Wulf's Webden

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11 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Did the Guns Stop Firing?

Perhaps it was because I led a short Act of Remembrance at church on Sunday but I wanted to also deliberately take a pause for myself today. How though to not get distracted and end up otherwise engaged at 11am. I had a brainwave and turned the radio on. To be more accurate, I turned the Radio 4 stream on via the BBC Sounds app on my iPad but, for the first time in a long while, I was listening to radio as it was being broadcast rather than catching up days or weeks later.

At 11am the announced reminded us that, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns of the Great War fell silent. It is a wonderfully poetic phrase, using repetition to mark a point to remember but, for the next two minutes, I tried to not get distracted by the question of whether the guns actually did fall silent at that point.

It clearly is a question that had been asked before. Google was keen to autocomplete my search on “when was the last shot fired in ww1” and also offered options for WWII, Vietnam and other conflicts. The AI overview boldly stated that the last artillery shell was fired at 10:59:59 and that, somewhere in that minute, the last soldier (American Private Henry Gunther) was killed while charging a German machine gun nest. To be honest, I expected that most of the fighting would have been coming to an end a few days earlier but the answer seemed suspiciously precise. If a shell was fired in the last second (without any digital timers) it would probably have landed a few seconds after the “magical” 11am mark.

Fortunately the first actual link was to a more nuanced page from the UK Government’s history site. That notes that the end of the fighting was somewhat more fuzzy. It was hard to get the message to troops who had been cut off from their communication lines and some of the commanders pushed as long as they could. For example, American General John Pershing ordered new assaults on the morning of 11 November and later had to face a congressional hearing to explain why so many men were sent to their deaths when the end was imminent. Furthermore – a fact I didn’t know – the armistice was only a temporary cease fire and had to be renewed four times before Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) officially ended the war.

History is about life and life is not cut-and-dried. However that is not a good reason to pass by the date and time that has become pinned on this modern tradition. The guns did not fall silent at that exact moment but o that they had and o that they would cease again, not to restart.

10 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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How to Cook ThAIt

I’m pretty sure that Ann Reardon, of the YouTube channel “How to Cook That” is not an AI generated bot. I’ve been watching her informational, food themed videos since long before it became possible to generate a fairly realistic video just by telling a computer what you had in mind. However, in the the video below she does and excellent job of showing the kind of clues to look for to tell if other videos are likely to be fake.

Is there a problem with a computer generated video on a food related topic. There doesn’t have to be but the “person” presenting it has never tasted the food. There is little guarantee that the “food” they make is palatable or, in some cases, even edible. Worse still is the fact that such videos are often used to market fake products or to extract details about enquirers for nefarious purposes.

They have got very good and often the best clue now is that you’ve seen a spate of other remarkably similar videos with different “people” and different settings but exactly the same movements and script. Watch Ann’s video though where she also goes through some other traits that, for now at least, still remain as common giveaways.

9 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Three String Bass?

Unsurprisingly, I often get information about music gear popping up in my YouTube feed. One of the things that caught my eye in the past week was a collaboration between Loog Guitars and Fender to put out some 3 string basses and guitars with nods to classic Fender instruments (like this one). Fender are still in my bad books but I’m also not sure about whether a three stringed bass is a good choice for a child.

Loog suggest it is an easy way into playing guitar – better, in their estimation, than a ukulele. I’m a lot less sure. I do agree that someone learning an instrument needs more than an instrument shaped toy although, honestly, a lot of kids really just want an instrument shaped toy to bash around as they play. It is also true that playing a ukulele is not quite the same as playing a guitar. However, the skills are directly transferable and it is also true that a three stringed bass is not a regular bass. There’s nothing wrong with three stringed instruments but the range of notes and strings available is a fundamental characteristic of chordophonic instruments.

In particular, I think there are two significant obstacles placed in the way of those who want to learn rather than just to use a prop to support their imagination and play. Firstly, if you diligently learn scales, riffs and chords, you will have to relearn when switching up. I’ve been playing six string basses for more than half my playing lifetime and I’ve also spent a long time on alternative tunings but I’d say that I am most confident finding notes on the EADG bass fretboard I first learned on. I reckon that someone who makes a serious start on a three string bass is going to take a while not to favour those three strings when they get a regular bass. Secondly, a lot of available learning material assumes four strings so there will be plenty of stuff – including all sorts of classic songs – that will be difficult or impossible when you haven’t got that range under your fingers.

I won’t be adding a Loog guitar to my collection and I would be inclined to advise others against them for this reason. I’d be much happier if they presented themselves as a different type of instrument rather than pretending to be a learning tool to work towards actual guitars or basses.

8 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Remembrance Sunday 2026

Poppies and Chamomile

I was asked to say something in this morning’s service at Hathern Baptist Church to mark Remembrance Sunday. I used the picture above (actually taken on my allotment just after I started work on it but it could have been on Flanders Field) and the following words:

Across the UK and beyond, many will take time to mark Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day on 11 November. That is why our worship team is a little smaller today, because some of them are with their cadet squad for the town event in Loughborough. The so-called “Great War”, which ended with the Armistice of 1918, left deep scars on many nations and it was appropriate that an annual act of remembrance was instituted. Sadly, it was a mere 21 years before the “Second World War” began. There have been many conflicts since which we and our allies have been involved with, sometimes for excellent reasons and sometimes on less defensible grounds. Let us stand if we are able and take two minutes in silence before the Lord to remember the brave and the fallen, to pray for wisdom for those who wield military power and for mercy and shelter for those who suffer unjustly because of international conflict.

