Eldrich Rebello's personal website

Tag: hobbies

  • Celestial events in Spring 2024

    Celestial events in Spring 2024
    Yours truly, not realising that I stood directly in front of the camera while it was capturing a long exposure shot of the May 2024 Aurora.
    One the of most clear aurora shots I have. Edited for clarity. The actual aurora looks nothing like this when seen with the naked eye.
    The March 2024 total solar eclipse, captured from Brantford, Ontario.

    Spring 2024 was an amazing time for celestial events in eastern Canada. First was the total solar eclipse, which tore a path right across the continent. Starting in Mexico, earth’s satellite cast its shadow north, across the land of the Free, escaped deadly violence and then entered Canada. Once there, it slunk across the country along the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence river, before exiting via the Maritime provinces.

    My own home was outside the path of totality with the difference being just under 1%. That 1% though, makes all the difference. The sun is so bright that just 1% illuminance makes it bright enough to damage human eyesight. Bunny and I decided to drive to Brantford, about one hour south, placing ourselves firmly in the Moon’s shadow.

    We would each head to the rendezvous point from different starting locations, hence needed two cars. Yes, emissions, I know. The ensuing confusion meant we were unable to actually meet and were separated by approximately 500 metres when I finally stopped driving. We were worried about cloud cover because the morning had un ciel nuageux, cloudy. As luck would have it, the clouds cleared well in time for the eclipse. We hit the roads.

    Bunny arrived first and discovered, much to her annoyance, that the park she chose was also the chosen viewing spot of a gaggle of other people. This being Amérique du Nord, everyone drives and that meant a full parking lot. I wouldn’t make it before the time of totality, hence the last-minute decision for me to abandon the road and to look up.

    And I am eternally grateful that look up I did because the celestial sphere put on a real show. Once the moon totally obscured the sun – a coincidence of identical relative sizes, by the way, not divine intervention – I saw the sun’s corona for only the second time in my life. The first was in Bahrain, in the early 2000s. Wow indeed.

    I tried to take a few photos but soon gave up and just took it in. I stared in awe at the magnificence of a rare sight. The atmosphere of a star, hotter than its surface, for reasons that physics is yet to determine.

    About two months later, the sun decided to belch up plasma in the direction of the earth. Solar plasma interacting with the earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere excites atoms and makes them emit radiation as visible light. The aurora borealis for me, because I live in the norther hemisphere.

    Once again, this is a sight I have seen earlier. In this case, from Finland. That time, though, I lived in Helsinki, a city with lots of light pollution and so wasn’t able to see more than a few faint wisps of green.

    This time, the solar storm was much stronger. Southern Ontario has relatively lower levels of light pollution outside the main cities and I live far enough away from Toronto that light pollution isn’t a difficult problem to solve. Southern Ontario, though, has a different problem – cloudy skies. This time, luck was on our side and the clouds – once again – cleared.

    And what a sight it was, seeing the aurora dancing overheard. I must remind you that Southern Ontario, the region around the Great Lakes, is at roughly the same latitude as Andorra, Monaco or the south of France. Pretty far south, although the winters would have you believe we live close to the Arctic. The aurora overhead at these latitudes is rare.

    I saw green and violet and I saw the aurora shifting with time, often every second. Truly a remarkable sight. My phone captured a vivid green glow. My DSLR camera did the same, however, being largely clueless as to how to operate that camera well, the photos I captured were not great. I forgot to set the aperture correctly. Anyhow, a lesson for another time.

    Bunny did not attend this event but I fully recommend it to anyone reading. If you have the chance to see the aurora in person, take it. You will not regret it. Oh, and use you eyes. Leave the cameras be. Do it for the memories, not the Snaptokgram.

  • Fountain Pens – a love reinked

    School systems back in the day recommended a transition of writing implements, from pencils to fountain pens. “Ink pens” was the name in the Indian school system and this sounds odd in hindsight. Ink as opposed to what, given that all pens use ink in some form. My childhood experience with fountain pens was horrible. No one taught me how to use them, how to properly hold them, how to apply the appropriate pressure and how to care for them. In typical Indian school system, it was a command sent down from on high, “Though shalt use a fountain pen henceforth”. And lo, it was so.

