Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Plate Bingo

Road trips have become a common activity in our family and one of our favorite games on road trips is plate bingo (or whatever it is called in your family.) We play cooperatively and we mark off each state’s plate that we see. On our trip to Yellowstone, we completed the whole set of 50 states plus a bunch in Canada and Mexico. We even saw a plate from Brazil!

We play on paper and it works just fine, but I was interested in trying to do it electronically. I flipped through the various apps for it but didn’t love any of them so with the power of agentic engineering, I built my own that is perfectly customized to my wishes. I’m going to skip posting the link here because I’m not really set up to service the entire internet if this page somehow gets popular, but feel free to text/email/whatever me and I’ll send you the link.

The interface is probably what you would expect. You get a big list of checkboxes for the US, Canada, and Mexico and as you check them, everything is synced to a central server so that everyone can see them. You can click into a state to see an example of the plate as well as facts about it. There’s a map view with your finds colored in, and you can upload a GPX file that overlays your route on the map along with a dot showing where you are now. At the end, you can generate a PDF report of the whole game showing some stats like the percentage of the country that you found by population and by area as well as a timeline of how many states you found per hour over your trip. In the back end I’m also keeping track of your location when you found a state with an idea to eventually come up with a “how hard is it to find state X based on your location” model.

Ultimately this whole thing could just be replaced with a single checkbox that says “Did you find West Virginia yet?” and in the unlikely event that you check that box, it says you win.

benmartens August 13, 2026 Geek, Travel No Comments

Washington County Exploration

I’ve explained in previous posts how at some point, we decided to try to visit all Washington counties. The rules were pretty simple:

  • All three of us are together as a family
  • We are in our electric car
  • We at least drive into the county, but ideally, we find something fun to explore in the area
  • If we previously achieved these criteria before we decided to set this as a goal, those counties still count.

I have belatedly created a tag for some of these trips: wacounties.

After all our previous trips, there was only one more left and that was for the five counties in the very southeast corner of the state. If you’ve ever looked at a map, there’s not a lot there. It’s composed largely of dry rolling hills dotted with cows and farm equipment. While beautiful, it’s hard to come up with something to do instead of just drive through.

Further complicating this was the fact that there were no superchargers in that area. My only idea was to charge up extremely high in Pasco, WA and then try to touch all the counties on the shortest route possible up to Spokane to get to another charger. Another idea was to bank on non-Tesla chargers (or a campground, etc) but that makes me MUCH more nervous. So many non-Tesla chargers are broken that I didn’t relish the idea of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a plug in my hand.

Thankfully in May of 2025, Tesla installed a new supercharger in Lewiston, ID! It was still a fairly long run, but it made things a lot more interesting.

We planned this as a 710-mile, overnight trip. On Saturday, we headed across Snoqualmie Pass, down through Yakima to Pasco. We charged there, had lunch, and headed east. Much of our route was along US-12. I have greatly enjoyed all the time we’ve spent on two lane roads as part of this adventure! The interstate is a good fast-forward, but the experience really gets better when we exit the interstate.

When we got to the final county, we stopped to take a photo by the sign.

Lewiston, ID and Clarkston, WA are right across the river from each other, and as you can guess from the name, Lewis and Clark came through there. We stopped at Hells Gate State Park in Idaho to visit the Lewis and Clark Discovery center and play a little disc golf. Then we had a delicious dinner at Roosters on the Snake River and then went back to our hotel. As always, we stayed at a Best Western Plus (not sponsored, but we should be at this point!) and it was probably the nicest one we’ve ever been to.

On Sunday we made the trek back on a slightly different route joining up with I-90 at Moses Lake. We sat in about 30 minutes of traffic for the decade long bridge replacement at Vantage. (I’m exaggerating the project length. Probably.)

