Wulf's Webden

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8 February 2024
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Creamy Tomato Soup

Recently, we’ve been having a lot of homemade soups for lunch, partly as a consequence of Jane having picked up a book of soup recipes at the start of the year. Some have been better than others, including some that have been very good indeed. I’d count today’s effort in that latter category.

Today’s soup was based on tomatoes but it also included some carrots, which I suspect help with the colour and stop the natural acidity of the tomatoes being overpowering, and a base of onion. We used some large, fresh tomatoes that were on offer in Lidl yesterday but, when we try this again, I think I’m inclined to try with a tin of tomatoes instead as the process of peeling them took ages!

The process also involves mashing the cooked veg and I strained it as well. That was another extra bit of work and I wonder if getting a vegetable mill tool might be a worthwhile investment to create such purees if we carry on soup making? Straining it creates quite a lot of pulp but even that doesn’t go to waste. I combined the left over pulp with the vegetable peelings (skins pre-washed) and tomato skins and that has been cooked up with water in the slow cooker to make another batch of vegetable stock. I’ll strain that out once it has cooled tomorrow morning and the residue will then go onto the compost heap, so nothing gets wasted at all in a veg-based dish like this.

By the way, no snow after all today – just lots and lots of icy cold rain!

7 February 2024
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Snow tomorrow?

I’m pretty sure there will be a tomorrow but will it be one where I see some snow locally? For my area, it’s not just on the forecast but we’re under one of the Met Office’s yellow warnings for the stuff and not that far from an amber warning area that covers the Peak District and up into South Yorkshire.

I was debating whether I ought to pop to the allotment to put the fleece back over my winter crops but I’ve decided not to. Although we might get snow falling, the temperature isn’t expected to get to freezing and I think a fleece weighted down with snow (and thus also blocking the light) might do more harm than good to those broad beans and alliums.

I guess I’ll find out the snow answer tomorrow and the gardening conundrum in a few days!

6 February 2024
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Valve Order

One of the things I picked up early in my tuba-playing journey was the information that it is important to put the valves in the proper order. I must have placed them down out of order after practising on Sunday afternoon because, yesterday, I got a demonstration of why.

The second valve seemed to be a tighter fit than normal. It went down without forcing but the valve press sat visibly lower than the other three. Most tellingly, it was impossible to blow through the instrument. What the valves do is contain slanted holes that connect different sets of pipes in the up and down positions. One wonders why they can’t all be interchangeable but, since they aren’t, the wrong valve is likely to lead the air flow to a dead end.

I couldn’t quite get my head round why only one obviously didn’t fit. What I had to resort to was blowing gently through the instruments and then dropping in the valves one by one, testing them in both up and down positions. If the valve fits, you don’t get a note but you do get air flow coming out of the next valve pipe and eventually I got it figured out.

That did chew up a little bit of my practise time but at least I learned more about the instrument. I wonder if I can mark something on each valve to make it easier to identify which is which rather than relying on putting them down in order, but without compromising their operation? Perhaps I could replace the felts with colour coded ones? Plenty to consider.

5 February 2024
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Pip Pip Per-ray

It’s probably a little late in the day to mention it but it turns out today is the 100th anniversary of the BBC making use of the Greenwich Time Signal (colloquially known as ‘the pips’). I haven’t listened to a lot of radio today but I did catch a little bit on Radio 4 which alerted me to the fact.

4 February 2024
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Freekeh

This weekend’s special ingredient was freekeh, a type of wheat grain often used in Levantine and North African cookery. We bought a packet back from my mum’s on a recent visit, which she had picked up somewhere and not found a use for. On the other hand, we had a recipe we’d tried before but we had to use the suggested substitute of bulgur wheat on our first run.

Bulgar wheat (cracked wholegrain wheat) wasn’t a bad call in terms of the flavour. The other thing it reminded me of, particularly in appearance and mouthfeel is pearl barley. Perhaps that’s not surprising because, as I understand it, both freekeh and pearl barley are grains processed to remove the outer hull (shell). Freekeh uses the durum variety of wheat. Pearl barley uses barley. Both work well to add texture and thickening that turns a soup into more of a stew.

I’ll certainly pick up more freekeh if I come across it and, meanwhile, perhaps we’ll try the recipe with pearl barley too.

3 February 2024
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Bluegrass Jam (Feb 2024)

At the same place Mo’s fortnightly sing-around sessions take place (The Plough Inn, Thorpe Acre Road, Loughborough), a bluegrass jam has started up on some of the intervening Saturdays. Today was the first one I was free for so I popped along to check it out.

It is largely a different group of people although I recognised a few people. As I expected, no pop covers and a more tightly focused genre of music, although the leading spot still goes round the room. I took my ukulele and led a version of Wayfarin’ Stranger. It seemed to go down well although possibly a tune I’d performed before would have been wiser. I don’t think A minor was the best key for my voice (I’ll try Em next time I take it out).

Anyway, I’ll go back again and I think my banjo skills would be more or less up to it, although I could do with working on learning a few more tunes on the instrument. I’m not sure quite when the next one is but I’ll keep my ears open.