7 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Not Ahead on Fashion

This afternoon I walked round Loughborough town centre looking for a hat. I’ve got a fedora I picked up in Oxford years ago but it has seen better days so I’m after something similar. If I’d wanted a beanie or a flat cap, I’d have been fine but the nearest I could get were some felt homburgs, which didn’t look durable enough.

It is the kind of thing I’d prefer to buy in person rather than online so I’ll just have to keep my eyes open… and my head up.

6 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Weather Apps

I listened to an interesting episode of Sliced Bread on BBC Sounds this evening, all about weather apps. They didn’t come up with a definitive “best” app, partly because all of them are based on modelling of the inherently chaotic weather system. Short term predictions are getting fairly reliable, as long as you interpret some of the phrases like “50% chance of rain” properly, but once you get a few days out, they all become less reliable, particularly in unsettled general conditions.

The meteorological expert on the programme said he tended to use the Met Office app. I still refer to that on my phone although I tend to refer to the Apple service on my iPad and actually find the Microsoft offering quite helpful on my Windows box and perhaps the most likely to tell me the same thing as I see looking out of the window!

One of his other comments was that he liked maps and though people were missing out by preferring location-based summaries. I would concur with that. One of my favourite features in the Microsoft one is the map that shows where it is detecting rain clouds. You can see what is going on now and also how they have shifted recently, helping make a better guess to the all important question of “if I pop out now, am I likely to get soaked before I come back?”

5 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Food Waste Collections

It seems like a long time ago now that the local council told us that food waste collections were coming and at least a month since the new bins arrived. There’s a small one for indoors and a larger one to put out for collection. Finally we got to this week when we were able to start putting the larger bin out alongside the other regular collections (refuse this week, recycling next week).

We did actually manage to scrape together a few bits to go out. Vegetable peelings and trimmings and other things continue to be directed towards home composting and we try to minimise the waste of actual food but there are a few things that don’t fall under either heading, like bones or teabags. That isn’t the contents of the teabags, which are excellent for composting, but the bags themselves which take a long time to break down in a home compost heap. I imagine that they will go down quicker in whatever kind of commercial scale operation takes all the collected food waste.

4 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Small boiler

Having had our new gas boiler replaced this week, we’ve now had to replace another kind of boiler. Our electric kettle, bought from Lidl in July on what I termed “gadget day“, stopped working. Jane checked the fuse with no joy, so I’m pretty sure the microcontroller inside the machine has gone (the bit that would detect power, water temperature and button presses, return a temperature reading to the display and turn on an appropriate LED light based on that reading).

I’ve spent a while looking online at various options. Variable temperature kettles aren’t uncommon but the reviews of the cheaper ones often mention problems like randomly breaking after a short time while the expensive ones are simply very expensive for what ought to be a fairly simple set of operations.

I’d almost settled on a Bosch one from Argos at about £65 but, meanwhile, popped back to Lidl to return the faulty one. Since it isn’t just that I’ve decided I don’t want it but the device is faulty, it was a no-quibble return and refund. However, on wandering round afterwards to pick up a few essential groceries, I found another Silvercrest kettle in the middle aisle.

This one was about £25 and less fancy than the one I took back but it covers all the essentials. The controls are in the base rather than directly on the kettle but they do have proper buttons rather than a smooth surface that didn’t always seem to register finger presses. It only offers 70, 80, 90 and 100°C settings rather than 5°C from 40-100°C but, even with the great range of options, I only seemed to use 70, 90 and 100°C so this will be more efficient. The lights and the live temperature read out were nice-to-haves but I can live without those.

Now I’m just hoping that this one lasts somewhat longer than four months.

3 November 2026
by wpAdmin
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Heating… on

The boiler is installed and working! It has left me feeling somewhat lighter in the bank account but I think it will be worth it. We are certainly having to run far less water to get the hot taps to live up to their name. I’m also impressed with the new thermostat. It looked a bit plasticky in the photos but turns out to be impressively weighty and pretty easy to program. A good job to have done now that winter continues to draw on.

2 November 2026
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Heating… off

We’ve never been entirely satisfied with the gas boiler in our house since we moved in and, although it has been regularly serviced, it seems to more often need the pressure topping up for heating and for lots of water to be run to get it hot. After we had it serviced at the start of September we decided it was time to have it replaced. Of course, early autumn is a busy time for boiler folk, so we’re just having it fitted this week.

We’ve reached the point where the new boiler is installed, plumbed in and the gas is back on. However, our installer will have to return tomorrow to do the flush and fill that lead to its final commissioning. Fortunately we’re out for dinner with friends tonight, we’ve got an electric shower in the bathroom and a kettle downstairs. I suspect our trusty oil-filled electric heater will also get a little service to take the edge off the morning chill.

We can survive that although I’m looking forward to enjoying some improvements to heating and hot water once the process is complete by about lunchtime tomorrow. Maybe it would have been better to get it done back in the summer but, then again, would we have been able to test the heating when the ambient temperature already felt like the inside of an oven?