    I used pens made by a Chinese brand “Hero”, legally Shanghai Hero Pen Company. According to Wikipedia, the pens are regarded as among the best in China and were popular in India during the 90s. The pens had a hooded nib and exposed only the very tip of the nib. I often used too much pressure and made the tines fray up to the point where ink either stopped flowing or sometimes gushed out. I learned through my misbehaving friends that ink would gush out if you angled the nib towards a victim and flicked the pen like a whip. This was a good example of how kids will weaponize the most innocuous items to be assholes. I too was an asshole. Anyhow, I often ended up with palms covered in ink, often wiped hours of writing by spilling water on paper and regularly ruined my white shirts with blue or black stains that would not wash away. The ink I used was made by Camlin and was horrible with the pen I used. I had no idea that pens came in different nib sizes, including fountain pens. I happened to use a fine-tipped pen and the ink clogged the feed and nib. I eventually flipped the nib and wrote with an inverted nib. This was a bad idea with cheap paper because the paper fibres clog the nib. I had no idea what the fibrous accumulations were, and I was loathe to touch the nib because I did not want ink on my fingers as well as palms. Mostly a bad experience.

    Eventually, I discovered the convenience of ballpoint pens and switched to those for almost twenty years. I did not take pens too seriously and viewed most pens as the same. I scoffed at pens costing several thousand rupees or tens of dollars. Completely by accident, I purchased a pilot G-Tec from a  stationery shop in Halifax, NS. I enjoyed this pen but it is a gel pen and the ink eventually runs out. I did not have a refill nor did I know how to find one so I eventually stopped using it before the refill ran out.

    Then I visited Japan.

    In the run up to the Japan trip, I scoured YouTube and reddit for must-buy things in Japan and one of these is Japanese stationary, including pens. The YouTube rabbit hole led me to fountain pens, to the American online store Jet Pens and eventually to the Toronto shop Wonder Pens. I was not able to complete my research quest before arriving in Japan and I don’t typically spend large amounts of money on things I may not use. I perused the options available in Japanese stationery stores and bought a few gel pens including refills. No fountain pens though, it seemed too daunting.

    Back in Canada, I completed my online reading and visited Wonder Pens in Toronto. The kind folks there recommended I purchase a $35 Pilot Metropolitan and a bottle of Lamy blue ink. That kicked it off for me. The YouTube rabbit hole taught me how to hold a pen, how much pressure to apply and how to get the most out of the pen. I was hooked. I loved the feeling and i loved the fact that I could write more with less hand strain. I did not like the shade of the Lamy blue ink, it was too dark for my liking. I did the logical thing and bought a different bottle, this time from Ferris Wheel Press, a Canadian ink and pen manufacturer. This was from a shop in Brampton called Blesket. While in the shop, I saw these cheap Pilot Preppy fountain pens and bought one on a whim, the 03 nib. I loved this and visited a local art store in Guelph to find a 02 nib. I also bought a pen with red plastic and then decided that red ink was the next purchase. I now had four fountain pens and two bottles of ink!

    With more written notes, I needed highlighters so I bought a six-pack from a shop in Cambridge called Phidon Pens. The ecosystem in Canada surprised me and I was delighted to see these shops thriving. Sure, the ink wasn’t cheap and the pens are 4x-5x the cost of the cheapest ballpoint pens but you can’t really put a price on joy, can you? My first Zebra highlighter ran out and I then discovered that Platinum make fountain pen-based highlighters. Ah, now I need highlighter ink so that was the next and most recent purchase, as you can see in the image below. The highlighter search showed me the Parallels pen by Pilot and I happened to find a few at Wyndham Art in Guelph. Of course, I bought the pen.

    This entire experience taught me a whole lot about fountain pens but also about writing. You don’t need expensive fountain pens to enjoy them. Most of my fountain pens cost under six Canadian dollars, not exactly pricey. Same with the inks I purchase – they are cheap and come in colours I love! There is a certain joy in discovering new ink colours and seeing how the ink spreads on low quality paper. There is so much to learn – calligraphy, paper quality, pressure, nib styles, ink shades, ink colours, specialty inks and so on.

    I encourage you to walk (or drive) to your local stationery store and buy a fountain pen. It is a joy!

