours of development time as I’ve got over 30 pieces still to go.

I’ll be a bit more conservative on my sums. Let’s say that I can manage to save 10 minutes per piece. That means each hour I put in is the equivalent of 6 songs from the expected time saving. I’m pretty sure it will take me more than an hour to fully work out but that should be enough to figure out whether I’m on track or not so, given the 30 songs backlog, it is definitely worth a punt. What I will need to do though is figure out where I’ve got to after investing the first chunk of time and then I can reassess whether I’m onto a winner or if I’m likely to lose out. That said, I’ve also got in mind that I might eventually add another 200-300 songs from the other band’s combined pads so even a relatively modest time gain might be worth it for the bigger picture.

Anyway, that’s how, from a programming perspective, I think about return on investment.

18 February 2026
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Gmail Auto-forwarding

In recent months, the ITV catch up TV service has started to frequently send an email message to verify a login. The trouble is that it goes to my email account but it is often Jane who wants to watch it and at times when I’m not able to quickly send on the message (for example, if I’m out at band a rehearsal). I will still want to log in from time to time but I don’t think you can set two email addresses on one account and, if we set up a new, shared mailbox, we’d both have to monitor it.

Tonight it struck me that I could add another filter to my incoming Gmail to forward a copy of the ITV ones across to Jane’s account. It did take a few steps to set up. First I had to put her address into the forwarding settings on my account (and verify that I was making the request). Next she had to verify that she wanted to receive the messages. There seemed to be a delay in that updating on my account so we went through that step twice. Finally, I verified that default forwarding was off (Jane doesn’t need all my emails) and set up the filter.

A little testing (a dummy message sent from another account but using the subject line I am filtering on) seems to have worked so, after a little palaver, I hope that wrinkle is now ironed out and we can both log in whenever we want.

17 February 2026
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Video stills

Being half-term, there weren’t any band rehearsals this evening so I used the time to do a bit more work on the music library website I am working on for the Training Band. I wanted to add a couple of features, one of which was links to videos of the pieces being performed. If the videos exist, isn’t that hard to find them but not everyone has good search-fu and sometimes you just want to pull up a video you can get on practising along to rather than skimming through lots that are unsuitable (for reasons such as poor sound quality or using the wrong arrangement).

What I discovered along the way was that you can extract a number of still images from any YouTube video just by crafting an image URL. For example, here is the URL for a video of me playing double bass at a folk session a couple of years ago (in The Plough, a local pub that is now sadly being demolished and the land sold off): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2A_8IYce3k. The critical bit of information is at the end after “v=” (ie. video id equals). I can take “x2A_8IYce3k” and use it in various ways. For example, here is a version that gives a copy of the selected thumbnail image at a reasonable size: https://img.youtube.com/vi/x2A_8IYce3k/maxresdefault.jpg. It is also possible to get a lower resolution image (http://img.youtube.com/vi/x2A_8IYce3k/0.jpg) or, by changing 0.jpg to 1.jpg, 2.jpg or 3.jpg, to get some stills clipped out of the video (at a size smaller still). It isn’t something most people will want every day but just the ticket for what I needed. Hat tip to snailedlt for the stackoverflow post which gave me the information I needed.

BTW, if you were curious but didn’t get round to clicking the link, here is the video using WordPress’s built in video-embed code:

16 February 2026
by wpAdmin
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Swede Chips

This week I discovered that the thought of making chips from swede instead of potatoes wasn’t entirely unprecedented. We tried it yesterday and they were quite tasty, particularly with generous amounts of salt and vinegar. This batch had been preboiled (in swede form) before I peeled and chopped them but most recipes suggest you can cook them from raw so that will be my next thing to try. That and possibly also the concept of sprinkling on a handful of parmesan cheese a few minutes before they are done to add a bit more flavour.