Welcome to stefanolandi.com

Category: Hobbies

  • Wait…where did Summer go?

    Holy smokes, Oct 8th already, what happened to August, wait…what happened to June?! Wow, I can’t believe how fast the Summer came and went, I had so many plans, so many projects, things I wanted to do, things I wanted to see, and now we are in the colourful foliage of yet another Autumn, which mind you, is my favourite time of year, and then another long Montreal Winter.

    I’m not complaining really, as it has been a productive Summer, I finally got to work on regrading the Eastern side of our land next to the house and raise it so that it formed a proper swale between our house and the neighbors which will hopefully mitigate the water flow coming from the back yard, which was turning and dumping straight into our garage drain and into our sump pit in the basement, and threatening to flood said basement as it has done on several occasions. The last time this happened was the last straw and I told my spouse, enough of this, I’m going to regrade the land and see if I can cut the water drainage by at least 50%. I’m happy to report that after all the work of building a small retaining wall and back-filling it with dirt to create a positive gradient away from the garage and the drain, the water drainage I believe has been mitigate by more than probably 75%-90%, so I’m ecstatic.
    With this almost finished now, I only have a few paver stones to finish installing and levelling, I’ll be able to bring my project indoors where I have the basement walls to finish covering and some time during the Winter I’m going to start replacing the kitchen floor and the countertop.

    What else is on the horizon? Well, I’m currently working on launching or perhaps re-launching my slandi.net page, which used to be my main domain and is still the domain for my email. Several years ago I came up with a neat acronym for that domain, Stefano’s Laboratory of Analog and Digital Inspirations, it fit the letters perfectly and also one of the ideas of what I wanted to do with my website/blog long-term, use it to share some of my passions, be it electronics, computers, photography and music. I say both analog and digital, not only because it happens to line up with the letters in my domain/name but it also encompasses my dual-love of what is digital and also what is purely analog, be it technology from simple tools to art forms such as painting, sculpture or woodwork. In fact, I used to love to carve wood but haven’t done so in many many years, so it may be something to re-discover in the years to come. As for the Analog side of things, I’m thinking of getting back into simple discrete electronics and have started re-reading some old electronic books that I got from Radio Shack more than 45 years ago now.

  • #audiomo2026 Day 7 – Binaural project

    #audiomo2026 Day 7 – Binaural project

    Getting back into social audio for #audiomo has got me thinking of an old project I had on the back-burner, time to fire up the soldering iron and get crackin’.

  • Blogging cliff #274

    Blogging cliff #274

    I know, a rather strange, cryptic title, but it really is how I feel about my blog these days, it has simply done its best Lemur imitation and jumped off the proverbial cliff, probably some 274 times by now. So where do I begin, or continue, as the case may be?

    Well, I still have the Toyota Yaris, it’s proven itself reliable, gets me to work in relative comfort but it yawn worthy, as I knew it would be but it’s not without it’s faults. It has a terrible exhaust leak, giving it, what might sound like an anemic growl, but worst than that, the leak is causing the Oxygen sensors ahead of and behind the catalytic converter to do their best politicians and lie to the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) into thinking there is much more Oxygen than is actually coming through the combustion chambers and so the car is running rather rich and kind of stumbles its way to work, like some kind of four-wheeled drunk sailor. In any case, I went under the car several months ago in an attempt to replace the leaking exhaust gasket, something the ECHOs and Yaris’ are known for, however, in my haste I ended up ordering the wrong part and so the gasket fit too loose and is not making the right contact with the flange against which it is supposed to rest. I’ve ordered the correct gasket and hopefully this coming Saturday I’ll put the car up on ramps, climb back underneath and attempt exhaust repair No. 2

    I recently ordered to Meshtastic devices from Aliexpress, so what the heck is that?! Well, in a nutshell, it’s basically a tiny radio that connects through a network of other tiny radios and also one to send text messages wirelessly without the need for cell towers or big corporations, think of it as a federated, crowdsourced messaging system. The small device, in my case, a Heltec Version 4 connects to my phone through bluetooth and a special App. I set it up, but unfortunately, the rather small antenna, if I can even call it that, that came with the device is puny and might be fine if you’re in a densely populated area with lots of other Mesh devices. These radios operate on the 900Mhz range, so just shy of the microwave range and require, what is called Line-of-sight communications. Therefore any buildings, mountains, altitude changes, or even the curvature of the earth, take that flat earthers, will prevent the radios from reaching each other. However, because of the store and forward nature of these radios, as long as you can connect to one node, as they are called in the mesh world, then you can through a number of hops, another mesh terminology, send a message to someone many kilometers or tens of kilometers away. So far, I was able to load the software onto my device, connect to it through the App on my phone and the device has picked up all sorts of nodes on the network but I have yet been able to send out a message successfully or have it acknowledged. I blame this on the fact that almost all of the nodes around me are too far away from me to reach with my diminutive antenna, and no that’s not a euphemism! I’ve ordered better antennas from Aliexpress, which hopefully will arrive in a week or so and will continue testing. I bought two of these units, with one going to a friend but he is still in the midst of getting his going. We are 5Km from each other as the crow flies BUT the terrain between us rises some 20m above sea level and we are both around the same altitude, so our connect prospects, at least directly are slim. As I was typing this I noticed another node appear in our neighbourhood, so perhaps through a series of hops we might be able to connect. I’m still very new at this and very much a neophyte, but I’m having lots of fun.

