benmartens – Page 104 – Studio711.com

Printing Tiled Images

I’m working on a new decorative sign for our house. After I had drawn it at full size in Photoshop Elements, I needed to print it full-size, tiled across multiple sheets of paper. It seems like there are a lot of ways to do this, but it took me long enough to figure out that I figured I should write it down.

My approach was to save it as a PDF from Photoshop Elements and then open that PDF in Fox It Reader. (I think Adobe Reader has a similar feature.) There’s an option when printing to print it as a tiled image. You should get some extra marks on the paper to help you line up the multiple sheets and tape them together. One easy way to accomplish that is to hold it up to a window when it’s light outside and then you can easily align the sheets.

If you do this regularly, you might want to check out Big Print. It costs $22 but check out the videos and you’ll quickly see why it’s probably worth the investment. On a side note, if you have an engineering mind and you enjoy woodworking, check out the rest of that guy’s site and his YouTube video. He makes incredibly complex tools and projects out of wood.

benmartens December 22, 2015 Links, Woodworking

Christmas Ornament For 2015

We have a great walk down memory lane when we put up our Christmas tree because every year, we buy an ornament on our family vacation. This year’s ornament was purchased at the San Diego Zoo. It’s actually a magnet, but it works as an ornament too!

You can see our past ornaments in these posts: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008-2010

benmartens December 21, 2015 Family

Name Check

If you’re thinking about starting a business or any kind of website, one of the hardest parts is coming up with a name. It’s not just coming up with an idea, it’s coming up with an idea that has an available domain name, Instagram name, Facebook name, etc.

There are a bunch of websites out there to help with this, but one of my favorites is https://namechk.com/. You just type in the name you are interested in using and it checks across a whole bunch of services at the same time to tell you where it’s available.

benmartens December 18, 2015 Links

Vitamin String Quartet

The DJ at our wedding introduced us to a group called “Vitamin String Quartet”. As the name implies, they are a string quartet. They play covers of popular music. That was the music he used during the dinner. If you aren’t paying attention, it just sounds like classical music, but every once in a while it catches your ear and you realize what song they are playing.

Check out their music on your favorite streaming service, but one of my favorites is their Jason Mraz album. I also noticed that they have a “Geek Wedding” album which is a bunch of love songs from geeky movies like Lord of the Rings. Tyla is lucky we got married before that album was released.

benmartens December 17, 2015 Music

Fantasy Football – Week 14

The Seahawks look like a completely different team after their bye week. Granted, they haven’t faced the toughest opponents, but still, their offense is miles ahead of where it was before. Thomas Rawls made us forget about Marshawn Lynch, but now he’s hurt too. Hopefully Lynch will be back for the postseason, but we’ll see if they can still make it there with Fred Jackson and a couple mediocre rookies.

Not too much happened in our league except that Logan and I swapped the #1 and #2 seeds for the playoffs. That just means that the first playoff games are me vs. Austin and Logan vs. Dad. Logan and I are the only two people in the playoffs that were part of the money pool so we’ll have our own little sub-battle going on. At the other end of the spectrum, Andy never could get it going this year and this week he broke the all-time record for the lowest score. I could almost hear Luke rejoicing in Toledo. Luke also gets credit for an optimal lineup this week!

The Power Rankings perfectly match the seeding of the playoffs.
1. Ben
2. Logan (+1)
3. Dad (-1)
4. Austin

Now on to the weekly awards.

	This Week	Season	All-Time
Highest Team Score	Ben had 143.53	Tim 200.51 (Week 3)	Tim 200.51 (2013)
Lowest Team Score	Andy had 41.29	Was Andy had 62.50 (Week 10)	Was Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout	Ben beat Andy by102.24	Ben beat Dad by 111.43 (Week 8)	Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win	Austin beat Logan by 3.55	Ben beat Andy by 2.46 (Week 7)	Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player	Russell Wilson had 42.98 for Tim	Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (Week 8)	Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak	Ben and Austin have 2 game winning streaks	Ben had an 8 game winning streak (Week 8)	Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak	Andy has an 8 game losing streak.	Was Andy had a 7 game losing streak (Week 13)	Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

benmartens December 16, 2015 Fantasy Sports

What is Advent?

Religions have a lot of seasons and celebrations. I readily admit that I don’t know most of the non-Christian ones and even some of the lesser known Christian ones are hard to remember. I won’t do this for every single Church season or special day, but I thought that for some of them I would do a little write up about what it means for Christians and why I celebrate it. It just so happens that the Christian “liturgical year” starts in December.