As we got closer to Seattle, the traffic got heavier, the drivers got worse, and the rain started up. It was a bummer to think that the county exploration project was over, but I’m so glad we did it! Elijah keeps asking if we’ll try it when we move to Minnesota. We’ll at least keep track but there are so many more counties there that it will be a long process.

benmartens August 11, 2026 Electric Vehicles, Travel No Comments

Truck Canopy

It’s hard to believe that our truck is 10 years old! Thankfully it only has about 65k miles on it because since 2020, I haven’t been using it to commute back and forth to work. We’re hoping to have it for many more years so this summer we upgraded it with a canopy.

A canopy seems like one of those things that is useful 95% of the time and then is REALLY annoying the other 5% when you actually need to haul dirt or move something tall. So hopefully I ended up feeling like it was a net win. I’m excited to have it in place for our big road trip later this summer, and once we move, I should have plenty of room to store it for times when it does need to come off. Maybe it’s even an excuse to get a tractor with forks to help lift it off!

Kudos to the friendly people at Truck Builders LLC for walking me through the process of picking it out and then easily working around my schedule to get it installed. I ended up with a Snugtop Rebel with the 24″ led strip and dedicated switch (shown in the bottom picture), sliding side windows, removable front window (for cleaning between the truck and the canopy), and the lock is wired into the same circuit that my key fob controls. It’s a nice setup!

The first thing I did when I got it was remove the vinyl logo from the back and the adhesive badges on the side. (I’ve did that on the first day I had both the Tesla and the truck too.) We’ve already used it for camping, and it worked great!

benmartens August 6, 2026 Commentary No Comments

Buying Piano Music with AI

I play music for some of our church services, and lately I’ve been playing for about 75% of them. My normal process is to look at the scheduled hymns and then look through all of my piano music to see if I have any arrangements of songs that match the hymns so I can use them for pre and post service music. Every time I buy a new piano book, I put it into a spreadsheet that matches the sheet music tunes to the hymn tunes so I can look them up easily in the future.

Now that I’ve been playing more Sundays, I’ve been looking to fill in some holes in my collection. But which piano book would fill the most holes? Sounds like a good programming problem.

I started by feeding AI the shared spreadsheet that the church worship team uses. I had it analyze all the hymns we’ve used for the last three years and then figure out how often we use them. Then I fed it my spreadsheet of all the music I already have. Then I pointed it to some online shopping sights from my favorite arrangers.

Using all that information, it assigned a point value to each hymn based on how often we’ve sung it in the past year and then filtered out any hymns that I already have covered with some other sheet music. Then it looked through the online catalogs of all the arrangers I like and, in the end, it spit out a list of books I should consider buying and told me who many “points” they would cover in my library.

I ordered the books a few minutes after I saw that report and later it dawned on me that maybe I should have validated the results before spending money based on what AI just told me. But it worked out great! The new books were excellent ways of giving me pre and post service arrangements that match some of our most-used hymns.

If you also play piano and are curious what arrangers I pointed the AI to, here is a list:

There are a lot more that I like but that seemed like a good enough sample size to prove whether this worked and I will probably expand it more in the future if I try to execute this again.

benmartens August 3, 2026 Music No Comments

Deception Pass Camping

Every year we try to go camping with Tyla’s family. I’m pretty sure we’ve done it every year since 2008! This year we went to an old favorite: Deception Pass State Park. It’s a very busy place and we had to book right when the reservations opened up 9 months earlier, but this time we stayed on the east side of the park in the Quarry Pond campground. That seemed a bit more laid back and we could still access all the various parts of the park.

Don always brings his trailer and we congregate there for all the meals, but I was able to book a cabin that was right next to their site. When you go camping in June around here, there’s a decent chance that it will be cold and rainy so the cabin is nice to have. Thankfully we had almost perfect weather with temps around 70 and clear skies.

We watched beautiful sunsets every night down at the beach, walked across the bridge, explored the tide pools in the north part of the park, and hiked around the Quarry Pond side of the park. A huge thanks to Don, Logan, and Megan for getting the camper ready for this one weekend trip and then storing it again!

As I was watching the sunset one night, I wondered where it was rising. Stop and think about that for a moment. You’re sitting near Seattle in June watching the sun going down over the Pacific. Where is it rising? The answer surprised me: Paris!

