9 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
This morning was a mini-landmark moment for me, as I joined the worship team at Hathern Baptist for a Sunday morning service. I’d previously played for a special Christmas event and I’ve had some other regular and one-off opportunities for contributing to worship music since I finished my Worship Pastor role last June but it feels good to be back into more regular music at the place where Jane and I have settled as our new home church.
8 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
We had the first sing around session of the year this afternoon, in the hall of All Saints Thorpe Acre with Dishley. I took my four string electric bass today and my contributions were Make Me Feel Your Love, Diving Duck Blues and Bad Moon Rising. The first one is a Bob Dylan song that the training band played a rather uninspiring version of last week, so I’ve been digging into it to see if I can improve the part for the low instruments. The other two are simply easy songs (the same three chords each) which are nice ones for others to join in with.
7 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
Yesterday’s brew, Brown Dog Stout, is now in the fermenter and making friends with the activated yeast. I took a gravity measurement and it looks like I nailed the target of 1.050. For the small batch, stove top brewing I am doing, a shorter mash time seems to be sufficient. The trick is to keep some of the water back from the mash and use it for “sparging”.
With this brew, I had 2l of water on hand beyond the 10l I used for the mash. Once I had squeezed out most of the liquid from the grains in the brew bag (adding that to the wort, which I was bringing to the boil), I heated a litre at a time in the kettle and rinsed the grains. By doing this, you extract sugars which otherwise would get lost and that is how the gravity (the density of the wort compared to pure water at 1.000) is increased.
The next step is to wait for a week or two and then I can draw off a small sample and see if the brew is sitting somewhere near the target gravity (1.013) for a couple of days in a row.
6 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
This afternoon it struck me that, if I got a move on, I could get my first homebrew of the year underway before I had to go out in the early evening. I’ve been reducing both my mash and boil times down, which helps make the time from start to end on the first day of a batch go more quickly. You still have to do a bit more than just add the two times together, such as how long it takes to bring the wort from the mashing temperature to a rolling boil, but it certainly helps and doesn’t seem to harm the results with the reductions I’ve made so far.
My chosen recipe was Graham Wheeler’s one for Burton Bridge Top Dog Stout, so a strong, dark beer. I’ve followed it a couple of times before (Bitter Dog Stout in 2017 and Black Dog Stout in 2019) but I have to confess that, apart from the timings, this is the first time I’ve actually followed the recipe proportions without making various ingredient additions and substitutions. I’m going to call this one Brown Dog Stout in honour of the chocolate lab that Jane takes for walks on Mondays to help a friend.
It is now sitting in my plastic jerry can to cool down overnight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll see if I managed to hit the suggested gravity (I undershot on the previous two but I’ve made a few tweaks to my process which might help) and get it fermenting.
5 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
I’m down to the Fennel Street Club in Loughborough with Les again tonight. A couple of weeks ago we did a couple of jazz sets and I played my double bass. Apparently there has been a request for us to include some 60’s pop and rock’n’roll numbers so I think I might take an electric bass instead for this one, giving me a little more flexibility. Music from a little after 8pm until a little before 10pm and free entry.
4 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
When I picked up a Lynda La Plante novel from the library the other day, about a detective named Jane Tennison, I hadn’t realised it was part of a prequel series to the Prime Suspect series. I don’t think I’ve read any of those but I have seen a few episodes on TV and I was expecting a follow up story. I didn’t cotton on until a scene in which a brick like mobile phone comes into play although perhaps I should have twigged at the fact that Tennison wasn’t the ranking officer in the room down at the police station!
So far, it is okay although not quite such a gripping read as I expected. I’ll get to the end of this one but I’m not convinced it is a series I will diligently pursue. Mind you, looking back on my LibraryThing account, it appears I did read a good handful of novels about the Prime Suspect era Tennison back in 2007. Perhaps I did find them gripping or maybe, in the end, they proved forgettable to me.