The church year starts with the season of Advent. Advent starts four Sundays before Christmas and runs up to Christmas. So for most years it starts the Sunday after Thanksgiving. These four Sundays are sometimes represented by four candles. One more candle gets lit each week. Some Advent wreaths have a fifth candle in the middle and that one gets lit on Christmas Day.

Advent is a season of waiting. We’re not just staring at our watches, waiting for Christmas to come. We are joyfully anticipating Christmas and reflecting on why we need Him and what His birth meant for us. Believers in the Old Testament waited thousands of years of Jesus to come. We only wait a few weeks and we get to celebrate it each year. But in addition to preparing and focusing on the birth of Jesus at Christmas, we also expectantly wait for his return at the end of the world when those who believe that Jesus died for their sins will be taken to heaven.

Want to know more? Check out this article about Advent from our church body.

I’ve already written a post about why I celebrate Christmas so it will be a little while before there’s another post in this series.

benmartens December 15, 2015 Commentary

Tool Cart

I’ve been dreaming about a workshop rebuild that will probably happen next summer. My original plan was to build a bench down the side of the garage to hold my tools. Then I realized that it could be more convenient if I had a few rolling carts to hold the tools. They can be rolled into place when needed and then pushed off to the side when they aren’t important.

I designed this one out in Sketchup and that worked extremely well for me. After designing it out, I also laid out the cut list and cut ALL of the pieces before starting to build. It was a leap of faith but it worked out great! I didn’t have to recut anything. I was almost completely done before I realized that I had made a big mistake. When I put the tools on top of the cart, they didn’t fit!

In a bonehead maneuver, I had never actually put the tools in the position that I would have them on the top of the cart to measure the total space. I just measured the individual tools and when I did that, I forgot to include the part that sticks out of the back of the jointer. ARG!

Thankfully, the jointer and the planer only overhung the edge by about an inch. I resolved this by running a 3/4″x3/4″ piece of leftover cedar all around the top edge. I also trimmed out the rest of the cart so it looked more intentional. It looks fine and everything fits without hanging over the edge.

The drawers came out pretty nice. This was my first time using drawer slides and they work wonderfully! They were really easy to install and I got the full-extension drawer slides so I don’t have to fuss with stuff hiding in the back of the drawer.

The final touch was to build a simple attachment to hold a power strip on the back of the cart. This means I only have one plug to power the cart and I also have some extra power ports if I need them.

I want to build one more of these to hold the drill press, spindle sander and belt sander. I’ll probably use a very similar design but this time I’ll make sure that I lay the tools out and measure the total space!

benmartens December 14, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

Christmas Lights

Do you remember voting for what color lights I should use around the garage doors this year? I took your advice and went all-white. You can see the end result below. I think it looks pretty nice. I might toy around with making the center door be all-red or something like that but for now, I’m happy. Next year I think I’ll focus on adding some smaller lights to the bushes and/or the little tree next to the driveway.

benmartens December 11, 2015 Commentary

Amazon Price Watches

If you’re stalking some items on Amazon, watching for a good price, check out camelcamelcamel.com. They will alert you if the price drops below a threshold that you set and it will also show you a price history chart. It’s interesting how much prices fluctuate! It’s also fun to scroll through their Top Price Drops page to see what items they are discounting the most today.

Even if you aren’t waiting for a product to hit a specific price point, it’s nice to check that site and make sure you aren’t buying it at a temporary price peak. It’s also handy to combine this with Amazon’s price reduction policy. It changes regularly, but right now it seems to be good for seven days. There’s some minimum price change is required too, but as an example, I watched a product drop $20 and seven days later, I called back and got a refund. I had to mention the policy to get the refund though. At first the rep told me to ship it back and then buy it again.

benmartens December 10, 2015 Links

Fantasy Football – Week 13

How ’bout them Seahawks? Eh? They looked great! Granted, the Vikings were down three key defensive players and they ran out of safeties, but the Seahawks actually had an offense. They get two “easy” games against the Ravens and the Browns before meeting the Rams and the Cardinals again in hopes of revenge. I admit that I’m starting to get my hopes up a bit. Vegas now thinks that the Seahawks are tied for the third most likely team to win the Super Bowl and they have passed up the Packers.

In our league, the top four teams won against the bottom four teams. This obviously did nothing to shake up the standings but it gave Austin a guaranteed playoff berth. This might be the first time when the playoffs were locked before the end of the regular season. If you didn’t make the playoffs, PLEASE make sure you continue to play hard this next week. There is still money riding on some of these games and the playoffs seeds will depend on your performance. Logan is locked for top seed but Dad and I could swap if I lose and he wins.

Logan might be in first place but the computer thinks he’s the third strongest team right now. We’ll see how that plays out.

1. Ben (+1)
2. Dad (+1)
3. Logan (-2)
4. Austin