Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

11 May 2025
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After a little break

It was good to be back at church this morning although, on the music side, I have confess that I forgot how I wired myself in and ended up starting off with the bass going through what should have been my vocal mic channel!

Part of that was probably down to a slightly different set up. Rather than taking my combo amp, I took my amp head and a new (to me) cabinet that a friend gave me yesterday. It has a single 12″ speaker, technically set up for guitar and only rated for 80W. However, it has enough juice to handle the volume I need to get a clear bass foldback tone – I just have to remember not to crank the amp, which could easily drive it too hard. The big advantage is that I can leave the cabinet at church and just carry the (tiny, class D) amp head with me for rehearsals and services… or perhaps that should be the “small” advantage?

10 May 2025
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Green May

Allotment

The allotment is looking quite verdant at the moment. There isn’t much to harvest just at the moment, unless you want to overdose on lovage, but things like broad beans and cabbages are well on their way to being ready and I came back with a good handful of tree spinach that had sprung up of its own accord. It wasn’t where I wanted it but its distinctive look meant I could easily set it aside from the rest of the weeding and take it home for dinner.

9 May 2025
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BOSL2

When I started using the OpenSCAD program to design 3D models it was fascinating but also often frustrating. Programming a model and adjusting parameters to shape it was powerful but simple things, like putting a fillet (rounded join) between two adjacent planes required careful thought. I seemed to spend a lot of my design time trying to figure out how to accomplish tasks that, on the surface, seemed like they ought to be simple.

I sometimes tried creating my own submodules to make things easier and also explored various packages other people had put together. Eventually, after some disappointments with downloads that seemed buggy, I came back to the OpenSCAD website and looked at their list of libraries. I decided to give the Belfry OpenSCAD Library v2 (ie. BOSL2) a go, despite the daunting amount of options it offered.

A couple of months down the line, I’m still far from mastering it but I rarely find myself pondering how to build my own custom libraries as BOSL2 does so much, so well. For example, I’ve recently designed a couple of lids to fit some glass storage tubes I got from my mum. Using cyl() rather than OpenSCAD’s built in cylinder(), I could quickly stack a couple of disks to create the lid and give them rounded edges. I wanted to add some knurling to the larger disk to improve grip and it turns out BOSL2 has me covered there, too, with a texture option.

In other words, thus far, it has functioned as a brilliant example of what a coding library should be. To borrow a line originally used to describe the Perl language, it makes easy things easy and hard things possible.

8 May 2025
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Gimp 3

A month or two back, I spotted that the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) had finally reached its 3.0 release. I can’t remember exactly what version number it was on when I first started using the program for digital images but I do know that it was over quarter of a century ago (late 1990s)! Small updates come reasonably often (we’re already on 3.0.2, which I’ve updated to) but bigger changes happen slowly.

The biggest practical change I’ve found so far is that you can now go back and redo the various filters that you have applied to your work. My normal process for digital photos would be to create a copy of the base layer, adjust the colour and then (after any cropping or resizing), create a copy of that layer and apply sharpening. Now I can just work on the base image but, if I decide an effect wasn’t quite right, I can go back and edit it individually without adding the extra layers. That alone makes the upgrade an essential step forward – a little time saved working on each photo will add up to a lot of time saved overall.

I expect I’ll find some other benefits of the upgrade too but that has been my starting point.

7 May 2025
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Gig Prep

A couple of years ago I got an opportunity to support the Broom Leys Choral Society in their annual summer concert and it has become a bit of a habit. Today was the first of two rehearsals to pin down the preparations.

This one was without the choir although a few of the members came along to sing their solo or small ensemble pieces with bass and drums joining their regular piano accompaniment. I’d done a fair amount of preparation but I also took the precaution of recording the whole session. I’ll do some more work before next week’s rehearsal with the choir, which will help me add in notes and corrections that I didn’t manage to jot down while playing and make sure I am set to give an excellent performance.

Details of the concert are below:

6 May 2025
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Tolpuddle

Tolpuddle is a quiet village in the Dorset and the kind of place you could pass through without a second thought if you didn’t have a personal connection to it… except for the fact that, almost 200 years ago, an injustice was done that ended up furthering the cause of the workers rights that its perpetrators sought to destroy. We visited last week and spent some time in the excellent (and free) museum that continues to tell the story.

In the early 1830s, conditions for agricultural labourers were hard and the average wage was not really sufficient to subsist on. Six men, many of them stalwart members of the local Methodist church, agreed to form a society together but to keep the membership secret. For that, they ended up being convicted in 1834 of criminal action and deported to Australia. Rather than quelling potential trouble, it galvanised public feeling and, by the end of the decade, all six had been pardoned and returned to these shores although most later emigrated to Canada, where they kept a low profile.

For a former history student, I do remarkably little exploration of history but was glad to include my first visit to Tolpuddle on my holiday itinerary last week and learn a little more about this episode which I was aware of but only in a limited, fuzzy way.

5 May 2025
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Japandi style

Japandi Pencil Pot

I was recently given some ‘brass’ silk PLA filament. I think it is a bit too orange for an entirely convincing brass effect but it does look gorgeous, particularly with a model like this ‘Japandi’ pencil pot I printed off this afternoon. It isn’t my design (credit to S.Corp. on Makerworld for the model) but it shows off the sheen that earns the ‘silk’ part of the name.

I wasn’t familiar with the ‘Japandi’ label but, having done some further research, it apparently signifies items that combine aesthetics from Japan and Scandanavia. A more muted filament might be a better choice but I’m pleased with the result. As well as showing off the colour, it has a pleasant feel in the hand and enough heft to support it in its intended function.

3 May 2025
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Covers?

Looking ahead to next week’s weather I see that overnight temperatures are due to drop to low single digits. I wonder if I need to put covers back on any of the tender plants? I think I’ll probably take the risk and leave them off (day time temperatures will still be around the mid-teens) but I’ll be watching updated forecasts carefully.

2 May 2025
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Sketching and Scanning

Jurassic Coast Sketch - 1

Above is the other sketch I did while sitting on the shoreline of the Jurassic Coast. It was done with water soluble graphite and drawing pencils in red and ochre. It reminds me of some oriental pieces I have seen done with brushed ink.

At home I would have popped the sketchbook down on a flatbed scanner but even that leaves an unpleasant shadow down the centre line. Trying to photograph the whole piece on my iPad is impossible. Even if you managed to work out a way to hold the book open and press the shutter button, you would have fingers showing on the result.

For these sketches, I had a brainwave and I photographed each page separately, stitching them back together at the post processing stage. It worked… reasonably well. Single pages on either side of the book leaf can be persuaded to fit reasonably flat and rotated for good lighting, although you can see I didn’t get that perfect. As square pages, it is in theory reasonably easy to also correct the perspective issues if the camera wasn’t held perfectly level. However, you can see here that I didn’t manage to get the left and right to line up perfectly.

The sketch I shared yesterday was actually put together after I did this one and you can see I managed to improve. More work needed but I’m getting somewhere with it.