Wulf's Webden

The Webden on WordPress

23 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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When this was all fields…

One of the routes we used to take in our “you can walk for up to an hour” strolls during lockdown was round parts of the Garendon Estate. Since then the house building plans have moved on and so there are now several estates were we can look round and truthfully say “I remember when this was all fields”. They are also growing at a pace. This afternoon Jane and I were out for a walk on the Garendon Park estate off the A6 to deliver leaflets of December events for Hathern Baptist and the 100+ flyers I’d picked up turned out to be short. We’ll go back for the remaining 40 or so houses this week but, next time we have something to take round the “new estate” it looks like we’ll be needing another 50-100 on top as a new section appears to be close to having people move in.

We do have some local fields left but not as many as when we moved up here!

22 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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Cold Again

After last week’s unfrozen freezer experience, we decided it was time to bit the bullet and replace the fridge freezer. A new Kenwood unit arrived today and, after letting it stand for a few hours we’ve been able to switch it on.

It has a couple of useful features – a display on the front that shows the target temperature for fridge and freezer and an alarm that goes off if a door is left open for more than a couple of minutes. Unfortunately the display doesn’t indicate the actual internal temperature so a suitable thermometer might be in my future but I think we’ll be happy for now if our next lot of ice cream doesn’t come out as extra soft scoop.

21 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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MusicBee

I think it was when I started using a Mac regularly that I began using the Clementine music player. When I moved back to more of a Windows focus development on that had stalled but a fork called the Strawberry music player existed and that became my main squeeze for a number of years. However at some point the developer decided they wanted to move to a subscription-based model. The older version I had still worked but it was falling behind on updates and, this week, I decided it was time to see what else was out there.

The answer I found was MusicBee, which is free to use and under active development. It made pretty light work of connecting to my personal music library and seems to be ample for my needs. It is somewhat too early to publish a full review but it is what is keeping some jazz from Rufus Reid rolling past my ear drums as I write this.

20 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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RT Wrangling

RT is an acronym with many meanings but, for those who have worked in IT support, it may well bring to mind Request Tracker. This is a well established tool that is widely used for handling support requests. I hadn’t realised until I looked it up just now that it was originally released in 1996. That means I could potentially have been using it for almost all the time I have been in IT support roles but I first experienced it from the support provider side when I joined the OxCERT security team about seven years ago. It didn’t have the prettiest interface but was invaluable in efficiently handling routine cases and supporting complex, multi-headed incident responses.

I only worked in that team for about a year but what I learned paid off today when I got access to the implementation run by Loughborough University’s IT support team. In this case, my task was searching through a queue of requests for Windows 11 upgrades and weeding out the ones successfully handled by the deployment centre in recent weeks. I made sure to tread carefully because it has been a while since I used it and I needed to work around the local implementation but I quickly got up to speed. The background knowledge meant I could set up some advanced searches that would have been beyond me if it was my first view of the system.

We still have quite a few cases that need attention but approximately 20% fewer than when I started work on the tidying up this morning.

19 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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Lovage Roots

With a couple of nights forecast to drop below 0°C, I decided it wasn’t wise to plant out my garlic and broad beans today but I did have some I could spend at the allotment. What did seem like a worthwhile primary task was to dig out the remnants of the lovage plant inside my “veg cage”. I’ve got another lovage plant (and a transplanted offshoot from the one I’ve removed) and lovage is a herb that I need in far smaller quantities than the massive volume produced by a healthy plant. It doesn’t seem to need extra protection so the space inside the netted cage is better used for other things.

I hadn’t realised what massive roots the plant would have. As well as a mass of material directly at the base of the plant there were quite a few elephantine roots. I ended up adding them to the compost heap but subsequent research suggests I could have harvested them for culinary purposes… although they would have taken a fair amount of washing. That will be something to experiment with in future.

Meanwhile, the lovage is gone, the beds have been topped up with some compost extracted from my composting system earlier this year and I’ve covered them with black fabric to inhibit weed growth and perhaps stop the ground getting quite so cold. By the end of the week we’ll be back to temperatures that are seasonally cold but not freezing and – hopefully – I’ll finally get the over-wintering garlic and broad beans off to a start.

