Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

9 February 2026
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Key Holiday

On Friday I popped down to the allotment after a slightly longer break than I had planned… only to find that my key for the gate padlock was missing! I thought I was going to have to contact the council and pay the fee for a replacement.

After doing a search at home, I remembered that the set of keys the band uses for getting into rehearse at Thorpe Acre church had gained a mysterious extra key two or three weeks ago. At the time, I thought it was odd but, thinking back, I wondered if that was where my key had gone? Since accidentally dropping the band key in a flower pot outside my front door towards the end of last year (it is so light and flimsy compared to the other keys I normally carry) I had got in the habit of putting it onto my key ring if I was looking after it that week.

On Sunday night, I was able to check and the mystery key looks very much like the one I was missing. I haven’t tried it yet but I’m certain that what was lost is now found! I must have accidentally got it caught up sometime after Christmas. I think it was early January when I last visited the allotment and it has either been too cold or too wet to make it worth visiting since then.

Mystery (hopefully) solved.

8 February 2026
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Dumplings Sans Suet

Dinner today was a beef and mushroom stew and Jane decided she wanted dumplings with it. It’s an easy recipe… if you have suet in the cupboard. Fortunately, a quick bit of research suggested that suet wasn’t an essential component. In the end, I used plain flour with butter as the fat component (slightly over half fat to flour), a pinch of salt, a sprinkle of dried tarragon and half a teaspoon of baking powder. Actually, they turned out okay; although it it looks like baking, it is a recipe you can treat more like a stew, throwing in what you’ve got.

Since we’re not out of the cold weather yet, I should get some more chances to experiment before the season for winter stews is finished.

7 February 2026
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Seeds purchased (2026)

I’ve made my first seed purchases of the year – some chillis and some sweet peas. Both are seeds that I can be starting any time now (although certainly with some extra heating for the chillis). Time to get going on the gardening year.

6 February 2026
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The Shakespeare of Christianity?

Ian and I have recently started reading Augustine’s Confessions together in a modern translation by Peter Northcutt. It will take us a while, not just because it is quite a hefty volume but because we only catch up every month or two. However, both of us were feeling excited about the project, having read and discussed the first book of the volume.

I speculated that perhaps Augustine could be called the “Shakespeare of Christianity”. Just like the Bard of Avon had a huge influence on the English language, Augustine has a reputation for making an indelible mark on the development of Christian theology. Reading the work, it seemed remarkably contemporary, in part a testament to Northcutt’s translation but also because people have not changed that much over the last millennia or two and Augustine wrote things that still echo today.

Earlier in the week, I’d been looking at Microsoft’s Co-pilot AI tool, which it seems keen to encourage you to use at every turn. I have my doubts about AI but I spotted there was a “Deep Research” option so I set that off on looking into whether others had used the same turn of phrase. TLDR; it didn’t find any examples of academic or other published material using the phrase although it suggested that there were several ways in which it could be appropriate.

I’m still not entirely trusting of Co-pilot to do research and it’s sycophantic tone makes me more rather than less suspicious. However, perhaps I have managed to come up with a novel idea. I’d be interested both if anyone can suggest any prior art that proves co-pilot missed something obvious or observations from those better informed than me about both Augustine and Shakespeare on whether the comparison is worthwhile or fatuous.

5 February 2026
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Here are your parts

We’ve recently had an influx of new people at the Charnwood Training Band, which is wonderful. It fills in some gaps where people had moved on and we’ve also gone from not having any French Horns (for as long as I’ve played with the group) to sometimes having three of them. One consequence though is that we need to make sure new players have music to work from.

Working with the band’s librarian, I have been developing an online system for doing this. My eureka moment this week was figuring out that I can both stop the music being available more widely than it ought to be and not bewilder players with too many choices by ask them to login with just the email address we already use for our third-party online events system. If I’ve got a table that stores their name, the section of the band they belong to and (for security) a hashed version of their email address, I can hook up the email to a suitable selection of parts. It is safe enough for our purposes and means nobody needs to remember an extra password.