They all left one day before us because of some family stuff, but we enjoyed our time with them and also the time with just the three of us.

benmartens July 13, 2026 Family, Outdoors

Nostalgic Coding

One of my favorite classes in my undergrad studies at Purdue as CS251 – Data Structures and Algorithms. Do I use them every day? Nope. But the fundamentals from that class are a key part of being a successful programmer. For a field of study that is full of text, I remember loving the mental part of this class. I could visualize how all these algorithms were working on a small scale, but then I’d be amazed to see how fast they could run over enormous datasets. It’s still at the root of what fascinates me today. This recent video from Veritasium dives into one of the most discoveries in computer science: Dijkstra’s algorithm. So if you want to know part of what excites me about programming, check this one out.

benmartens July 9, 2026 Geek, Links, Uncategorized

Car Refrigerator

Until recently, I didn’t even know that 12v refrigerators were a thing that you could buy, but once I found out, I couldn’t stop thinking about how convenient it could be for our road trip. After some research, I settled on the BougeRV CRPRO 30. (For some reason it is much cheaper at Walmart than Amazon.) This particular model is powered by either 12v or 120v and the temperature can be set anywhere from -8F to 50F. Theoretically it has a voltage meter built in so it will shut off if the car battery gets low, but so far I have been unplugging it when we leave the car for very long.

I’ve enjoyed four main benefits over a traditional cooler besides the obvious one of not having to buy ice:

  • Initially, it looks tiny when you compare it to a cooler, but when you realize you don’t have to add ice, it suddenly feels much bigger.
  • I can easily add more cans/bottles to it as you go and they will get cooled off without destroying your ice in the process. (Did you know it takes over half a bag of ice to chill a 12 pack?)
  • One of the last things I would do before a trip is buy ice and pack the cooler. With this, I can just have it sitting on the floor in the kitchen plugged into the wall and I can throw stuff in throughout the week.
  • In a cooler, I have to protect many things from getting wet. With this, I don’t have to mess with all those extra bags.

We used it on our recent camping trip and it was great! It held all the chilled food that we needed and then we restocked it with drinks throughout the weekend. We had it plugged into the truck on the drive to the campground and then we used power at our campsite to keep it cold.

It was definitely a luxury to have it at the campsite, but I think where it will really be useful is on our big road trip coming up later this summer. We almost always pack lunches and snacks to save money and time so instead of buying endless bags of ice, we’ll have an easy way to keep things cool. It’s a little awkward to carry into the hotel and back to the car every night, but I bought a shoulder strap to go with it that will hopefully make it simpler.

benmartens July 6, 2026 Uncategorized

Car Repairs

When I had my motorcycle, I bought a set of 9 DVDs that explained a lot of maintenance tasks (including things like valve adjustments!) It was extremely helpful to be able to see the work being done on the exact same motorcycle that I owned.

Fast forward and now pretty much anything you need is on YouTube. I have a playlist of common vehicle things that I need to do, but I was very happy to recently stumble on the TRQ app. You punch in the details about your vehicle and then you get a curated list of videos specifically for your vehicle. It saves time clicking around trying to find the right answer, but of course it helps if you have a common vehicle. My F150 has over 90 videos!

I’m sure there are a lot more apps like this. If you have a favorite, please let me know. Thankfully I haven’t had to do much beyond basic maintenance but I’m sure that time will come.

benmartens July 2, 2026 Uncategorized

Confirmation

Elijah was recently confirmed at church. Most people probably don’t know what that means, and those that do probably have differing definitions. My quick explanation of it has been that for the last two years, Elijah has been taking extra classes at church with Pastor and this is his graduation ceremony which is also part of the church service. I think that’s a decent surface level explanation, but I wanted to go a bit deeper here.

First of all, let’s talk about what it is not. Confirmation is not a sacrament, nor is it anything that is commanded in the Bible. It doesn’t save you. You’re not receiving Christ. While it is the point at which you start taking communion, it’s not the same as “first communion” in other churches. You don’t need to do this to get to have faith or get to heaven.

