Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

14 November 2025
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Deodorant Holder

I like to store my deodorant upside down, so that the liquid rests on the ball and can be quickly distributed. I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone in this as most brands come with a flat top to the cap. However it isn’t the most stable configuration, especially since we introduced some hexagonal storage units (Makerworld design) – they stack up nicely but I suspect they transfer vibrations as the various ‘lotions and potions’ get moved around.

Deodorant Holder

My solution has been to design a block that fits into the gap between some of the hexagonal containers. The block has a cutaway that roughly follows the form of deodorant lids, at least the two I’ve got in stock at the moment and there’s a bit of wiggle room so it should be able to cope with more.

I’ve got TPU loaded up at the moment which, as a rubbery and waterproof material, is ideal for the job. What you can’t see is that I also paused printing partway through so I could drop some waste PLA into the space inside. I used the ‘lightning’ infill so there is quite a gap at the bottom, which gets filled up nearer the top to give support to the top surface. It does mean it rattles a bit but I’m not planning to do much shaking. However, it also adds some extra weight to the resulting piece and is a good way of putting the waste plastic to good use.

13 November 2025
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Who is Watching?

I thought I’d take a look tonight at who is reading my blog… or at least what kinds of systems are accessing it. According to the log files, access to my site has climbed steeply in recent months although I probably shouldn’t get too excited. The most popular pages are ones that don’t exist and the majority of my visitors appear to come from Vietnam. One doesn’t want to be ungrateful but that might suggest these are not all avid readers of my deathless prose but also a certain number of automated attempts to find weak spots in my site. Lesson: if you publish anything online, you have to make sure appropriate security is in place because there are bots out there dedicated to searching for vulnerabilities.

Apparently almost half of my visitors are coming in via Apple Macs but, given the observations about countries of origin, it is hard to extrapolate anything from that with confidence. My reflection is that, if I do want to get a handle on who my audience are, I’ll need to work through the log files with a bit more finesse than what the venerable AWStats provided by my ISP can offer. The headline of “the numbers are going up” has never been particularly meaningful and, with more automated systems floating around the web, is probably becoming exponentially less useful with each passing year.

12 November 2025
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Cloud Cover

Apparently there is an unusually high chance of seeing the Northern Lights in the UK tonight… unless, like me, you are in a patch of it expected to be under continuous cloud cover. Never mind – maybe next time. At least I feel under no pressure to stay up and keep sticking my head out of the window!

11 November 2025
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Silence

Today turned out to be busier than expected at work. Last minute bookings meant a 200% increase in bookings from what it had looked like on the sheet yesterday morning. However, I was pleased to find that nobody was either booked or turned up around 11am so I could take a couple of minutes of respectful silence to mark Remembrance Day.

The two world wars are another year further away but peace has not yet set in around the globe. Having had my chainsaw accident earlier this year also gave it another, unexpected resonance. Not everyone comes back from war and many that do bear scars. My scar was from a different cause and turns out to have been a blessedly minor injury in the scheme of things but the hours I spent when it wasn’t clear if that was going to be the case, and the mark that I will probably carry on my arm for the rest of my days, made this year’s quiet reflection particularly poignant to me.

10 November 2025
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Custom Lining

I got my design and print tasks sorted out and now have liners for the top and bottom of my glasses case made out of rubbery TPU:

Glasses Case With Liner

That serves to reduce the excess space and cushion any movement my clip on specs do make. It also adds a nice overall heft to the case. It did take quite a bit of measuring and thinking to figure out how to create the lining but I was pleased not to have to go through lots of test prints. The resulting fit isn’t completely perfect but safely past “good enough” so I’ll count this project as done for now.

9 November 2025
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Service

In this morning’s service at Hathern Baptist Church, I was speaking on the subject of service, a service I was glad offer. You can hear my talk on Soundcloud, including some musings on words that are very specific and words (like service) that are overloaded with different meanings:

You can definitely hear my “sarf London” accent coming out in this and, although I thought I was speaking slowly, I could have put the brakes on a bit more. On the other hand, I spoke to several people afterwards who found it had said something they needed to hear. The opportunity to preach isn’t about covering myself with glory but giving people something which will help them to be more like Jesus.

8 November 2025
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Brothers in Christ

Today I’ve been a day conference for Christian men held at Melton Mowbray Baptist Church, under the heading “Brothers in Christ” and featuring Paul Harcourt (who led the New Wine network for a number of years) as a guest speaker. Some men’s events (not all!) can be a bit testosterone-heavy and lean into unhelpful stereotypes but this one was safely into well-balanced territory. I’d both be glad to hear Paul Harcourt again and to go back to a future event organised by the same group. Overall, I’d still generally prefer events that aren’t gender segregated but I liked this one, perhaps because it probably wouldn’t have been very different if it had been open to all.

7 November 2025
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Fading Light

I needed to get to the allotment today but, with various other engagements and needing to pick Jane up mid-afternoon, I didn’t get there until just after 4pm. The earlier rain had passed and the sky was clear but I hadn’t taken into account how quickly the light drops away at this time of year. By 5pm, I’d harvest the last remaining cabbages, pulled out most of the second lovage plant that I’m removing and done some weeding… but it was getting so dark, I couldn’t properly see what I was doing.

With a month and a half of shortening days, I’ll have to plan carefully for the next few tasks I have lined up for the plot: I can’t rely on squeezing in a quick visit at the end of an afternoon.

6 November 2025
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Preparation in Time

Last time I was preaching on a Sunday, I was still working on my script up until the Saturday afternoon. However, with an opportunity this Sunday, I don’t have that luxury. I’ll be out all day on Saturday and not back until mid-evening, so things need to be finished off tomorrow… and that’s why I’ve pushed to get my first draft complete this evening.

Even tomorrow, I’ve got other things on but I think won’t need much more editing. A good night’s sleep will help me approach it with fresh eyes in the morning but, for tonight, I just wanted to note the importance of planning for the time available.

5 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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Render Troubleshooting

I recently posted about a glasses case I had printed and mentioned that I had the idea of creating a rubbery lining using TPU filament. The case has rounded corners and a gentle chamfer round the top and bottom edges so modelling it was more complicated than just measure a box shape. I explored some of the different options for creating what I wanted using OpenSCAD with the BOSL2 library and ended up with two stacked prismoids. Both have the rounding on the vertical edges but the lower one is slightly smaller in the X and Y dimensions, creating the chamfer. There are probably other ways I could have done it too but this worked within the OpenSCAD Playground site I can use online if I have a quiet patch at work.

The downside was that, when I loaded my demo script on my home computer, the rendering seemed to take about 45 seconds. Given that the shape isn’t very complex, that seemed an unusually long time. Time for some troubleshooting.

What I did was go back to some very simple code. Initially I created a prismoid with identical bottom and top dimensions and no other refinements. That was done in a fraction of a second. Making the bottom a little smaller than the top also worked almost as swiftly. The killer, which pushed rendering to over 10 seconds was also rounding the edges. It turned out that the $fs and $fa special variables, which I’d set to 0.1 to give a visually smooth finish to the curve, was the cause. I changed both to 1 and that brought me back to lightning speed and I was then able to return to my original code, which dropped to taking about 1.9s.

Probably those variables could have been raised higher. When I ran the model off, the printed curves were perfectly smooth to the touch. Better yet, the prototype print dropped neatly inside the glasses case with a perfect fit. Time to load up the TPU and see how that does.