Studio711.com – Ben Martens

GPS For Your Brain

I’ve written posts about how LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT, Copilot, etc) are changing my life, but I continue to have conversations with people who are hesitant about it. It seems like it takes that one “aha!” experience where to help someone internalize how this will revolutionize something in their daily routine. So here’s another post where I’ll share a bunch of examples of how I use it to see if any of them trigger for you. Once you get it into your daily flow, it becomes like GPS for your brain. It doesn’t replace you in anything, but it enhances your abilities dramatically. Just like I wouldn’t drive somewhere with a paper atlas anymore, I’d be left behind in life if I wasn’t using AI.

  1. Argue Against Me. Humans love to have their own beliefs reinforced, but true learning happens when you can really understand the opposite viewpoint. AI is great for this. I’ll open up a prompt and explain my viewpoint and then say “Give me some logical arguments from the opposite point of view.” It’s very eye-opening. It’s how I wish all discussions would go but with AI, it’s a lot easier to get non-emotional responses.
  2. Coding. There’s a lot of talk about using AI for coding. I code for a living so obviously I’m interested in whether AI is going to come for my job. I currently find it to be fantastic for small, self-contained problems like “write me a powershell script to do x, y, and z” but it’s not as good at “This class feels unnecessary to me. Rearchitect this project to clean it up.” I’ll keep trying the more advanced scenarios though because it improves so rapidly. If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend checking out this article: How AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths
  3. Command Line Arguments. I guess this is related to coding, but sometimes I find myself using a command line tool with a ton of different arguments. Instead of reading the documentation, I’ll just say “I’m using ytdlp and I want to download only the audio of this video and I want it saved to mp3 format. Generate the command line arguments that I need.” Bingo!
  4. Explain like I’m 5, 10, and 15 years old. When I get curious about a new area, I’m not sure how much I know, so I’ll ask AI something like “I’m curious about quantum entanglement. Give me separate explanations like I’m a 5, 10, and 15 years old.” The numbers might vary, but something like that will help me get quickly up to speed and lets me ask much more specific questions as I continue to learn. It’s awesome to be able to ask dumb questions in a private environment!
  5. Sermon Summaries. Each Sunday I’m responsible for posting sermons from our church services on Facebook and YouTube. I like to include a quick blurb about the sermon and I’ve been experimenting with AI for this. I take the automatically generated transcript of the sermon, feed it into AI, and then ask for a 2-3 sentence summary in the style of the speaker. That “in the style of the speaker” phrase is a key piece of the prompt. It produces a much more natural sounding blurb. I still have to review it for theological accuracy and sometimes I’ll even give it more prompting about what type of source theology is acceptable, but in general, it’s a very solid start and much more eloquent than I would have generated on my own. And even if I could have written something good, using an automated solution like this is a lot easier for someone else to repeat.
  6. Bible Study Companion. During our Bible studies at church, I’ve been typing the questions in and seeing what AI thinks about the answers. “What does placing Ruth in the line of the savior tell us about God’s salvation plan?” I read through the answers and it’s usually a cheat sheet for all the answers that the group will give. Every once in a while they miss one that I think is relevant and I can share it with the group. Now obviously this loses part of the self-reflection benefit of Bible study, but as someone who sometimes finds themselves leading the study, it feels good to have a tool like this in my back pocket.
  7. Homework Helper. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining concepts to Elijah either because I’m unable to formulate it in a way he grasps or because we’re not working well together. In both cases, I fire up the voice version of an AI and have Elijah chat with it. Even if the AI explains it the same way I was, it usually goes over better.

Those are just some examples from my daily life, but there are other awesome ideas too. How about using it to learn a dying language and then safeguard it for the future? And this next example isn’t specifically related to LLMs, but imagine AI training to speak in the voice of someone who has lost their voice to disease? Now their text to speech actually sounds like them. We’re just starting to discover all the possibilities.

These topics come up in a lot of podcasts, but one good one I listened to recently was an interview with Reid Hoffman who recently wrote a book called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. You can listen to the episode here: Unlocking AI’s Potential: Reid Hoffman Discusses ‘Superagency’. I got the “GPS for your brain” quote from that episode.