Instead, it’s a church practice where someone (usually towards the end of middle school) publicly affirms their faith. They are acknowledging that they have been taught what the Christian faith is and they are saying they believe that it is true. It’s somewhat similar to a wedding vow renewal ceremony. A wedding vow renewal doesn’t create marriage. The couple was already married, but it is still meaningful and publicly reaffirms what is already true. Somewhat similarly, confirmation does not create salvation. It publicly reaffirms the faith already given by the Holy Spirit through the gospel.

Confirmation class is a structured way to instruct people about what the Bible teaches. Various churches in our national church body handle it slightly differently, but our church does Bible History class in 6th grade, Catechism class in 7th grade, and then life application in 8th grade. The confirmation ceremony happens between 7th and 8th grade. So my quick “graduation” explanation is not at all what we want to happen. Your Christian training lasts your whole life and even the classes continue on next year as they talk about how to apply their faith in their lives.

We were happy that both Tyla’s family and my parents could be there to celebrate along with friends from church. It was a special day in his life, and we pray that it’s just a solid start to his life of faith.

P.S. I’m always happy to talk more about this if you have questions, or you can check out this quick summary of what the Bible teaches: The Great Exchange – WAJ. The rest of that site is great as well.

benmartens June 29, 2026 Family

Unified Theory of Time Management

Whether through some series of life events, personality quirks, or the fact that it has literally been my job for many years, I love efficiency. Or rather, I am deeply troubled by inefficiency. I can’t get rid of inefficiency in others, but I optimize my time to what is probably a bit of an unhealthy level. As I think about how to optimize my optimization efforts, there are two main ways I look at how I spend my time:

  • Am I producing or consuming?
  • Am I serving others or serving myself?

Both questions help me be intentional about how I spend my time. For example, I feel better about myself at the end of the day if I spent most of my time creating something new versus just ingesting what someone else created. And I feel better about myself if I am serving others versus indulging my own wishes.

As I was chewing on this recently, I realized that these two ways of analyzing my time could be complimentary. Imagine a grid like this:

With this model, each box starts to make sense:

  • Producing / Serving Others – This is anything you’re creating where someone else is the primary beneficiary. Examples: Making dinner, planning a family trip, doing yard work, creating a family budget, volunteering on the church council, or practicing piano for playing at church services. This box is where the vast majority of my time goes and I think that’s a good thing.
  • Consuming / Serving Others – This quadrant doesn’t always feel productive in the moment but it can make your service more effective in the future. Examples: Reading a book about team leadership, learning a new technology, or studying the Bible to prepare to teach a Bible class. I don’t think I have a lot of regular tasks that fit in this quadrant.
  • Producing / Serving Self – In this zone, you’re producing something where you are the primary beneficiary. Examples: Woodworking, personal finance planning, or organizing the garage. If I had no responsibilities, this is where I’d love to spend all my time. In reality, this box usually gets squished out by the producing/serving others box.
  • Consuming / Serving Self – While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this quadrant, it’s the “candy”. Left unchecked, this can get out of hand. Examples: Watching TV, playing video games, or taking a nap. I do reserve some time at the end of the day to wind down with TV and reading a book. If I run fast right up until the point I crawl into bed, I don’t get very good sleep.

I think that whether you’re trying to lose weight, break a habit, or optimize your time, writing it all down is a great way to tackle the challenge. Seeing everything listed out at the end of the day or the week can be eye-opening. With something like this that is more subjective, you have to be very honest with yourself because not everything fits nicely into a single quadrant. For example, why am I blogging right now? I’m definitely producing content, but who does it serve? Some of it is recording content for my family to look back on in the future, some of it I think will be useful to others, and a lot of it is just me enjoying writing. Ultimately, if you have to say “well technically” before your answer, you probably already know which quadrant it should fit in.

I don’t think there’s any “right” answer about how your time gets divided among these four quadrants, but I do try to be intentional about it, and I pointedly focus on keeping the bottom right quadrant to the bare minimum. Social media and doom scrolling apps fall squarely in that bottom right quadrant, but that’s a topic for another post.

benmartens June 25, 2026 Commentary