Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

29 May 2026
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String ’em up

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been getting tied up in knots. My mission has been to make use of the anchors I installed in the soil before planting out tomatoes in the polytunnel and running strings up to the support bar. At the moment, the plants are small and don’t need much support but they are putting on rapid growth. Coming out of the pot and into the soil will do that for many plants and tomatoes are particularly vigorous. Last year I injured my arm in mid-May and didn’t get the plants properly tied up; a decent amount of fruit but it would have been easier to tend to and harvest the plants if it hadn’t been such a jungle.

At the bottom, I’ve got an eyelet to tie through and I’ve opted for a bowline. It is a fairly simple knot (although I’ve had to spend some time revising it). It holds firm under load and should be possible to untie at the end of the season.

At the top, I need to fasten round a horizontal bar and add that load. For this one, I’m using an adjustable grip hitch. I don’t think I’ve mastered the tying of it and I’m not sure it is the best choice for some of the string I am using but (with the help of some hand drawn diagrams) I’ve made a reasonable job of it so far and it should improve as I practise with the remaining plants.

28 May 2026
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Gathered to Go

The Gathered to Go album I joined the choir for back in January got released this week. Officially it came out yesterday but it is propagating round various online platforms more slowly – the YouTube version came out today:

Every online play provides a fraction of a cent and sometime next spring I’ll be totting up all the plays of all the Jubilate and Resound Songs and using that to figure out how to split up what was actually received in the account so that artists get the right royalty payment. Online streams are good because they make it more likely that other people will also discover the songs but, having been behind the scenes for the first time, it is very clear that direct purchases support the charity and the artists much more. For that, see the Jubilate website.

One caveat – I think this is a great project with some fantastic songs but don’t expect to be able to pick out my voice in the choir parts (or perhaps that is a bonus!).

27 May 2026
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Southern Folk Rhapsody

Yesterday I pressed the button on a new piece of music for the concert band:

It combines a bunch of tunes I know fairly well but I suspect some of them (except Swing Low, Sweet Chariot) will be new to some of the my fellow players. What particularly attracted me though was that there is nothing particularly difficult about any individual part but there are some wonderful bits of orchestration as Michael Sweeney takes us from one piece to another. I think we can make a good job of it but I don’t think we’ll nail it on the first couple of tries… which is ideal for a piece that will make us work and get us to a worthwhile result.

26 May 2026
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SVG Icons

Today I was looking for an efficient way to include a PDF icon on my website for the concert band music. I remembered that the Bootstrap CSS library used to have something called glyphicons but, while I was looking for them, I stumbled across their set of icons. I remember experimenting with SVG graphics a long time ago, when it was a new idea on the web, but this means I can have neat, scalable icons that take up a fraction of the space that a JPEG or PNG or other rasterised image format would.

I haven’t figured out how to embed them in this blog or you’d probably have a row of them dancing across the page but I think this is going to be a very useful extra snippet of knowledge for me.

25 May 2026
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Pen Magnet

It is useful having a pen available in the kitchen and, for quite a while, I’ve been keeping a biro on the fridge using a magnet held on with an elastic band wrapped round several times. It has been a good solution but the elastic band is now perishing and it was time to work out what to do next. I suppose the simple solution would have been another elastic band or perhaps a dab of hot glue but I’ve got a 3D printer so today I’ve been designing, prototyping and printing a custom solution.

I observed that this particular biro has a screw cap at the end opposite the writing point. I realised that, if this was unscrewed a bit it would still be firm but could also hold a ring in place which, in turn, could hold a small fitting to house the magnet.

Draft one came together quickly but a couple of the measurements weren’t quite right. In particular, I’d neglected to leave enough depth for the magnet so the housing wasn’t flush to the barrel but bent away from it. I ended up doing three more prints, with tweaks between each. The first was a partial print to check the lower section with the ring and housing. Next I realised that rather than a weak ring, I could use a rounded triangular shape (actually a hull between a circle and a rounded rectangle) to add more strength. The dimensions were still a bit off but my final version solved that as well as adding an extra hole to make it easier if I want to push the magnet out in future: it was pressed in tightly and a bit of a pain to extract from failed prototypes.