So if you tried AI once and it gave you a dumb answer or didn’t work for you, don’t give up. One piece of advice is to use the voice version of the AI and just talk to it. That can feel a lot more natural. Or if you want to chat via text but aren’t getting good answers, there’s a whole school of knowledge called “prompt engineering” which is about how to craft the right types of questions. As an example, one thing I hear at church a lot is “AI gives me too much reformed theology.” Sure, maybe it does by default because that makes up a lot of the theological material on the internet. But you could also start your prompt with something like the following:

Serve as an AI theologian with a primary focus on interpreting and teaching Christian doctrines based solely on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth. Use the creeds of Christianity (such as the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds) as supporting documents to clarify key doctrines. Supplement interpretations with insights from faith leaders, especially Martin Luther, whose writings emphasize justification by grace through faith and the authority of Scripture. Maintain a Christ-centered perspective throughout all discussions, ensuring that interpretations align with a literal and historical reading of the Scriptures.

You’ll get a much better response from that prompt! Also, there’s a “think deeper” button in many of the tools now. This helps apply an iterative response to the AI’s response which takes a little longer but can give better results. And while I still use mostly free tools, remember that the free option you’re using is old tech. If you want the latest and greatest, you’ll need to explore the paid options.

Need some links to get started? Here’s my current list ordered by most frequently used first:

benmartens April 3, 2025 Uncategorized No Comments

Migrating Off MailStore Home

I’ve been a happy user of MailStore Home for years. It lets me easily archive mail off of my various email accounts, store it locally, and still easily search it all. (I’m probably paranoid, but I don’t like having years of my personal emails stored on free email services.)

Due to some security changes and lack of support from MailStore, my Outlook.com accounts no longer work with their tool. It’s hard to complain too much when I’m using a free tool. They make their money from corporate customers. So I was off to search for something else.

There are lots of other options, but I kept seeing people recommend Thunderbird which is the email client from the Mozilla Foundation (makers of the Firefox browser.) I was able to export all my emails from MailStore to EML files and then import them into Thunderbird. It will take me a while to get used to the search interface, but functionally I’m back on track. I don’t like the interface enough to switch from my regular email client to just using Thunderbird, but it’s easy enough to open Thunderbird every once in a while and archive some emails from my various accounts to my local folders.

So if I’ve previously recommended MailStore to you as a way to archive your email locally, my new recommendation is Thunderbird. It’s a nice way to have access to all my old emails without letting companies scrape through my content. If you don’t care about that and if you don’t run out of space on your free email accounts, then you can ignore all this.

benmartens March 27, 2025 Uncategorized No Comments

Canon EF 70-200 First Impressions

I posted a few weeks ago about our new Canon R8. After buying that, I traded in almost all our old camera gear at keh.com to swap it for a used Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens. In Canon lingo, the L series lenses are as fancy as they get, and this 70-200 lens is one of the most popular lenses that Canon makes. Our R8 body takes the newer RF lens mount but since that is still very new, there aren’t a lot of lenses on the market and very few on the used mark. We already bought a mount adapter that lets us use the older EF style lenses and since those have been around for so long, there are tons of great options on the used market.

I’ve eyeballed this lens for probably 10 years but we’ve never been able to justify the cost. But with Elijah participating in more school activities, we wanted to be able to capture them well. But wait you say. Isn’t that the justification we used to get the R8 body? I have no idea what you’re talking about. Moving on.

The lens from our old camera that we kept is a Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 SP XR Di LD. Until recently, that’s the nicest lens I ever used and I thought it was great. The f/2.8 aperture helped a lot with collecting enough light into the lens for indoor shooting and I got some great photos out of it, especially when combined with the new full frame sensor on the R8. Never having used anything nicer, I was a little nervous spending so much money on a nicer lens because what if I couldn’t tell a difference?

My concerns were unfounded. This EF 70-200 blew my mind. I took it out for its first real test at Elijah’s basketball game. During the game, I was trying to review the photos on the camera and sure, they looked good, but it’s a tiny screen. How much could I really see? When I got home, I was amazed at how sharp the photos were. That lens combined with the amazing focus tracking of the camera body left me with way more good shots than I used to get and those shots were all of a much higher quality level. I now feel like I’m more limited by skill than by camera gear so that’s a fun place to be.

