Wulf's Webden

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5 October 2025
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25 Years of The Haven

One of my voluntary roles is as a trustee of The Haven, a charity that offers affordable counselling in my local area and provides placements for trainee counsellors. It has been running under that name for 25 years and, yesterday, we held a service to mark that at the Loughborough URC church, where our Loughborough activity is based.

Normally I contribute IT and information security expertise but what I brought to yesterday’s event was my guitar and a few songs slotted in throughout the service. The URC church doesn’t seem set up for ‘worship band’ music but I brought enough gear to make me self-sufficient. Over the last year, my guitar playing has been on the back burner as I’ve mainly been on bass or other instruments in various settings but there was a bit of time to practise in advance and get it up to scratch.

It is hard to say what counselling will look like in another 25 years time. Even over the time I have been involved, it has shifted, with a lot more being done online, both for setting up new clients and even conducting a certain proportion of the counselling sessions. Both of those changes were driven, in part, by COVID-19 which forced people to explore what communications technology could do; some have found it preferable to continue that way. I do hope though that The Haven, or something descended from it in the same vein, continues to offer affordable and compassionate support to those who need it.

4 October 2025
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Cotton Bud Container

Cotton Bud Holder - Closed

That is the cotton bud container I got from MakerWorld.com and printed yesterday. I used the same combination of a Sunlu “Transparent Orange” body and Sunlu “Brass” lid as on my previous container print but the ribbing on most of the body largely negates the translucency of the filament. I also found that I got a few little nibs and sharp edges which needed cleaning and sanding but that could have been down to my filament choice. That said, closely-spaced ridges, while an attractive surface with good strength, do prove quite challenging for printers.

The other feature of this design is that the centre pulls up and the buds splay out a bit to be picked. I think it will be quite useful and I’m planning to print another in more solid colours. First though I’ll use this one for a few days and see just how well it does in practise. It turns out to hold only a small part of a new box of buds and I’m not sure if they will reliably slide back in place or stick out and prevent it closing. Neat idea: testing to do.

Cotton Bud Holder - Open

3 October 2025
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Christmas Songs Already

I’m still not convinced that supermarkets need to have had some of their Christmas stock out since the beginning of September but, as a musician, you do need to start reasonably early on preparing for the spate of events that come with the season. Most bands tend to put it off a bit longer but a scratch group formed out of members across the three Charnwood concert bands is playing at the Needle and Pin in Loughborough on 6 December, so we’ve begun working on Christmas material together. I’ve also had the first rehearsal of the term for the University choir and that is also focused on Christmas music. Fair enough – it is good to be prepared, especially when you only have a limited number of rehearsal hours together before the performance.

2 October 2025
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Here’s one I didn’t write…

My friend Ian and I are slowly working our way through How to Inhabit Time by James KA Smith (BrazosPress, 2022). Tonight, our first catch up for several months, we got onto a chapter exploring the idea of seasons of life. One recent period that Smith mentioned as a season that many discerned together was the COVID-19 pandemic. In the UK, I think we were effectively in lockdown from 23 March 2020. My diary reminds me that I recorded the first version of morning prayer at church with a small group on Sunday 22 March and then published it that night for use from the following day. When, however, did the pandemic season end?

There are dates lockdowns ended but also when they started again. Life was quite different until quite well into 2021 although, from the perspective of late 2025, I can see why we found it hard to remember earlier experiences such as 1918 and later. There was a clear start but a much more fuzzy end.

I’m sure I wrote a short poem after a shopping trip during that yes / no period which pondered at what point I’d be going to supermarkets without wearing a mask and feeling that was normal again. I didn’t particularly mind mask wearing and I think I persisted with it longer than normal, since I was often interacting with both elderly and very young people at church. However, I can’t find a trace of that poem. Perhaps I just wrote it on my head as I headed home from the store without committing it to paper or the digital equivalent? Perhaps I ought to delve back in my memory and pin it down? For what its worth, I can’t remember when I last wore a facemask to the shops or elsewhere but I still routinely carry one in my pocket.

It turns out I did write one poem though, published here on 19 March 2020. End of Term reminds me that even the start of the period was a little fuzzier than the hard dates given above. We could anticipate the season ahead in the same way that a drop in temperature in late August or September heralds autumn’s arrival and winter’s imminence.