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  • Build Review – Liverpool FC Anfield Mini BRXLZ Stadium

    Build Review – Liverpool FC Anfield Mini BRXLZ Stadium

    I am a bandwagon fan of the English football club Liverpool FC. I watch some matches, I recognise a few players and am moderately emotionally invested in the club’s success. I do not live in the city of Liverpool or in the UK and have visited the place only twice. Why I support this club, I cannot say. Maybe it is an innate tribalism and this was one available choice at the time? That’s the likely explanation.

    I recently visited the post-Brexit United Kingdom and made my way to Sport Direct, my favourite shop for cheap sports-themed goods. In the discount bin at the discount store, I found a couple of Premier League building block stadiums, one of which was Anfield – Liverpool’s home stadium.

    This kit is sold in two models – the mini version and the full size one. The mini version has 1,369 pieces and the full-size version has 4,650 pieces. The larger version is more life-like, as you might expect. While in line at Sports Direct, I did not know that the larger version existed. Liverpool’s website sells the larger model for GBP 65, over one hundred Canadian dollarydoos, not a price I was (or am) willing to pay. I don’t love the club that much. I bought the mini set for about GBP 24, a much more palatable price.

    I built the stadium model over approximately fifteen hours. The instructions were adequate but did not mention several pitfalls and alignment problems. The blocks themselves are small, much smaller than Lego blocks, and are fiddly to the point where you sometimes require tweezers. The block colours in the instructions are sometimes unclear. There are two shades of grey and one black and the printed colours are washed out, leading to some confusion. The attention to detail required for block placement is also a challenge, especially in a sloped stadium. The specific problem with this kit is the ascending white segments on the stands. Each is a 1 x 3 block with an overlap of 1 x 2 i.e. the blocks stack vertically, offset by one space to create the required staircase. The problem is that the entire stack is supported only at the bottom meaning that pressure anywhere above can split it. This has a tendency to happen often and there are nine such stacks. Annoying, to say the least.


    Alignment is a problem when assembling the stadium roof, as you can see in my pictures here. It is fiddly and difficult to get right with the blocks in place. Too much pressure and blocks lower down just shoot off or parts of the structure collapse.

    The small size of the blocks also means that some have imperfections from the injection moulding. The kit comes with sufficient spares so this is often not a problem but I did run into a few alignment challenges, again, as you can see on the stadium roof section.


    In all, I enjoyed the assembly process and the assembled product looks great. There is a challenge but nothing too great. At the price I paid, I would recommend but cannot recommend this at full price because of the quality control issues.

    Overall, 7/10 at the reduced price. 4/10 at full price.

    My suggestions:

    1. Look ahead and build stacks where you can. Good examples are the brown/orange stadium pillar sections.

    2. When adding 1×1 blocks to the large, flat sections, look ahead and assemble those sections before attaching to the rest of the structure.

    3. Assemble the white stacks in the stands first. Push each block as far back as it will go on the lower block i.e. aim for maximum length.

    Note the alignment issues with the stadium roof girders.
    View showing the white sections of the stands. These sections are stacked 1×3 blocks with an overlap of 1×2. Note the misaligned (blurred) middle white stack on the left stand.
    View showing the “LFC” text built from blocks. This is a nice touch and is quite stable because the blocks integrate into the adjacent rows. I enjoyed this part of the finished stadium.

  • nanoblock – The Japanese micro-sized building blocks

    L – A Gacha-gacha rocket from the Miraikan science museum in Tokyo.

    R – The assembled E233 Tokyo metro car

    At the Toronto Anime North convention in 2022, I discovered nanoblock, the micro-sized building blocks made by a Japanese company called Kawada. They are small enough to be fiddly and unstable but give you tremendous satisfaction when you assemble them into a more concrete whole.

    I was slightly taken aback by the prices – most sets are around fifteen Canadian dollary-doos. Remember that I am taken aback by any price that is not zero – after all, I am Indian. I bought two at the nanoblock store in Tokyo Skytree – admittedly, not the cheapest location.

    One set was a model of the E233 trainset developed by Japanese train company JR East. The model I have is blue, to match the colours of the Keihin–Tōhoku line in Tokyo.

    I decided to capture the building process in a time-lapse video. My YouTube game is weak, hence why there are few edits and the thumbnail is vertical. Both unforgivable errors. Straight to jail.

    A second model that W purchased for me was of the N700 Shinkansen. Another timelapse video is below. The interesting aspect of these designs is that you can combine individual models into a train set. I love that!