Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Good Eats Returns!

I loved Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” back in the early 2000s. It was a unique combination of cooking and science. Some of the things I learned on that show are still drilled into my brain like “Avoid single use kitchen gadgets.”

So you can imagine my excitement when I saw that he’s bringing it back on YouTube! The first episode went live on November 22 and he’s releasing weekly episodes.

There were a couple other sequel/spinoff series so while I hope this one will last for a long time, I’m here for whatever we get!

benmartens December 29, 2025 Links No Comments

Merry Christmas!

LUKE 2

THE BIRTH OF JESUS

1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.

4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

benmartens December 25, 2025 Commentary No Comments

Eagle Sign

For my birthday, my parents tried to buy me a kit from CIC Workshop to make an American Flag Eagle sign. The kit was out of stock so that set me on my path of making the American flag in the shape of the United States and then the Martin Luther College sign. As I was ordering a bit more material to make that MLC sign, I realized that the original eagle kit was back in stock so I picked that up.

The kit comes with all of the raw materials cut to size. The HDPE material is pricey so it is helpful to only buy what you need. It also comes with the digital files in a variety of formats and even a legal release allowing you to sell the result.

It was fun to cut it out and assemble it, and since the material is very fast to cut, I was done pretty quickly. Basically when you look at this, each color is its own piece except for the white which is the color underneath the black. Everything fits into its place and is held in with special glue that works with HDPE. I added a keyhole slot in the back so I could hang it on a screw and now it proudly overlooks my workshop.

This exploration into HDPE has been interesting but I’m looking forward to getting back to a more traditional woodworking project. I still have some HDPE material leftover though so this probably won’t be the last project I ever do with it.

benmartens December 24, 2025 Woodworking No Comments

Railriding

Looking back through my 2025 posts in preparation for my “year in review” post, I realized that I never wrote about our rail riding trip in August!

For Tyla’s birthday adventure, we checked out Vance Creek Railriders. They have a stretch of tracks and custom built pedal powered train carts. Each cart can hold up to four people and you better be ready to pedal because it’s a workout!

The trip away from the home base goes pretty quickly because there are large stretches that are slightly downhill. We probably got going ~20-25 mph at points, but of course, all that fun downhill was just future work for us.

At the turnaround point, they had a special contraption for flipping the carts around while we had the option of visiting the port-a-potty.

Coming back was significantly harder, and it was made worse by the group towards the front that seemed to take pedaling as an optional part of the trip. It sort of was optional because the cart in the back had a small engine on it, but there was no way it could push the dozen or so carts up the hills so we all still had to pedal.

I don’t think any of us are itching to do this every weekend, but it was definitely a fun experience that we’re all glad we tried.

benmartens December 18, 2025 Family, Travel No Comments

Custom MLC Sign

After making the flag shaped like the United States, I wanted to do a couple more projects with that HDPE material. Since I had some red/white/red left over, I bought a sheet of black/white/black and pulled out my vector drawing of the Martin Luther College athletics logo. It was a relatively easy job to set up except that I was trying to maximize my use of a scrap piece, and since the material is so expensive, I didn’t have any extra. Any error would scrap the whole project.

Thankfully it all came out smoothly. Gluing the two pieces together was tricky because almost nothing adheres to this, but I did find an epoxy that works pretty well. It’s not an unbreakable bond, but I think it will be ok for a sign hanging on the wall.

I have one more HDPE project planned, but you’ll have to check back later to see that. You can also follow my woodworking Instagram account @martenswoodworks. Feel free to leave angry comments about how this is not a woodworking project.

benmartens December 17, 2025 Woodworking No Comments

Nativity Set

Back in 2022, a teacher at Elijah’s school approached me with a special project opportunity. The old wooden cross on the school property had fallen over. She had saved a chunk of it and wondered if I could make something from it.

The piece she saved was an 8×8 that was maybe 15″ long. I finally landed on the idea of making a nativity set out of it and I based the design on a set that Mom always put up around our house while I was growing up.

I carefully sliced the wood into ~3/4″ pieces. Then I drew the whole thing on the computer first and used the CNC to cut out all the parts. (That turned out to be a good move since I ended up making more of them.) I cut it out of regular pine first to refine the design and then nervously used up the reclaimed wood to make a set. The final step (after endless hand sanding) was applying 5 colors of stain to the various pieces and gluing them together. I made a quick video of the process so the school could use it as marketing for their upcoming fundraiser/auction.

The set made from the school cross sold for over $700 at auction! Since I had another complete set made from regular pine, I finished that one as well and gave it to my parents as a Christmas gift.

Fast forward a couple years and I keep thinking about this project and how it would be nice to have our own set so I pulled out the files and cut another one. Most of the effort is in the hand sanding and the staining. I didn’t sand this one quite as much as the others partly because I’m lazy and partly because I wondered if a slightly more rustic look would look good. I think it came out well and it will be fun to have it up around our house at Christmas.