18 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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.vimrc

I’m not under any illusions that my blog is likely to go viral. It doesn’t exist to bring me fame and fortune and even the motivation of interacting with the blogosphere is minimal as the wider ecosystem of blogs run by people I know has shrunk to a small fraction of what it was ten or fifteen years ago. My blogging motivations are mainly to give a ping to the family and friends who follow it that I’m still alive, to maintain a habit of (almost) daily short-form writing to keep those skills polished and to act as a memory aid for things I might want to look up in the future.

It fell a bit short on that last one today. Moving to the new phase of the Windows 11 project at work today went smoothly. I still got to help a few people get used to their upgraded computers but also got to work in the main IT support office and, as a bonus, had a laptop assigned to me. I’ll be getting some additional software installed to help with the extra tasks I’ll be carrying out but it also seemed reasonable to install my favourite text editor (Vim) as I’d done on the machine I used most days in the previous office.

I did have a blog entry describing how to make Vim work with standard Windows key bindings like Ctrl-C for copy but I didn’t have any details of what else was in my standard .vimrc file (the place for personal customisations). It wasn’t too hard to look up some suggestions but, for my own reference, this is what is on my own machine at home:

set nocompatible
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set history=50
set ruler
set showcmd
set incsearch
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set foldcolumn=4
set foldmethod=indent
set hls
set autoindent
set number
set visualbell
set gfn=Cascadia_Mono:h12
syntax on
source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
behave mswin

I also note that, at home, this seems to work from a .vimrc in the root of my user area on the hard drive although the documentation I found today said that I needed a _vimrc file on a Windows box. Perhaps the reason the former didn’t work was that I tried it before I also adjusted the view to show me all file extensions so I could remove the (hidden) .txt on the end of the name? That’s something to experiment with but at least I’ve got an online reference next time I set up a new machine.

17 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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Mothballing

I don’t recall ever using mothballs. These were small lumps of material that would sublimate over time and give off fumes poisonous to moths and other fibre-eating pests. The fumes weren’t great for humans either and, with most people’s wardrobes containing fewer natural fibre garments, mothballs are rarely necessary. However, the name has become synonymous with the idea of closing a project or putting it to bed for an extended time.

Today we’ve been “mothballing” the Windows 11 deployment office run by IT services at the University. The project, which has been the main area I’ve worked on over the last year, is moving on to upgrading desktop machines in situ. There are still some laptops out there which need upgrading but those will now be done on a “business as usual” basis via the main helpdesk.

It does feel a bit sad to have reached the end of this phase as I’d got quite used to the routine. There are plenty of little systems I’d worked up to help things run smoothly, like the process of maintaining a text file that told me who to expect each day and gave me a map of where to find the machines for each person coming back to collect their upgraded laptop. Still, it has given me a chance to keep my Vim skills up to date and even develop a few new ones (like macros for routine batch tasks). I’ve also found scope for a bit of Python programming, for example a script I run each morning to flag pending collections as due and collections that were missed as overdue.

Some of those particular things won’t get used again but at least I can carry the skills forward. I expect it won’t be long before I find another situation where my little box of software tools will find some new opportunities for use.

15 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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Not as Cold as Expected

Later this week, the temperature is due to drop to the point where we may experience overnight frosts. Today hasn’t been so cold but, after a day out, we discovered our freezer wasn’t so cold either! I’m not sure if the freezer is failing or whether accidentally left the door ajar but the ice cubes had reverted to cold water!

Consequently, I’ve spent more of the evening than originally planned engaged in cooking. We’ve put less critical things back in the freezer, which did seem to fire up. Meanwhile, I’ve jointed the defrosted poultry to get another hunter’s stew marinating (by choice, I would have defrosted them in the fridge overnight so still in the safe zone) and we’ve had a protein heavy dinner (two lamb chops for Jane and three beefburgers for me!).

Tomorrow we’ll be able to find out if it was a temporary glitch or whether we need a new freezer and we’ll probably enjoy a delicious stew too!

14 November 2025
by wpAdmin
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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.