Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

25 March 2026
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IANAV

Many of the acronyms dreamt up as bulletin boards turned into email lists then forums and social media sites have drifted out of use. It is quite a while since I saw someone note that IANAL (I am not a lawyer), which used to be a caveat for giving legal sounding advice off the top of your head. However, it is certainly true that I am not a vintner.

We tried the first bottle of the rosé wine bottled earlier this year. It was very still, which is a good thing. The previous batch got increasingly fizzy – not regarded as a desirable attribute for red wine – and ended at the point when you would get more of a fountain than a drink! However, while it has lost the overtone of pear drops, it remains quite sour. I tried the idea of back-sweetening with icing sugar… and it produced a cloudy result that tasted like a sour drink with icing sugar in.

I think it will want another couple of months at least before we take another sample and see if time is mellowing it at all. If not, maybe we need to try it with fatty food that needs something to cut through or even just put it straight to cooking purposes? However, I wouldn’t say that the sourness tastes like vinegar so there is a reasonable chance that it will improve.

24 March 2026
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Charity Gig on Saturday

This Saturday evening Jane and I are playing with the Charnwood Training Band at Sileby Methodist Church (King Street, Sileby, LE12 7NA). The performance starts at 7pm (expect doors open from about 6:30pm) and we are raising money for The Alzheimer’s Society.

We had our final pre-gig rehearsal tonight so, although we won’t be perfect, I’m confident we’ll put on a decent show. I’m also doing a double bass and flute duet with a flautist friend and there will be a few other party pieces to look forward to as well.

23 March 2026
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Keeping Sharp

I still haven’t mastered the art of sharpening but I do realise that different types of blade benefit from different tools and techniques. For gardening blades, I recently bought a Sharpal 129N which has a very aggressive action but seems good for thick, heavy blades. I don’t think it would be the tool for the refined edges needed on kitchen knives but, for something like a hoe, the tungsten carbide adds a quick edge.

It has done well in a couple of tests at home – I’ll take it to the allotment later this week when I’ve got some weeding to get on with and where the diamond rod I was using seems to have lost most of its effectiveness.

21 March 2026
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A Stroll Round Millook

Route

In the most recent edition of the Broadleaf magazine from the Woodland Trust, we spotted a walk not too far from where we were headed on a recent trip to Devon. It was about 10km in total but the map above shows the actual route we took – a bit shorter but a decent stroll with the ups and downs.

Click on the image for more pictures for the walk, which was a good use of another beautiful spring day.

20 March 2026
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A Sunny Day at Rosemoor

We’ve visited RHS Rosemoor this week, taking advantage of the glorious spring weather being enjoyed by much of the UK at the moment:

Rosemoor Panorama

I took this panorama shot on my iPad, which seemed to add almost a soft filter effect to some of brighter areas… or that could just be a side effect of lots of detail (9000px wide) shrunk down to fit any screen I’ve been able to view it on.

17 March 2026
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An Even Split

As I’m going through a phase of doing a lot of file editing using a command line terminal (SSH to a different machine), I am building my skills with Vim as opposed to gVim – in other words, no mouse!

One useful trick I’ve discovered in the last week or two is for helping deal with split windows. I knew the commands to introduce horizonal and vertical splits (:sp and :vsp respectively) and I could move between the sections (Ctrl-W and then a direction key) but I wasn’t sure how to resize the partitions. Most of the time I just want them evened up and it turns out Ctrl-W = is the necessary command sequence.

It sounds obvious when you know it, which makes it easy to remember and is proving very helpful indeed.

16 March 2026
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Pepper Seedlings

In the last week or so the seeds I’ve been getting going have started to appear, including these chilli peppers ‘De Cayenne’ (Capsicum annuum). This year, I’ve kept them over a water held at about 27°C, making the soil about 24°C and, since the seedlings appeared, I’ve had grow lights on for 12 hours a day (they sit in a fairly shaded bit of the kitchen).

Pepper 'De Cayenne' Seedlings

I was wondering how to get them out of the tiny pots I started in but still give them heat and then I remembered that we had a few 2l bottles (from sparkling water) in the recycling. I’ve put the strongest seedlings in individual larger pots and moved the heat pad so it should service this and the original propagator. Next week, there might be more seedlings to pot up but I’ll call time on the ones that haven’t come to anything because it will be time to get the tomatoes going.

15 March 2026
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Testing Patience

I watched a couple more episodes of the detective drama Patience today and crossed from season 1 to season 2. I was somewhat surprised to discover that the lead police detective had been replaced by a new character who is decidedly less sympathetic, at least in the first episode. Perhaps it will all settle down but it would have been nice to at least get a goodbye scene with DI Metcalfe. It seemed very out of character for her to disappear to an entirely different part of the country and just send a letter to her protégée to say she wasn’t coming back!

14 March 2026
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Blue to Black

I’m now back to black ink in my Lamy cartridge pen. I ended up giving the pen a good wash between changes so I can’t say how long it would have taken to stop issuing a mixture of blue and black but I expect it would have been less time than when changing to the lighter colour. What I can see is that it took about a month (2 Feb – 1 Mar) to run through the cartridge writing between a line or two and several pages each day, so it looks like having an ink pen isn’t too expensive a habit to maintain.

Buying in batches, the ink costs around 85p a cartridge although I might consider experimenting with a converter so that I could refill from an ink bottle rather than generating another piece of waste plastic every month. Working at home, I’m less likely to be caught away from my “filling station”, although there is the potential to get very messy!