    If you’re still with me this far, thank you. I don’t have any illusions that my blog is even read, perhaps by only one person (Hi S!) but I kind of promised myself that I would ‘try’ to get back into regular blogging about my life, the happenings in and around my hobbies and interests, and generally share a little about myself to the world. Thanks for reading.

  • Four years and counting

    According to the date calculator on timeanddate.com I’m due to retire in 3 years, 11months and 5 days, but hey who’s counting, I’m looking very much forward to retirement, there are so many things I want to do, projects I want to work on, things I want to learn. During the next few years I will be slowly preparing for retirement by purchasing those tools and items for many of my past-times and interests, this might include specialized measurement tools for my electronics hobby, woodworking tools, mechanics tools, etc… Perhaps a nice new synthesizer is in the mix as well, we’ll see. I both anticipate my retirement but I’m also a little leery of it as I worry that I’ll have enough to do, enough things to fill my time. Then again, there are many things I haven’t thought of, like perhaps some meetups I could go to, some social events or perhaps other outside activities. I’ve always loved the theater, so perhaps something like that is in order. Who knows really, I just hope that I’ll be healthy enough to enjoy my retirement years. This brings me to another point, physical fitness, which unfortunately I’m sorely lacking at the moment. You see I have a life partner that is an avid fitness guru. She loves to exercise and has the discipline to do it, alas it’s not my case at all. I’m not so much a couch potato, as a desk potato and spend untold hours on the computer doing a myriad of things. I really need to find a hobby/interest that gets me moving, gets me out of the house at least and doing something physical. I was thinking of getting back into photography and maybe doing urban photography or hiking in the forest to do some forest bathing, etc… That is a possibility, I just wish I had more discipline. In any case, I’ve got a little less than four years and in that time I have to get my ducks in a row as they say…

  • Good-bye Spaced-Ex and Blue Orifice and a confession…

    Good-bye Spaced-Ex and Blue Orifice and a confession…

    UPDATE: 2026-05-31

    On this, the last day of May, I’m confessing that my boycott of SpaceX and Blue Origin didn’t really last that long. I suppose it’s because Musk, perhaps having understood his errors with the DOE (doubtful) and his supporting of Donald Trump after the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal broke out, has simply vanished from the political spectrum and he’s seemingly back to talking about colonizing Mars. I certainly don’t condone any of his or Bezo’s other behaviour, but such is the pull of my interest in space exploration and rocket science and technology in general. Am I being hypocritical, perhaps a little bit. I certainly don’t talk too much about either company and praise them, I simply and quietly read and/or watch their on-going activities. I have also since started watching Scott Manley and Marcus House as I felt boycotting them wasn’t fair, they are simply space journalists in their own right. So yes, do I completely retract everything I’ve written below? No, not all of it, I still am sickened by these billionaire little boys, but I mustn’t forget the thousands of people who work at SpaceX and Blue Origin who put in hours and hours of hard work and scientific experimentation in pursuit of space exploration and so I feel I’m honouring them when watching and cheering on Starship and so forth.

    I’m so done with rich billionaire little boys and their big toys. Elon Musk’s rather disturbing gestures at President Trump’s inauguration really upset me as it did many people and I’ve decided to now do a personal boycott of SpaceX flights. I’m a big space nerd at heart, so not partaking in the excitement of launches and the advancements of amazing technology like Starship is going to be very very difficult. However, I just can’t bring myself to ignore Musk’s seemingly white supremacy behaviour and Jeff Bezos isn’t any better, Amazon recently closed all of their distribution centres here in Quebec because one of them was successful in forming a union. The employees were only trying to get fair wages and better working conditions and Amazon punished them for it, closed down everything and laid them off.

    For this reason I’ve decided I’m going to boycott SpaceX and Blue Origin launches. In fact I’m even going to Boycott Scott Manley and Marcus House as they mostly talks about SpaceX. It’s going to be tough as I’m such a space nerd, but I’ll continue to watch and listen to NASA but if they mention or talk about SpaceX, then I’ll switch off, perhaps in time I’ll just ween myself off NASA altogether, who knows. I’m not sure what I’ll use to fill the gap, perhaps Ham radio, my music, both listening and playing it, and then there is reading, as I have so many books waiting for me. In any case, I don’t know how successful I’ll be we’ll see. I’ll take it one day at a time and see what happens.