I might revisit this in the future. I think it would be fun to make a fancier version that uses five different species of wood and no stain. I’m curious if that would look good or if the quality of the wood would detract from the simple design.

benmartens December 15, 2025 Woodworking

Recurring Subscriptions

I distinctly remember sitting in a Computer Science class at Purdue around the turn of the century (I might as well own it, I’m getting older) where a professor was trying to convince us that the model of paying once for software was going away. He certainly was right. Everything is a subscription now, and those subscriptions can be a huge drag on your financial future. I feel like we are pretty careful about any recurring subscriptions, but let’s review them and see how we’re doing:

  • Amazon – At $139/year, this isn’t cheap, but we use it a lot. I know there are various feelings about shopping at Amazon, but I love all the extra family/hobby time it gives me because I can just have stuff show up instead of driving around in traffic trying to find some random item.
  • Monarch Money – After Mint closed, I was looking for new personal finance software and I’m happy that I landed on Monarch. It’s $100/year well-spent. It’s what I’m using to write this post because I can easily find recurring bills. If you only do one thing for your financial future, spend time every month categorizing your transactions and keep a solid understanding of where all your money is going. If you want 50% off your first year, consider using my referral link.
  • Comcast Internet – I keep costs low here by buying my own modem, getting the cheapest plan I can find, and setting an annual reminder to sign up for a new one year contract at a lower price. We currently pay $56/year for 500/30 service. That’s way more download speed than we need (I lived fine with 100Mbps until very recently) but this was the best deal when it was time to renew. Pro-tip: don’t let them upsell you on speed. You will almost never notice the difference between 100Mbps and 500Mbps. This is coming from someone who works fully remotely and has over 50+ devices on the network.
  • Xfinity Mobile – Our total household cell phone bill each month is $25. No that’s not a typo. Xfinity Mobile operates on the same network as Verizon and I can’t tell any difference from when we were paying $80/month for Verizon. That $25 includes two lines with 1GB of shared data. Yes that’s ridiculously small but since I work from home, I rarely need cell data, and, more importantly, knowing that we have almost no data available means that we do not spend any time surfing around on our phones when we’re out and about. If we need to bump up to unlimited data for a month, it’s only $65 total. If you don’t want Xfinity Mobile, there are plenty of other similar companies like Mint Mobile, Boost Mobile, Straight Talk, etc. I don’t understand how the big companies still exist.
  • Spotify – Tyla and I both listen to music for much of the day and so we have a the $15/month family plan. It’s integrated into our Tesla too so we get access to our playlists and the full library anywhere we go. And since we have the family plan, it was easy to add Elijah and keep his musical tastes out of our recommendations.
  • YouTube – We pay the $15/month to have no ads on YouTube. I’m allergic to ads. Unless there’s no other option, I’d rather not watch something than watch something with ads. This YouTube subscription is permanent. We carefully manage our other streaming TV services, but YouTube is a constant. For now we just share my account, but when Elijah is old enough to get out of his kids account, we’ll upgrade to the family plan. This does include YouTube Music which theoretically should be as good as Spotify but my attempts in the past to switch over have fizzled out. If you love YouTube Music, I’d love to learn more about why you love it.
  • Prime Video – I was very frustrated when Amazon nickel-and-dimed us by making it an extra $3/month to get rid of ads on Prime Video even with a Prime account. It still feels very cheap to me, but we’re currently playing it. This is one of the temporary subscriptions. We’ll drop it and move on to something else soon.
  • Disney+/Hulu – Again, I pay for the no-ads version at around $21/month. We’ve had this for about the last six month while Elijah and I are plowing through tons of Star Wars content. I’ve canceled our subscription though and starting in December I think we’ll switch over to Netflix for a while.
  • Trakt – This $60/year service that helps us keep track of the TV and movies that we watch. It’s especially helpful since we hop around services. When we come back to a service, I can easily see what episode we were on in each show. It’s also a good way for me to remember shows that I want to watch with just Tyla or as a family. There are a lot of different front-ends to Trakt but I just use the standard app.
  • Duolingo – I’m almost up to 1900 days on my Duolingo streak. I pay $80/year for this and I’m most of the way through the Spanish program. Once I complete it, I think I might drop Duolingo and switch to another language app that is a little less gamified.
  • Tesla Premium Connectivity – This is another splurge that costs us $100/year but it means that our Tesla has a lot of additional features such as streaming music (Spotify!), live traffic, satellite-view maps, live sentry mode cameras, and when we are parked, we can watch video streaming services (with separate subscription) like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

I’m pretty quick to drop services that I don’t think are worth the money, and I know what I would drop if we needed to find a little more room in the budget. If you’re curious to learn any more about these services, I’m happy to share why we like them!

benmartens December 11, 2025 Geek

Wireless Android Auto

I’m very thankful to have Android Auto in our 2016 F150. It keeps that head unit from becoming an unusable lump of electronics over time. Or so I thought. A few years ago, I stopped using it because it would repeatedly drop connection even on a 20 minute drive. I tried better quality cables but nothing seemed to help.

When we decided to drive the truck to Yellowstone, I was trying to figure out how I could get it working again and I decided to give a wireless adapter a try. The adapter stays plugged in and then the phone connects wirelessly to the adapter. I went with the AAWireless Two and it was some of the best money I ever spent on that truck. We did our ~2500 mile road trip and it never disconnected unexpectedly even when we would get in and out of the truck dozens of times while we explored the park.

This little gizmo changed me from never bothering to use Android Auto to using it every time I get in the truck. It connects in ~5 seconds and voila, I’m good to go!

benmartens December 8, 2025 Gadgets