Band members probably know the email addresses of some of the other members but we’d share the parts with them if they wanted anyway. Sometimes people do move from one instrument to another – I went from electric bass to tuba although, in that case, both are part of the bass section. I’ll also need to think about whether there is a similarly simple way to give certain people, like the conductor and librarian a “golden key” allowing them to see everything.

Tonight I finished the programming groundwork. Now I need to complete the data table and start filling in the gaps in what is available to share.

4 February 2026
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Black to Blue

I have two Lamy fountain pens. One I’ve been using for about eight years, with black ink, and one I got two or three years ago, with purple ink. Recently I realised that somewhere I had picked up a Lamy cartridge with blue ink. I suspect it was accidentally packed with black cartridges and I didn’t notice because I normally buy multiple packs at a time.

I decided to put it in the black pen and I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t immediately start flowing with blue ink. Because I normally stick with the same colours and I haven’t experienced blockages, I don’t normally clean the pens on each colour change. After a little while, the blue did start to appear although tinged black and then eventually more blue.

What surprised me though was that it hasn’t yet settled down two or three days later. I’m now sometimes getting blue and sometimes it drifts back to near black. To be honest, I’m quite enjoying the effect and, since it is only for personal note-taking, I am happy to keep watching it but it isn’t what I expected. I’m quite intrigued to see if I get similar vacillation when I put the next black cartridge in or whether the darker colour takes over more quickly. In addition, it will give me some idea of how many pages I can write between changes – another useful bit of information about my tools and materials.

3 February 2026
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Sleeting Commute?

When I came out of band tonight, it wasn’t just cold but also sleeting. Looking out of the window just now, it is lightly settling. With my new commute (breakfast table to home office) that wouldn’t bother me at all but tomorrow I’m going in for my first morning shift at the University since mid-December. I’ve got a small number of these shifts booked in this month, to help with the ongoing Windows 11 upgrade project. It is a little extra pocket money on top of my regular wage but mainly it provides an opportunity to maintain my contacts in the IT team there and do some labour which isn’t just staring at a screen and tapping on a keyboard (well, that and intensive thinking!).

Ah well, I’ve got suitable clothing if it does settle and the walk will do me good.

2 February 2026
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Wall Clip

I recently printed this paper clip from a model on Makerworld:

Paper Clip

The holding power comes from a separate cylinder that keeps the clip under enough tension to stop the papers pushed into it from falling out. The original was intended to be fastened to a wall with a sticky pad but I used what is called a “negative part” to create a hole in the back. That means it fits over the screw I already had in the wall.

I put it up on Friday and the calendar I mounted with it is holding firm so far, so I’m confident that it is a functional design.

1 February 2026
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Cache Control

I recently got the keys to the website for my church and I had a bright idea this morning after a study guide was given out. I could post a new entry each day for the 100 days it covers to the blog on the website, providing visitors with current information and gently ensuring that older items get squeezed further back. The site runs on WordPress, so writing some posts was easy. The trouble was that I posted the first one and I could see it on the browser I’d done the update on but my pastor couldn’t see it on her computer. It turned out I also couldn’t see it on my machine when using a different browser!

After some investigation to try and work out if only certain categories or authors were displayed on the live site for regular visitors, I discovered that wherever the site is hosted insists on caching material. On a busy site, it can make things more responsive because it builds an updated page for the first visitor and sends a static copy of that to the next few thousand people to come along. For a busy site, that could be a boon but I don’t think it is a real benefit for a small site like ours. Also, it doesn’t automatically rebuild when new content is posted creating a gap between what authors and everyone sees.

I spotted a cache purging button (now pressed, and that seems to have cleared the problem) and some cache time limits, which I have reduced. New material should now be available in an hour or less rather than about three days! I’ll see how it does with the post scheduled for tomorrow morning and consider where I could reduce the time further or discover an “update cache” button. Still, problem solved for now.

31 January 2026
by wpAdmin
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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.