But maybe this was just cognitive dissonance. Maybe I want to believe it’s better because we spent extra money on it. It’s time for a test.

I set up a tripod in our living room and, using both lenses, I took a photo of Elijah’s science fair posterboard across the room. Both photos were f/3.5, ISO 2000, 1/100 sec at a focal length of 75mm. Zooming in on my PC revealed this comparison. The new lens is remarkably clearer.

I’ll leave the professional reviews to other people, but in both my subjective and objective tests, this new lens is wonderful. Physically, it’s a beast to carry around. The lighter weight of the newer RF lenses is a major advantage, but for the price savings, I’m ok with the extra weight. However, for regular shooting days, I’ll be packing the 28-75 lens… and wondering when I can replace that one with the L series equivalent!

benmartens March 20, 2025 Gadgets, Photography

COVID-19: Day 1826 (Five Years)

This blog serves a few purposes, but one of the major ones is being a (public) journal. It’s interesting, for example, to look back at my thoughts right after the planes crashed on September 11. The spread of COVID-19 feels like one of those events that we’ll remember for a long time so it felt worthy of at least one post, but this probably won’t be the last one.

That was the first paragraph of a post from March 6, 2020, one week before the lockdown started for us. Looking back at the many posts I wrote about COVID-19 I had two thoughts. First, I’m so glad that I wrote all those posts. It’s an incredible record of what was going through my head as I went through an event that will be in history books. Secondly, I’m not embarrassed by what I wrote. That’s a surprise… you can’t find the first years of this blog (mid 2000’s) on my site anymore because I cringe when I read a lot of those posts. But our family’s approach to COVID-19 and other health issues hasn’t changed even after five years: get vaccinated, trust the current science (even when new research invalidates old research), and rely on guidelines from the experts (even when it gets updated.)

The disease is still killing a lot of people. Thankfully death rates are lower now, but it’s still well-entrenched in the top 10 causes for death (though it takes a couple years for agencies to collect exact numbers.)

Our family has been COVID-19 free for quite a while. I’m very thankful for that because even though the risk of death is lower than before, there are still risks of nasty downstream impacts from the disease. Two of the YouTubers that we follow have been hit by long COVID-19. Shawn from Kids Invent Stuff recently announced his challenges with it and Diana from Physics girl just got out of bed for the first time in two years. While I like that society isn’t shut down by this disease anymore, we can’t just ignore it. Research needs to continue, and we need to keep communicating the importance of vaccines. If everyone got vaccinated, couldn’t we remove this from the top 10 killer list?

One of the biggest challenges, especially during the first couple years of COVID-19, was educating people. There is enough blame for that to spread around to everyone: scientists, news media, government, the general population, etc. Unfortunately, this problem doesn’t seem to have gotten better. How much of people’s opinions are currently formed by TikTok and doom scrolling? How is our reaction going to be any more informed the next time we go through an emergency like this? On the home front, I’ve put extra effort into trying to teach Elijah how to evaluate information that he hears.

It would be hard to live through a situation like this and not be forever changed. The mental and emotional aspects are hard to evaluate but there are regular parts of my visible life that are still different than before the pandemic. Here are some that I can think of:

  1. I still work from home! I’m officially a 100% remote employee, and I love not having to commute into the office. No two members of my team work in the same building and most of us are spread out across North America.
  2. We still wear masks on planes. I used to get sick so often when I flew. Why didn’t I do this before? Now I haven’t gotten sick from a flight in five years.
  3. I still do my grocery shopping on Friday mornings before 7am. This started during the lockdown to avoid contact with other people, but I’ve grown to love it. I don’t have to give up more valuable evening/weekend time, it forces me to food plan for the whole week so I make less trips to the store, and my shopping is faster because the store is so empty.
  4. Almost all our meals have always been made at home, but when we do eat from a restaurant, we still do takeout like we did during the lockdown. Ordering online, picking it up, and eating at home is not only cheaper, but it saves us a ton of time waiting around at the table.
  5. We have always tried to keep up with flu shots and other vaccines, but other than flu and COVID, Tyla and I were behind on some. As an adult, nobody says “Hey, have you had a DTaP lately?” There has been an outbreak of Pertussis (whopping cough) at Elijah’s school, and I was thankful that all three of us had gotten that particular vaccine updated in the last year.
  6. I love all the previously in-person meetings that are now online. I get to skip a lot of rush hour/evening drives for church leadership meetings and daytime meetings like school and doctor appointments take so much less time when you just hop online for a call.

