Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

25 January 2026
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Be Ready For a Long Journey

Jane often watches the Sunday output from Kensington Temple in London and I caught a bit this afternoon. Pastor Malcolm Duncan was doing a Q&A session and was asked how to respond to someone who was angry with God after his sister had died. It is a difficult question and, having had his own experiences of bereavement, he took a minute to gather his thoughts. His response was compassionate and wise – turn up to be with the person and turn down your inclination to try and offer words to fix the pain. What particularly struck me was the phrase “be ready for a long journey”.

I wonder if, in part, that was because it meshed with what I was speaking about at St Theo’s this morning? I wasn’t handling such a difficult question but exploring a couple of passages from the Bible, which led me to the title “being called and learning to follow”. The message was that we can treasure the moment we gave our lives to Jesus and all that, looking back, we can realise was happening around us to prepare us for it. However, what is more important today is our choice to continue walking with Jesus, following his lead.

Be ready for a long journey would have been a perfect phrase to drop into what I said. Some people have a very short journey between salvation received and salvation completed. The thief on the cross, to whom Jesus said “today you will be with me in paradise” is the most obvious example. For most of us, the journey is years or even decades in the travelling. Life is a journey and I don’t want to be found attempting it in flip-flops or without a water bottle. Even at this stage, what do I need to stock up on and what excess baggage could I leave behind?

24 January 2026
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The Burns Unit

Today was an unusual sing around session for me, in that I only led one song (You Wreck Me by Tom Petty). That was because a couple of my flautist friends came along and we took the rest of our turns to give us a modicum of rehearsal for the gig we did tonight at The Needle and Pin in Loughborough. Since it was a (slightly) Burns Night flavoured event, someone suggested we could use the moniker “The Burns Unit”.

I’m not sure anyone actually asked what name we were playing under but the gig went well and we reeled (and jigged) through a selection of Scottish folk tunes, with two flutes and me backing them up on acoustic guitar. Lots of fun and the skinny guitar strings will have helped toughen up my finger calluses for sure! Meanwhile, my personal Burns celebration and dose of haggis (Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!) will be tomorrow, on 25 January.

22 January 2026
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Catching up on Debian

I’ve been messing around with Linux, with varying degrees of success, for the best part of 30 years. I remember installing an early version of RedHat Linux and then wondering what to do with it. Two or three years later I got a chance to start using it in a webdev job I was doing and, since then, I’ve generally had some kind of Linux box to hand as well as periods of looking after multiple Linux servers. By the time I started at Oxford, I’d got onto Ubuntu Linux and stuck with that for quite a while although I also dallied with Debian when part of the OxCERT team.

Since moving up to Loughborough, my use of Linux began to tail off. I was still using Linux based webservers to host my code but doing less development at home. Mainly I used my MacBook as a Mac rather than to host a Linux client via VirtualBox and then, as the MacBook started to creak with age, I bought a Windows 10 PC. That had the Windows Subsystem for Linux on, which was just enough command line goodness to keep me going but, for a while, that was about it.

I’m getting back in the saddle though. I also picked up a Win11 laptop but discovered that the peril of an older, refurbished machine was that it soon got to the point where I couldn’t apply Windows security updates any more. I got Debian 12 installed on an external hard drive and that was about as far as I’d got… until I secure my new webdev job. Now I’m regularly booting up the laptop alongside using my (upgraded to) Win11 PC and, even on that, I’m making much extensive use of WSL.

One thing I’d never done much of though, until trying it last night, was using Linux for entertainment. In the past, it had always proved to be awkward to get media things running smoothly and I’d never had an incentive to push on that instead of using another OS. However, it turned out that after saying yes to a message allowing the use of some proprietary codecs, it was streaming away on a UK catch up service as well as any other device. That machine is still going to be primarily focused on my work tasks but it is nice to know that Debian – and probably many other distros – have caught up with the times on the media playback side… or maybe it is just me doing the catch up for myself!

21 January 2026
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Food to Play With

After visiting the library today, I took the opportunity to pop into Elf Foods (the local health food shop) and picked up a couple of ingredients I’m keen to try.

The first is agar-agar, a gelling agent derived from algae. I think I used to use during my school days in petri dishes but it is edible and has culinary applications. In particular, once it has been used to set a liquid, it will be stable up to the mid-80s Celsius – much hotter than something set with gelatin. I’ve seen a recipe for an agar set “phony baloney” based on cooked red lentils that looked intriguing so that is high up the list of things I want to try.

The other one was nutritional yeast. I’m familiar with yeast from baking and brewing and I am a marmite (yeast extract) lover. As I’ve been browsing recipe books to improve my meat-free repertoire, I’ve noticed that nutritional yeast comes up quite frequently as an ingredient. Among other things, I think it contributes certain vitamins that an omnivorous diet normally gets from meat. I’m looking forward to trying this one and seeing if I love or hate it.

20 January 2026
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Fried Courgettes

So far this month, I’ve been attempting to have a less meat heavy diet. It wouldn’t be fair to say that I’ve gone vegetarian but I’m certainly racking up more days where dead animal doesn’t feature. The way to do that is to find other things that are delightful to eat and one of my favourites has been fried courgettes.

Simply slicing them into rounds about 1cm thick and frying in a little oil until they start to colour on the faces makes them quite delicious and more so when seasoned and combined with other ingredients. I’m tempted to describe them as ‘meaty’ but what I mean by that is that they bring depth of flavour, texture, succulence and (from the oil) some fat which makes for an excellent mouth feel.

We’re not in peak courgette season yet but I think they will feature on the list of vegetables I’ll try to get going up at the allotment as we move into spring and summer. I’ll also be interested to see if I can preserve them in a way that might allow me to enjoy the same culinary benefits from my own crops beyond the end of the season.