1 October 2025
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Spike Refinements

Sometimes a 3D printed design works out well in practise, sometimes it has obviously failed and sometimes you gradually become aware of issues over time. The tool I created to help remove the springs from my tuba valves falls into the third category. It is a set of four joined spikes that I could put over the open valve holes before inverting the tuba and catching the springs as they fell out. However, I’ve realised that the spikes aren’t quite long enough and often end up slipping down the sides of the spikes.

Version two adds 20mm to the end of each spike, which should ensure the springs already sit around them before I turn the instrument upside down. In theory that should solve the problem – tomorrow morning, once the print has finished and the bed cooled down, I’ll be able to move to the practical test and find out for sure.

30 September 2025
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(Don’t) Feed the Birds

Feed the Birds is one of the tunes we rehearsed with the training band this evening and, as a signed up member of the RSPB, it is generally something I like to do. However I do have one reservation – I’m not to happy when birds come and feed on soft fruit I was planning to eat myself!

After work, I popped by the allotment and harvested most of the berries from my Chilean Guava plant. My yield was a whole 25g. That is not a lot but probably more than I’ve had off it in the previous seven or so years I’ve been growing it in total. I had some zero harvest years when the plant was young or after it had been moved to the allotment but also times when I appeared to have a decent crop and then, by the time I got round to going to harvest, they had all disappeared.

Not this year!

29 September 2025
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Update on the Wine

The wine I started earlier this month had settled down a lot, without much visible sign of continuing fermentation. As the demijohn had a certain amount of scum on the sides and a thick must at the bottom, as well as those bloated, floating raisins I put in to help kickstart fermentation, I decided it was sensible to transfer it to a fresh demijohn to mature.

I took a measurement and it has dropped to 0.997 from the initial reading of 1.080, suggesting an ABV of about 11% (10.89 according to the calculator). That is fairly much what I would expect from what is going to be a pale rose. I also took a sip of what was left in my sample tube and it isn’t quite ready for consumption just yet. I’d characterise it as very sharp, with acidity overwhelming other parts of the flavour profile.

What I need to do now is be patient. It can spend another 3+ months in the demijohn, quietly mellowing, and then I can make a judgement on whether it has been a success.

28 September 2025
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Quiet Amp

A musician friend of mine came to this afternoon’s CSWO gig in the park and said he hardly heard a note out of place… but, to be honest, I hardly heard a note. Something seemed to be wrong with my amp so, although I could hear a little bit of the bass through the main speakers from where I was sitting at the back of the stage (via the DI feed to the main desk), I didn’t get any of the local foldback I was expecting from my own system. That’s the second time that amp set up has let me down….

Of course, testing it back home later in the evening, it worked just fine. The thought struck me – could it be a power supply issue. The amp set up has worked well for me in multiple locations, including on all the dates on the Belgium tour. For that, I used my Jackery battery but this afternoon the PA team asked me to plug into their power instead. The previous time I had an issue, we were in a shopping centre and I was plugged into the power there. I wonder if a slightly odd power supply causes issues with my amp where it appears to be running but doesn’t produce any appreciable output?

One to investigate – perhaps I need a power conditioner unit for when I’m plugging into “mains” supplies of unknown quality?

24 September 2025
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Working Card

Although I didn’t get it for a few months after I started, I’ve had a staff ID card at the university for a while now… only used it as something I wear sitting in the Windows 11 deployment office. Today, I had a small choir rehearsal on campus after work so I finally got to put it to use for a bit more.

Firstly, I paid a visit to the library. I’ve been meaning to poke my head in for a while but, with an hour or so to kill, it seemed like an ideal opportunity. The card let me through the security gates with no problems. Given that students are starting to arrive back on campus, I was surprised how empty it seemed inside. Perhaps no one has unfinished assignments due at the start of term… or perhaps the deadlines are still too far away? I was on the hunt for the computing section, particularly for items on Python programming. However, the most recent I could find was from 2016 and the main reference manuals were from 2013. In computer terms, that is ancient and a sign of how much of that class of information has moved online.

Back outside, I made my way down to the Design School, where the rehearsal was happening and, again, the card gave me admittance. I’m pretty sure it isn’t an “access all areas” pass but it was nice to be able to breeze into the areas I wanted to visit.