These small changes have enhanced my life in unexpected ways, but the continued toll of COVID-19 shows the need for ongoing research and vaccine promotion. We can’t afford to let misinformation shape our actions. We have to prioritize education and getting information from trustworthy sources to handle inevitable future emergencies more effectively.

benmartens March 13, 2025 Commentary

Painting 3D Prints

I don’t know what inspired it but I decided to try my hand at printing 3D prints. We had just watched Inside Out 2 and I found a model of Anger on Printables.

My first attempt used red filament and then I used some of Elijah’s acrylic paints with brushes. Never having done this before, I had no idea what I was doing. The end result was pretty rough. I hadn’t done anything to fix the layer lines in the print, the paints very thick, and the brushes were cheap/damaged. It turned out so badly that I wanted to try again. (And I just now noticed that I forgot to paint the mouth.)

For the second attempt, I took more time. I started by doing four or five layers of filler primer with endless sanding in between. I bought some new (but still cheap) acrylic paint and brushes. The new brushes and paint worked so much better than my first attempt, but I still lacked skill and I was never able to get a brush free appearance, but this was a significant improvement from the first attempt.

The red and the black colors hid the brush strokes pretty well but it’s very obvious on the white parts. Maybe next time I’ll have to get a basic air brush setup and give that a shot?

benmartens March 6, 2025 Maker

PSE Flex Program Review

As I mentioned previously, our electricity rates are increasing, but our power company is also rolling out some interesting programs to help people save money and reduce load on the grid. I recently enrolled in one called “PSE Flex“.

There are multiple ways to enroll:

  1. They send you a message before a “flex event” and ask you to reduce your power consumption. You get paid $1/kWh that you save and $15/year just for being in the program.
  2. If you let them remotely adjust your smart thermostat, you will get $40/year.
  3. If you let them control your EV charging, they will give you $0.50/kWh saved during Flex events.
  4. If you have a battery storage system, you get $500/year if you let them use power from it during Flex events.

I signed us up for the first item and after one month of usage, I’m very happy to report that we’ve already saved the initial $25 sign up credit plus an additional $43.21! There were nine Flex events in those 30 days. I don’t know if that’s normal or if it was ramped up because of the very cold weather we had. Either way, that’s a pretty significant savings.

As someone who spends a lot of time with “big data” I immediately had questions when they said they would credit me for power that I didn’t use. How can you measure something that doesn’t happen? They obviously had to guess and I have two ideas about how they are guessing:

  1. They look at how much power I used during the same timeframe in the days leading up to the event.
  2. They look at how much power I used in the hour before and the hour after the event.

They’re probably doing some combo of this but from my experiments, the second one seems to be the stronger signal. And with a giant electricity storage device sitting in my garage (the Tesla), I can really take advantage of this. I make sure to charge the car for the hour before and the hour after the event and whenever I’ve done that, they’ve said that I’ve saved roughly the kWh that I would have used if I had kept charging that whole time.

In most places, you power is coming from a mix of powerplants. You can see where our power is coming from by looking at the Bonneville Power Authority charts: BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER. Most of our power comes from hydro. That green line is wind and solar. Coal/natural gas and nuclear are at almost exactly the same level.

