Wulf's Webden

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3 September 2026
by wpAdmin
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HolidAI planning

I’ve got a few days away coming up later this month so I’ve been looking up some travel information online. Since you tend to get fed AI responses and those tools are quite good at digesting useful information from the huge number of potential results, I decided to lean into it.

Tonight’s particular task was identifying some options that aren’t too far from where we are staying and which would work for us if the weather is particularly wet. I started with typing a fairly detailed question into Google rather than two or three keywords, which prompts it to prioritise an LLM generated response. Initially it gave me some information about four places within the 45 minute drive I had indicated. I asked it to give me another four options but allowed it to expand the distance to a 60 minute drive (we will be quite in the wilds). I then asked it to combine all the options and to include some information about pricing.

So far, so good. Where Google’s built in system fell down was after I’d tried to copy the results into an email to Jane and realised that they needed reformatting. It seemed to give up and I suspect I’d reached the limits of what it was willing to give me for free. However, since I’ve got Windows 11 on my main machine, I’ve also got CoPilot. I pasted in the table and my specifications for reformatting and it did a fairly good job – not quite what I asked but a usable result. It also came up with the goods when I asked it to replace all the google.com URLs with URLs that pointed directly to the locations in question.

I decided that was the point at which enough had been done. If I kept playing around, I’d end up spending more time on the prompting than I would have done on manual reformatting! However, that’s plenty of options that I can now do further research on – for example by visiting the URLs of the ones that seem most interesting and confirming opening times, prices and the like. I could also take my shortlist and, for example, ask for other attractions that are nearby, including ones that would work if the sun comes out.

Is it demonstrating true intelligence? No, but it is an enhanced form of searching as long as you know when to stop and remember to check the details before acting on them – in other words, very similar to the “wonders” that we’ve grown used to in our SatNav systems.

2 September 2026
by wpAdmin
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Out of Proportion?

Raspberry Conserve

I’m beginning to harbour a suspicion that the amount of raspberries and blackberries we are producing at the allotment is rather out of proportion to what we need. We produced a batch of raspberry conserve recently and I discovered that we already had enough homemade jam in the cupboards that we probably don’t need any more for several years!

Time to start thinking about rejigging the balance – for example, we could do with a lot more blackcurrant bushes, which produce fruit earlier in the year and which aren’t presently producing anything like a glut.

I’ll probably also drop or at least seriously reduce the jostaberry bushes, which are now quite large but barely seem to produce any fruit at all. Perhaps a decent gooseberry or two would make a good substitute? They say grow what you want to eat but I’m definitely ready to add the second part, “… but not too much of it”.

30 August 2026
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Pork Belly

Today’s dinner was pork belly in the air fryer. I more or less followed the method given in this video:

My results weren’t quite as good as illustrated but starting with a piece of pre-scored pork belly from a supermarket rather than an unscored surface would then be pierced with tiny holes probably contributed. It was still pretty tasty.

Bonus points to the courgette accompaniment. I cooked up wedges that I’d season with salt, pepper, five spice, onion powder, courgette powder and beetroot powder. That last one gave an excellent colour and the result was almost as “meaty” as the pork belly!

29 August 2026
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Design and Print… with a time limit

This morning we were helping with a work party at church and one of the tasks was cleaning all of the children’s toys. One was a toy kitchen and I spotted that the latch for one of the doors had broken, meaning the door wouldn’t stay shut and making the edge of the door into a hazard as it projected out. Since there were quite a lot of other people working there, I decided to pop home to design and print a replacement. The twist here was that I was under a strict time limit – Jane and I needed to be gone by midday so I had about 1.5 hours to design the part, get it printed and get back to church to install it.

Door Clip

Measuring and design takes a while but the real challenge is that, to see how a piece comes out, you need to print it – 15 minutes plus cooling time before lifting it off the bed for the final piece. That meant I couldn’t work through many iterations.

I started with the base plate – fairly simple but a bit more than just a rectangle with a couple of holes. Only having the broken piece to hand, I had to stick fairly closely to it otherwise I might have got back to church and found it didn’t fit. I did print a base plate while I worked on the next bit of the design, to check that my measuring up was good.

Where I did slightly fall down was the two cylinders that catch the other bit of the latch. On the first complete version, they were a bit on the small side. I redesigned to what you see above in grey but time was running short and I had to get back. It turns out that first version did work although I think this one will be more robust and I’ll switch it round sometime soon.

Anyway, it was a good exercise to push my skills by working under a time limit and, pending seeing how it works out in use, I’m pleased with the result.

28 August 2026
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Songs I Didn’t Play

Tonight I had planned to go to the Open Mic at the Hathern Club but, by the time I’d finished working in the garden, catching up with something that had come up at work and then thinking about dinner, my time to finish working on songs and get across there had passed. The songs I would have played were:

  • Jolene (Dolly Parton – RIP)
  • Emmaretta (Deep Purple)
  • Valerie (The Zutons / Amy Winehouse)

The first is a song by a woman about a woman. It’s “conceit” is that the protagonist is asking the antagonist not to steal her “man” away. That is an unusual approach and a beautiful song which I love to play despite the gender issue.

The Deep Purple song is less well known and is the one I was least confident in. I’ve played it before but it was a while ago. This one is a fairly straightforward song by a man / men to a woman.

I was going to finish on another song about a named woman. Here it was originally written by a man but perhaps became more famous because of Amy Winehouse’s cover. That was the equivalent of me singing Jolene although Winehouse definitely had the better voice! I’ve seen a video that features the real woman behind the song, which adds some fascinating background to the song:

27 August 2026
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Rough Shapes

Sometimes in 3D design, you want the opposite of the smooth shapes I mentioned earlier this week. It can even be, as it was for me, another stage of the same project. Depending on your software, it may be easy, hard or impossible to create them at the modelling stage but an excellent solution which I tried out for the first time this week is BumpMesh, created by Stefan of CNC Kitchen. You can import your model, apply a texture and then export the result to slice and print.

The result I got was very impressive and I’m looking forward to finding more projects where I can make use of it. As with most things in the 3D printing world, it is always worth trying a small sample first. I did that by virtue of the object I was printing not having enough support and falling over partway through the print. Not only did I add better support but I also realised I’d dialled the texture depth down to the point where it look just like bad printing rather than the wood grain effect I was after.

26 August 2026
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Looking Down on the Back Garden – August 2026

If you click on the picture below and scroll back through my album of garden shots from the same position over the last few years, you can tell it has been a long, hard summer:

Looking Down on the Back Garden - August 2026

Some stuff is doing well but a lot of the plants are pretty dried out compared to August in most previous years. Still, at least we’re starting to get some rain again and things are beginning to green up once more.

25 August 2026
by wpAdmin
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Smooth Shapes

This evening I’ve been working on some 3D design where I’m trying to create a moderately complex shape with a degree of rounding. I already had the basic design worked out in Inkscape but, if you simply import an SVG image into OpenSCAD, you can’t apply any profile to the top and bottom edges. For that you need the shape expressed as a path.

I spent some time looking into a library called PathBuilder. I figured out how to extract the path details from an SVG file and load them up as a shape but got stuck on converting the file into a valid path that I could use tools like BOSL2’s offset_sweep on. In other words, after a long period of messing around, I wasn’t really any further forward than just importing the SVG.

In the end, I turned to “turtle” graphics to work out my path. For what I did, I probably would have been better off just manually setting up the points but the turtle approach would allow me more control over creating more complex shapes like arcs rather than just jumping through a series of [x,y] points. Anyway, job done… I think. I’ll let the test piece finish off overnight and then I can test it in the morning.