19 January 2026
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Music to take home

The choir is into week three of the term now but at last we can take the pieces (or the pieces distributed so far) home to work on. For the first couple of weeks we were working on the main piece for May’s concert but it was needed for a “come and sing” event over the weekend. Now that’s gone I’ve got a copy to hold onto for the next few months. Of course, that also means I need to get on and do some homework!

18 January 2026
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Tag Editing

One of the handy things about MP3 files, and other digital formats, is that you can include extra information in them. For example, I’ve just updated the USB stick I use in my car to switch round some of the tracks and the extra information means I can look for a particular artist or album rather than having to dig down through a list of file names and the information is clearly displayed on the screen if a song catches my ear and I want to see what it is. A couple of months ago, I switched to MusicBee as my music player of choice – I’m still happy with it but, yesterday evening, I couldn’t find the ability to edit tags that I’d got used to with the Clementine / Strawberry line of software.

Since I’m getting back into more regular use of command line tools at the moment, I decided to look for a command line tool for a group of new files I needed to edit. The article Editing MP3 Tags on Linux led me to id3v2, which I’m fairly sure I’ve used in the past (or an earlier version of it). It isn’t as fully featured as the other suggestion of eyeD3 but it was easy to install on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) (apt install id3v2). I was able to make short work of updating the files to show the information I needed to group them together – they are demo pieces I’ll be singing on later this month but came without any tagging.

17 January 2026
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Pot holes you could drive into…

Jane and I drove down to near London today and, on the way down, we stopped at Toddington services, just north of Luton on the M1. The conveniences were convenient and clean so good marks for that but I’m afraid it is the pot holes that stuck in my mind. Fortunately it wasn’t too busy on a Saturday morning so we could see them coming and drive round but some of them were massive. Describing them as big enough to drive into is a touch of hyperbole but not by much. Some certainly looked large enough to drop a tyre into so if you hit them wrong you end up with some substantial and possibly journey-ending damage.

I hope they get them sorted out soon. The management must be aware and, as an organisation that exists to look after motorway drivers, they should be ashamed for letting them get so bad. Meanwhile, for us, it was a good reminder not to take lightly patches of road where water obscures the surface – you have no idea what is (or, with pot holes, what isn’t) underneath!

16 January 2026
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Singing off the same hymn sheet

I’ve been involved in church music for a long time and, in the churches I’ve been, there has been a gradual shift from printed books to electronic files that never make it to the printed page. In my present church, each person reads the chords and lyrics from a device of their choice, so no more stands collapsing under the weight of oversized books or endless piles of paper. However, it would also be fair to note that we often turn out to be using different sources for the same song and, even if we have managed to agree on the sources, there are plenty of mistakes to be found when you are relying on transcriptions that may have come from a seasoned professional or someone who hasn’t really even mastered the art of tuning their guitar!

Since I’m getting my head back into webdev space for the new job, I’ve also been doing some personal side projects that give me a chance to limber up and flex my development muscles. The main one of those so far has been to work on a way of sharing my collection of ChordPro files, amassed over the last decade or so, in a way that is less clunky than exporting from OnSong to DropBox (after setting the key and song flow), then sharing PDF and ChordPro files via the group WhatsApp.

It is a long way off public release and it is likely to always stay as a system that needs a developer’s hand to guide it but I think I’ve arrived at something which is reasonably functional. Indeed, we’ve already used it for all services this year and I’ve applied various updates to improve weaknesses after each one. In the present iteration, songs can be picked from a list of about 20, either individually or strung together into a set. Each song can also (fairly reliably) be transposed into different keys. In week 1 I was using files I’d manually crafted into HTML, last week the .cho files were processed on the fly and, for this week, the songs we need will actually be rendered from JSON files.

That last step makes it simpler to step through things like the chords (almost done – I’ve just got to do a few tweaks as minor keys are not reliable). Next on my roadmap is to make it easier to customise the order different blocks appear in and to add reminders such as who is going to start the song or how to blend into the next piece. That will be much easier drawn from a JSON source, which already has a clear structure. I will need to automate the .cho to .json transition but, since that doesn’t need to be done live, I can turn back to Python. I’m enjoying getting back to PHP but there are certain tasks were Python makes it easier for me to express what I want the program to do.

I’ve also got some ideas for a little further ahead – for example, potentially team members could access the full catalogue at any time but I might also add a view that allows the congregation to see the lyrics for the current service. I’m not aware of anyone in the present congregation who has problems reading from the screens but that has been an issue for some in previous places and some of those people would have loved to be able to use a personal device, set up around their needs, to keep up with the songs.

Plenty to be doing but it seems to be beneficial for my fellow band members and I can feel those coding muscles coming back to strength.

15 January 2026
by wpAdmin
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Non-greedy Expressions

This is another of my notes-to-self about the Vim editor. I love the way it offers the power of regular expressions for searching and replacing strings of text but the default mode is “greedy”. This means that it finds the longest matching result it can on each line. For example, if I had a line from a song like “[C]Three [G]blind [C]mice” and I wanted to remove the chords, I couldn’t search for \[.*] – that looks like some kind of weird emoticon but would be read as anything between an opening and closing square bracket. Plug that in and the result would be “mice”.

Instead, you need a non-greedy regular expression. It is easily done but it seems to come up just infrequently enough that I have to check the documentation every time. However, it feels like I am just on the cusp of committing it to memory, hence this post to drive it home. If I used the search \[.\{-}] I would get the intended result of “Three blind mice”. The trick is to remember that the single asterisk character has to be replaced by {-} and an additional \ in front so that the system doesn’t try to do anything clever with the opening curly brace.

In other words – and perhaps this will help my memory – the non-greedy expression makes up for it by being greedy about the number of characters it requires!