2 February 2024
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Clair de What?!

I love a wide range of music including the curiously experimental. For example, take Debussy’s wonderful piano piece Clair de Lune and speed it up by a small percentage every bar:

It would probably be fair to say it gets a little out of hand but, to my ear, it still works musically through quite a few tempo increases.

1 February 2024
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Strawberry Fields Forever?

One thing I hadn’t got round to doing with my new laptop was to decide on which media player to use to access my music collection. This morning, I was doing a bit of personal data entry work (feeding in gardening data from paper-based notes), which is exactly the kind of task where it works well to have some tunes running in the background.

On my desktop Windows box, I’ve been using Clementine, which I carried over from when I was more Mac-based. It has worked well but appears not to have been updated since 2016. That would be a security risk if someone develops an exploit for it and the software is also still 32-bit when my system can take full advantage of 64-bit programs. Probably time to move on (and also for the other Windows system too).

I remembered that an old favourite, WinAmp, was designed by Justin Frankel, the same person who is behind the excellent Reaper DAW that I mainly use nowadays. There is a recent version of WinAmp available but the software has been sold on between several developers since I last used it. I downloaded and tried it but, although it looked very familiar, that wasn’t entirely a good thing – software has moved on in many ways since the 10-15 years ago that I last used it.

It turns out that there was a fork of Clementine called Strawberry and that is still being actively developed. I’ve downloaded and tested that and it feels familiar in a good way. Indeed, so far, I haven’t spotted anything that seems to distinguish it from the experience of using Clementine except that it opens direct rather than (as Clementine does) putting itself in the system tray and having to be clicked on from there.

I’ll give it a few more days to be sure but I think this one will be a keeper and I’ve already uninstalled WinAmp (no point keeping unused apps around).

31 January 2024
by wpAdmin
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Chordal thoughts

What is a chord? Multiple notes sounded at the same time. Many definitions would insist on three or more notes and call a combination of two notes a dyad… but other definitions call a dyad a two-note chord. Taken on its own, a pair of notes is open to a lot of interpretations. Adding more notes often makes it clearer what a chord should be called although you still need to consider the context.

There are limits on how many notes you can include before the waters start to become muddier rather than clearer. Mash down all the notes you can fit under your fingers on a piano keyboard and it isn’t so much a chord as a cacophony. The latter description often also applies to playing a smaller group of notes very close to each other although, if you lift some of them up or down an octave, a meaningful pattern may emerge.

Assuming a solo instrument, different possibilities present themselves. On a piano, you can play tighter clusters than on most stringed instruments. However, you can only play each individual note once while something like a guitar or bass can play the same note twice (more with some techniques). The choice of how to play a chord can be dictated by many different things. For a beginner, it is probably the one shape they have learned for the chord. A more advanced player will realise that there are multiple options and they might pick in order to emphasise a line flowing through a series of chords, or based on genre or other stylistic considerations (or they might be reading music which dictates or suggests a particular combination.

Even when the same note can be played more than once, each instance of the note will have a different timbre in most tunings, affected by the length and mass of the vibrating portion of the string and how it was struck. Timbre is created by how a given note contains combinations of multiples of the fundamental frequency. An A at 110Hz will also contain some measure of 220Hz, 330Hz, 440Hz and more. That 330Hz is an odd one out in that group – all the others would be heard as an A if isolated but the 330Hz is just a hair sharper than an E (329Hz), so even a single note with all but the purest toned instruments contains harmonic content hinting at chords, and that can be another (often unconscious) factor in which combinations of notes are selected.

Is that everything I know about chords? Probably not, but I thought I’d try a quick brain dump on the topic and see what came to mind. What got me started? Figuring out what chord shapes I was going to use on ukulele today for a song I was leading for the toddlers’ group at church and trying to remember how to play a B7 (like a simple Em but moved across one string – 4 3 2 0 or B4 D#4 F#4 A4 in finger position or note terms). Sounds lovely in the context I needed it for, next to my basic Em (0 4 3 2 / G4 E4 G4 B4).

29 January 2024
by wpAdmin
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I thought it mitre work…

Jane seems to think I’ve got a lot of power tools but I certainly don’t have all of them (or room for all of them!). One that is missing from my collection is a mitre saw (also known as a chop saw). The blade mechanism is similar to a circular saw but held in a housing that constrains where it will go, making it both safer and easier to make repeated identical cuts.

I was able to borrow one from a friend recently for a job I was doing but I decided to take it back today even through I’ve still got another couple of rounds to do. I had three main problems with the device in practise:

  1. It is very bulky – with the space needed for movement along the arm, it was too large to use inside the shed and blocked up the space in there while being stored
  2. The wood I was using was quite small and tended to splinter badly – I wonder if the unit would be better for two by fours and similar sized lumber (which is what my friend had made good use of it for)
  3. I wasn’t doing lots of repeated cuts but lots of measuring and fitting, so I wasn’t gaining a lot from the repeatability benefits.

It was good to be able to use the tool but I think I’ll stick to the ones I’ve got for the job in hand and strike a mitre saw off my inner wishlist unless I start on some quite different woodworking tasks.