The pen now sits back on the fridge looking neater than it ever has before and, meanwhile, I am starting work on the next design project…

24 May 2026
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Looking Down on the Back Garden – May 2026

Looking Down on the Back Garden - May 2026

I normally like to wait for an overcast morning to take my regular photos of the back garden but there’s a chance we aren’t going to get one of those before May runs out. Light cloud cover diffuses the light and reduces the contrast in the photo. The big story of this picture is that, as is normally expected in late spring, there is lots of growth and plenty of splashes of colour, even if the conditions this was taken under make it a little harder to see.

23 May 2026
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Wood Filament

Reprinting my plant supports with the drier PETG hasn’t yielded perfect results but they are significantly better. However, I’m taking my focus off that as I realised I had enough points (earned in various ways, including interacting with the community and posting my own models) on my MakerWorld acccount to get a gift voucher which would cover a couple of rolls of filament.

I got some PLA Tough+ in silver, which may obviate the need for messing with PETG (testing needed on how it stands up to environmental exposure) and some PLA Wood, in rosewood colour. I’ve been wanting to try wood filaments for a long time and I’m presently running off a lightweight cable holder that I’ve done multiple times before.

It certainly smells nicer than other filaments I’ve printed and I’m looking forward to evaluating the finished print tomorrow once it has fully cooled down. I’ve got a number of projects in mind where something that looks at least as wooden as plywood will be a real boon but I’ve learned that it is probably better to wait a little while than impatiently ripping it off the board just after it has finished.

22 May 2026
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Drying Filament

One of the subjects 3D printing channels often talk about is drying filaments for better results. The theory is that some filaments, particularly more hygroscopic (water-attracting) ones, benefit from or need treatment to dry them out and prevent them picking up moisture. Since I mainly print with PLA, which isn’t regarded as overly susceptible to this problem, it isn’t an area I’ve felt I’ve needed to pay much attention to. However, I’ve recently had my PETG out (still on the original roll I bought at the start of 2025) and I noticed I was getting a lot more stringing than I remembered. Messing around with the setting and following suggestions about things like changing the retraction length didn’t seem to make much difference and so I decided it was time to look into filament drying.

You can buy a variety of filament dryers but the cheaper ones are still expensive and the expensive ones can run to £80 or more. I did some research last night but decided not to press the button on any of them. Instead, I’ve experimented today with the DIY option that is sometimes offered. You take an old filament box, cut one side off and punch holes in the other. You then set the heat bed to a suitable level, using the fact that the printers typically now have printing beds with precise temperature control. Pop on a spool of filament, cover it with the box, and leave for several hours.

I used 60°C and left the spool on the bed for about 4 hours. I’ve printed off a small test piece and drying the filament does seem to have done the trick. I’ll probably be printing off some more of the plant supports I was doing earlier this week and that will be the real test as that was where I was being left with a lot of cleaning up to do after the print. However, unless I post a follow-up in a few days, you can probably assume that the DIY option is a worthwhile one to consider in the average UK setting, which isn’t bone dry but certainly isn’t as humid as many places.

21 May 2026
by wpAdmin
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PDF to ChordPro

One of the tasks I came back from my residential meeting with was to convert a series of PDF chord charts into ChordPro format in readiness for a album launch next week. The chord charts are neatly laid out and come in two formats but the PDF ones compress all the chords up and the Microsoft Publisher ones spread them out too much. It was looking like it would have to be quite a manual job to work up the files, putting the right chords in the right places.

I did a quick bit of searching first and came across a useful looking website called PDF to ChordPro. This lets you drop a PDF file onto the browser, use drag and drop functionality to properly position the chords and then export it to ChordPro. Furthermore, it does this all within the browser so nothing is uploaded to, stored on or potentially lost to an external server.

I’ve bashed through a few files tonight and will finish the rest tomorrow. While it doesn’t do an instant job, I can’t think of a faster pipeline and it won’t be too long before I can proceed with two more important tests, of loading each file into an iPad app that can read ChordPro files and playing along with the tracks to check that it lines up with what people will hear.

20 May 2026
by wpAdmin
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Conjoined Bread

Later today I’m off for an overnight stay at The House of Bread, a retreat centre in South Warwickshire for a work meeting. Trustees and staff are spread round the country and most of the time we communicate online but there are times everyone gets together. This is my first such gathering since starting but I picked up that people are invited to bring some food contributions. It might be a bit of a “coals to Newcastle” thing, but I decided to bake some bread yesterday to take and share.

I cooked two large loaves and, for efficiency, baked them side by side. They ended up rather conjoined although, by cutting the merged section off, I ended up with both better looking bread and some which Jane could have… so not such a bad result, all things considered.