Studio711.com – Ben Martens

CrashPlan Update

crashplan-logoIn 2011 I signed up for CrashPlan and I’ve been a big advocate ever since. It’s a fantastic cloud backup service. You just install it on your machine, pay a small annual fee, tell it what folders to watch and you’re protected! There’s no limit on how much data you can upload. I have 3.9TB uploaded now!

As the size of my backups have increased, there have been two times when the app has stopped working. Both times were because the app was running out of memory to look at all the files and figure out what had changed. There’s an easy fix which is well-documented on the CrashPlan site. You just edit an INI file and restart the service.

If you’re not doing any kind off site backup yet, go to crashplan.com and sign up. It’s a tiny amount of money to be protected against all kinds of problems and data loss disasters.

benmartens October 9, 2015 Geek

Generator

generatorWe lose power at our house once or twice a year. In the last nine years, there have been a couple multi-day outages, but in general, our power is pretty reliable. But… we bought a generator. When we came back from vacation to a house with no power, food going bad in the fridge and an overtired kid who was thrown even more out of his routine, I snapped and clicked BUY IT NOW on Amazon.

Generators can get really expensive. I think I kept it fairly simple by making some compromises. I didn’t get a name brand, I didn’t get a super quiet model, I got gas instead of diesel, and I didn’t get one that is wired into my house. What I DID get is a DuroMax XP440E. It’s rated for a sustained 3500 watts, has an electric starter and it cost less than $400. I figure that if we use it even a few times, I’ll feel like it was worth the money.

My main goal during an outage would be to run the fridge along with some lights and cell phone chargers. That will be easily accomplished by placing the generator on the back patio and running extension cords into the house. Simple, but effective.

At some point I want to have a bunch of upgrades done on my electrical panel (per circuit usage monitoring, whole-house surge protection, etc) and at that point I might have them wire in a transfer switch. Then I could just plug the generator right into the panel and (carefully) power the whole house. Obviously we wouldn’t fire up the dryer, the microwave, etc, but it would be really nice to use light switches. Plus, our water heater requires electricity because it’s tankless so this would give us hot water. Brent, our HVAC guy, said we could power our furnace with the generator too. So there are lots of possibilities but I don’t plan to go down that route soon (or maybe ever.) In an emergency, I’m pretty sure I could hack up a solution to get the furnace powered by the generator so I feel like I’m covered. Plus it rarely gets THAT cold here.

Once it arrived, setup was simple. There are a few steps to follow to get it ready to run the first time, but now it should start up very easily via either the electric starter or the pull cord. We live less than a mile from the gas station so assuming they have generators, we should be able to get gas from them as needed if my small local cache runs out.

That all being said, I feel somewhat ridiculous for buying a generator. I grew up in a house that seemed to lose power all the time and we never had a generator. This was definitely a luxury purchase, but for I’m happy with getting this backup plan for only $400.

benmartens October 8, 2015 Home Improvement

Fantasy Football – Week 4

2015week4 freemanWhew, the Seahawks squeaked out an ugly victory against arguably the worst team in the NFL. But even the Lions were able to run through that porous offensive line. Jimmy Graham is great, but was losing Unger worth it? And then we had “batgate” after the game was over. Apparently the touch in the endzone was illegal. Yes, it would have been better if the rules were properly enforced, but I don’t feel nearly as bad about this one as I did about the Packers one. Nobody seemed to even notice that something incorrect had happened (or maybe I just missed it as I fast forwarded to get to the action.)

We had some close games in our league. Luke and Andy faced off to see who would win their first game. Sorry Luke. Maybe next time? You are the closets to Detroit so I guess it fits. We had a lot of low scores, but looking at the rosters, a large part of it was some surprises about who made the points. There were a lot of points on the benches this week. I’m trying not to mention my streak because I know it will go down in flames.

The power rankings are back! Here’s what my super secret, proprietary formula says:

1. Ben
2. Tim
3. Logan
4. Austin

Now on to the weekly awards.

This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Ben had 139.79 Tim 200.51 (Week 3) Tim 200.51 (2013)
Lowest Team Score Austin had 71.56 Andy 70.73 (Week 2) Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout Ben beat Austin by 68.23 Was Ben beat Dad by 60.90 (Week 1) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Andy beat Luke by 5.53 Austin beat Jim by 2.49 (Week 2) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Devonta Freeman had 35.40 for Ben Aaron Rodgers had 44.92 for Tim (Week 3) Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013)
Longest Winning Streak Ben has a 4 game winning streak. Was Ben has a 3 game winning streak (Week 3) Micah had an 8 game winning streak (2011)
Longest Losing Streak Luke has a 4 game losing streak. Was Luke and Andy have 3 game losing streaks. (Week 3) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens October 7, 2015 Fantasy Sports

Apocolyptic Bunker

Imagine building a 70mph mobility scooter, a bed that launches you across the room as a morning alarm, or a jet bicycle. These are just some of the things that Colin Furze has done on his YouTube channel. His latest project trumps them all though: an apocalyptic bunker. He’s digging a huge hole in his back yard and building a bunker! You can watch parts 1, 2 and 3 on his channel now, but there will be a few more videos before he finishes. I love watching videos from makers, but Colin is in a league of his own. He dreams up crazy things and then actually makes them happen.

benmartens October 6, 2015 Links

Job Change

microsoft-azure-logoI’ve been at Microsoft for over 9 years and in that time, I’ve worked on a bunch of different teams. However, I never went out and LOOKED for a new team. I was just moved around in reorgs. That kept me generally happy and I got to peak inside a bunch of different organizations. The key thread through all of those jobs as BI (business intelligence.) I spent a lot of time on Power Query and the language research that led into. Then Power Query joined in with the whole Power BI effort and I moved from the Power Query team into a data engineering/analytics team. Over those years my job title changed from Test Engineer to Test Lead to Software Engineer. All of these changes have been good and have increased my knowledge. This latest team, Power BI, has been really awesome. We went from nothing to a shipping product in about a year and we’re really shaking things up. This is almost certainly Microsoft’s next billion dollar business. (Go sign up. It’s free and easy. http://powerbi.com)

One of the great things about being in a company like this is the opportunity for changing teams without changing companies. There are SO many things that I want to work on in this company that I’ll never scratch the surface. All it takes to change teams is a few emails, some interviews and bam, new job.