I had a hard time understanding why we were having Flex events when we weren’t also having peak power consumption periods. While they probably do have Flex events to reduce peak power usage, there is another reason: it can be cheaper to pay you to $1 kWh to not use power than it is for PSE to BUY the power! There’s a great explanation of this scenario in a Reddit thread but as a very quick summary, the price that PSE pays per MW can fluctuate from $40/MWh on a normal day up to $2000! Those of us on the west coast can see minute by minute pricing on this website: California ISO Price Map

I’m sure the whole story is way more complicated than what I’ve understood so far, but for now, I’ll be very happy if I can keep saving $40/month on my power bill!

benmartens February 27, 2025 Electric Vehicles, Links

Canon R8 First Impressions

For our first Christmas as a married couple, Tyla and I decided we’d do “family gifts” instead of specific gifts for each other. This year it was tickets to see the Piano Guys when they come to Seattle, but that first year we decided to get a nice camera. I had some SLR experience from high school when I bought a Minolta 500si but that didn’t prove useful too long as the world moved from film to digital. I was interested in getting a modern dSLR so we dipped our toes in the water with a Canon T2i and the 18-55mm kit lens. I later added a 55-250mm f/4-5.6, a 50mm f/1.8, and a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.5. None of it was fancy or expensive but it helped me learn a lot more about where I was pushing the limits of the gear and where I just need to learn more.

The main roadblock with that T2i was the “crop sensor.” Lower end dSLR cameras have smaller sensors than the higher end full frame sensors. The full frame sensors have 2.6 large surface area than the crop (APS-C) sensors. The extra size is particularly beneficial in low light situations, so I used Elijah’s desire to play basketball again this year as a good excuse to upgrade.

I ended up getting a Canon R8 which is on the low end for Canon’s full frame camera bodies, but it also has the advantage of being the more modern mirrorless style camera. As the name implies, mirrorless cameras do away with the mirror which means the cameras can be lighter, smaller, and faster.

I bought just the body for the camera since my old lenses would be compatible and would be enough to get me started. With the change to mirrorless tech and the change in form factor, Canon introduced a new camera mount called RF lenses. These lenses are smaller, lighter, and have all the latest tech. But thankfully you can still use all the older EF lenses with an adapter. To complicate things a bit, both the EF and RF lenses have “-S” variants which were specifically made for crop sensor cameras. They technically work on full frame cameras but they’re typically cheaper build quality and will also produce vignetting on the bigger sensors. My 18-55mm and 55-250mm were EF-S lenses but my 50mm and 28-75mm were EF lenses since I had bought those hoping I would upgrade to a nicer camera body in the future.

So that’s a lot of text before I talk about actually using the camera. Honestly, it’s frustrating. I had tens of thousands of pictures under my belt with the T2i and I barely had to think about it. Now there’s a lot more futzing around for the setting I want, missing shots because it’s focusing on the wrong place, etc. I believe all of that is just a learning curve and I’ll end up ahead of where I was.

To help speed up some of that learning, I took the camera to Elijah’s multi-school competition last weekend. He was competing in a Lego building competition and Lego robotics. I took a lot of pictures and ended up with a few passable ones but nothing stellar. Mostly it was interesting to see how the camera behaved indoors with unpredictable kids and lots of stuff moving around as I tried to hold focus on the right spots. The camera does do some pretty amazing eye detection and focus tracking. It seems natural to post some images here but as I said, none of them really show off the capabilities of the camera. Here’s one which is nice except that Elijah’s back is to the camera.

That 28-75mm lens is my favorite and is generally the only one that was on my old camera unless I had some very specific reason to get out the ultra-fast 50mm lens for very shallow depth of field. That 28-75mm lens had enough reach to handle most situations I was in, but that zoom feels inadequate on the new R8 body. This is because the crop sensor camera bodies have an unavoidable 1.6x zoom compared to a full frame sensor. So on the T2i, that 75mm zoom behaved like a 120mm zoom. Now on the R8, I lose that which is great on the wider end of the zoom but not on the narrower. More on that in a future post.

I had been using a copy of Lightroom from back in the days when you could just buy the software and be done. That copy of Lightroom doesn’t work with the more modern RAW photo formats. Now Lightroom is a subscription model and I’m not willing to pay that much per month for something that I don’t even use every month. I hunted around through a lot of alternative software including darktable and RawTherapee. I’m sure those tools can do what I need but I’m not interested in devoting months of my life to learning their painful UIs. Corel PaintShop Pro was included for free with my camera and I figured I would just move to that but unfortunately, they don’t support photos from the R8 yet. If they do, I might switch to that. For now I’m using my existing copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements. The Organizer app lets me flip through all my shots, tag some specific ones, and then I can edit them in their native RAW format. I’m mainly adjusting white balance and making a few other small tweaks so it’s good enough. It’s a major downgrade from Lightroom but I wasn’t using most of what Lightroom offered anyway.