3 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
Those who know me might be surprised to see me slipping the American English spelling of centre into the title of this post. On the other hand, those who know me and know some computer programming might realise that it is a clue that I’ll be describing something related to writing programs. Even in British English, the American spelling has become baked into the word we use to describe code and there are often cases where such words have to be used inside the code as well: center is a case in point.
The reason I am thinking about it today is the OpenSCAD project I was messing about with yesterday afternoon. I’m trying to create holders from some elegant but thin and narrow-based bottles we have in our kitchen. One of the reasons they look elegant is that the sides aren’t flat but rounded with a wide radius. Unfortunately, that also means any holder needs to be designed with a similar radius. I got that figured out but didn’t account for it in doing the maths to constructed some small demo pieces. As a result, the physical dimensions were not quite what I expected – I’d forgotten to account that I wasn’t in the “Kansas” of straightforward, flat sides any more.
One strategy that seems to be working out is to try and create my base objects centred in the 3D space (with the center attribute set to true). At the cost of a few more calculations in setting some of them up, it makes it easier to then position them in space relative to each other because they all share that reference point. Mind you, the other strategy that I’m also looking at is installing FreeCAD. That interface relies more on visual manipulation and, I am hoping, should also include a measuring tool. OpenSCAD is a powerful tool, which I’ll keep on working with, but sometimes I want to be able to sculpt my designs rather than having to calculate the dimensions and positions of every last divot.
2 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
The Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra is looking for a new conductor as, sadly, our the present and wonderful incumbent needs to move on. Tonight we see the first of two weeks when we have a potential new conductor auditioning. It will be interesting to see how they approach directing us through the selected pieces. In the best of all worlds, they both do brilliantly and we end up with one as a regular and another who can step in when required. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying hard to be as accurate as possible with my bass playing.
1 February 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
I’m a long way off being a 3D printing filament expert but I’m starting to form a few views from first hand experience. So far, I’ve experienced PLA, in the tiny amount of white filament that came with the printer and the spool of black I bought, and PETG, in white (Bambu’s PETG HF, or high flow, variety).
Both give impressive results, or at least results which have impressed me. In theory, the PETG is a little more flexible and more durable when used outside although some videos I’ve seen suggest that both can work pretty well. I do wish I’d bought grey rather than black PLA. Black probably will be ideal for some applications but it does make parts harder to see in dark corners. Perhaps I’ll want that for some applications but camouflage doesn’t seem like a major bonus now.
The other factor, which I haven’t seen commented on so often, is the smell. I believe both are regarded as pretty safe (compared to some alternatives) but the PLA makes it much more obvious that I’ve been printing plastic. It is enough of a stink that I’d rather not be in the room when the printing is going on while the PETG doesn’t bother me at all.
I’ve got plenty more to go on both spools at the moment but, as they start to run down, I probably won’t get another black immediately and I might consider sticking to the PETG, depending on available prices.
31 January 2025
by wpAdmin
0 comments
Above is a photo of my first completed 3D printing project. Earlier this week, I mentioned that I’d designed and printed a clip. Yesterday I finished realising my design and today I peeled it off the print bed and installed it. You can see the system in wet weather mode, exposing a hole in the underside of the pipe and making sure that the water that flows out is encouraged to drop into the gutter below.
When the water butts fed by the pipe empty out a bit, I’ll twist the white component on the left so that the hole is covered and the maximum volume of water should instead be diverted to my collection system. It hasn’t been properly tested yet (the Met Office suggest it might get a workout sometime next week) but it ought to be better than the regular brown pipe clip you can see on the right, which has acted as a partial diverter, and twisting the whole pipe to allow water to flow along or drop out.
It is a bespoke solution to a particular set of design parameters that most people probably don’t have and I don’t think I could have bought anything like it off the shelf. Assuming it works along the lines I intend, it pays for the design time and the material used and makes a start on justifying the investment in the printer. Meanwhile, I have started that new 3D printing category and will be adding suitable previous posts into it.