I’ll have mercy on you and stop rambling, but this has been a fun process to work through. I know I’m the weird dad at Elijah’s events who is walking around taking pictures of everything, but I love having the pictures when I’m done, and let’s be honest, I’d be the weird dad at the event even if I did have a camera in front of my face.

benmartens February 20, 2025 Gadgets, Photography

The Cost of Power

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

In the last post in the series, I gave an update on our Model Y’s efficiency and our continued progress towards having this car be cheaper than the gas car we would have purchased instead. Today I’m here to report on a bit of a change to those calculations. Our electricity price has increased by ~20% this year and next year they’ll go up again (~5-10%).

PSE prices are increasing because of state regulations which are requiring them to get rid of coal and natural gas plants. Voters want more wind and solar but not nuclear. This is being demanded at such a rapid rate that PSE needs to raise costs to cover the change.

This slows things down a bit, but the bigger factor in determining how much money we are saving is still the cost of gas. The change in electricity cost means that our electricity cost per mile* goes up from $0.034 to $0.041/mile. Our gas cost would currently be $0.19/mile. A gallon of gas going down by about $0.20 would be a bigger hit to our savings per mile than this electricity cost increase.

This price increase also led me to do a better job with the previous price increase that had happened in January of 2023. My old calculations had ignored the lower prices for the first half a year that we had the car. After improving the electricity cost changes in the model, we’re at $10,628 in fuel savings after 57,600 miles.

So while the cost increase is annoying, it doesn’t dramatically change the math. It does increase my desire to have solar panels on the house though. The math on that just doesn’t work out super well in the Seattle area though. It would be a neat feeling to generate my own power to fuel our car!

*Yes, I’m also factoring in service costs, depreciation, insurance, registration, etc in the total cost per mile. This post only focuses on the fuel costs.

benmartens February 18, 2025 Electric Vehicles

Nightstand

Our bedroom furniture is a mishmash of stuff we had before we were married and while it still works fine, there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to the setup. For example, somehow during those endless nights with Elijah as a baby, we ended up with a foldable TV tray table serving as Tyla’s nightstand. After ~11 years of this, I figured it was time to do something about it.

I landed on a set of plans from Wood Magazine since I find it significantly easier to work off existing plans than to build from scratch. I knew I wanted to build this out of walnut, but my first hurdle was the cost of the materials. The plans called for less than half a sheet of 3/4″ plywood and it needed to be good quality on both sides. A sheet of walnut plywood is not cheap and while I could theoretically buy half a sheet, the markup for having them only sell me a half almost makes it not worth it. I ended up buying a full sheet and made plans for what to do with the leftovers. (Stay tuned… hopefully that next project won’t take 11 years.)

The build itself was straightforward. The plans were ok but they’re very basic. There’s not much joinery. Everything is just a set of panels and pieces that get combined with biscuits. I was ok with the simpler build, but I wasn’t crazy about the biscuits. They’re great and I use them on various projects, but it felt like the glue up would be very complicated since the pieces could still slide laterally. I ended up doing everything with dowels instead and that worked out very well. I was able to dry assemble everything and then the glue-up was straightforward. But before the glue-up, I prefinished everything with General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil Based Topcoat in semi-gloss.

In keeping with the nature of the simple design, the drawer just sits in the opening, and it is a bit of a loose fit. It’s fine for a nightstand but that could be an area for improvement if you’re using the same plans.

I dream of replacing all the furniture in our house with stuff I’ve made, but at this rate I think I’d have to outlive Methusaleh.

benmartens February 13, 2025 Woodworking

Old Maps Online

I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by a website called Old Maps Online, but it has been fascinating to go back to again and again. There’s a slider at the bottom and you can scroll through time to see how various nations have changed their territories. I’m especially interested in Bible history and this has added a lot of information to my studies. Note that at the top of the page you can switch between having the map show regions, rulers, people, and key battles. You can also click on the map details to get related Wikipedia articles in a slide out panel.

benmartens February 6, 2025 Links