So for the first time in 9 years, I took advantage of that opportunity and I’m voluntarily changing to a new team. I’m going to stay in the big data technology space, but I’m swithcing to the Azure Compute team. This is one of the core groups inside of Microsoft Azure. Azure is the cloud computing offering from Microsoft. It started 4 years after the more popular “Amazon Web Services”, but it’s rapidly catching up according to Gartner’s latest report. You can also check out some of the recent financial disclosures to understand how Azure is one of the key bets for the future of the company and it’s going exceedingly well.

My new group handles the vast number of physical and virtual machines that are at the heart of the service. And my specific team is focused on customer analytics. Are you getting what you pay for when you use Azure? What areas are good or painful? What features can we add to make it even better? There is a LOT of telemetry and feedback data available and I’m eager to dip my hands into that pot.

While this feels like a brand new job, it’s awesome that my paycheck, benefits, title and commute are unchanged. Thanks to Microsoft for giving me so many opportunities to pursue my interests!

benmartens October 5, 2015 Commentary

Moving From Groove To Spotify

spotifylogoTyla and I have been enjoying our Groove (Xbox Music) subscriptions. They work well on our phones, computers, Xboxes, etc. I have three main complaints about the service:

  1. I use it to play music through our whole-house FM transmitter. It crashes/stops pretty frequently and I have to restart it about once per day.
  2. There is no sharing of playlists. This is a huge negative for me. Sometimes I want to make my own lists, but very often I just want a curated list that somebody else generated. Or maybe I want to use the playlist that Tyla made of Elijah’s favorite songs. There’s no way to import/export or share playlists in Groove.
  3. There’s no family plan. Everyone buy’s their own subscription at full price.

With these thoughts in mind, I think we’re going to join the rest of the planet and switch to Spotify when our current subscriptions are up later this year. The first family member pays full price and additional family members are half price. It’s easy to switch but the only real pain point is moving our playlists over to Spotify. Manually recreating them would take forever.

There’s no great way to do this, but if you’re a geek, you can probably follow my vague instructions:

  1. Fire up Chrome. Browse to music.windows.com and open your playlist.
  2. Scroll down to make sure the whole playlist loads (it only grabs 50 songs at a time.)
  3. Press F12 to open the developer tools
  4. In the Elements tab, right click on the root HTML node and choose Copy.
  5. Paste that into notepad and save the file.
  6. Now you need to parse out the artist and song info. There are tons of possibilities here, but I used Power Query in Excel. Basically I filtered for the types of rows that had Artist and Titles. I stripped out all the extra info and voila. I built out a table with two columns: Artist and Title.
  7. I copied that table and went to Ivy. That site lets you create a Spotify playlist. It looks up each one of those songs in the Spotify catalog. You’re probably not going to find all of your songs in the Spotify catalog since the catalogs are different, but most of them will probably work.
  8. Ivy gives you a button to click that copies the playlist to your clipboard. Then you create a new playlist in Spotify and paste your clipboard into that playlist. Voila!

Easy? Nope. Hacky? Yep. But it saved me a bunch of time. There is an SDK for Groove but it doesn’t look like you can easily get playlist contents for a specific user. I started trying to code it up, but this was faster and I’ll never need to do it again anyway.

benmartens October 2, 2015 Geek, Music

Upgrading Christmas Lights

I’m planning to slowly improve our Christmas lights from year to year. This year I’m going to put lights around each of the three garage doors. I’m trying to figure out if I should do the red/white pattern there too or if I should go all white. Here’s a reminder of what we had last year. This year there will be lights around the top, left and right of each of the three garage doors.

christmaslights2014

Vote in the poll below and share your opinion!

benmartens October 1, 2015 Commentary

Fantasy Football – Week 3

2015week3_aaronrodgersThe Seahawks finally put a tally mark in the win column against the hapless, injured Bears. Yay. The first half looked pitiful. I don’t see how they can get very far in the playoffs (if they even make it) given their offensive line situation. It’s a mess. And yes, Kam is back. I would have loved it if Pete benched him for the first half, but whatever. Hopefully they’ll dump him at the end of the season and get a couple offensive linemen.

Our league had some really high scores. Jim got his first win, but the big news is that Tim set an all-time record for single week points. And he could have had another 15 points with a perfect roster! I’m now the only undefeated team but I expect to break that streak next week when I have a really tough bye week situation.

Now on to the weekly awards.

This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Tim 200.51 Was Ben 145.30  (Week 1) Was Tim 195.50 (2013)
Lowest Team Score Luke 102.53 Andy 70.73 (Week 2) Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout Tim beat Austin by 48.50 Ben beat Dad by 60.90 (Week 1) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Jim beat Luke by 5.18 Austin beat Jim by 2.49 (Week 2) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Aaron Rodgers had 44.92 for Tim Was Ben Roethlistberger had 36.66 for Dad (Week 2) Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013)
Longest Winning Streak Ben has a 3 game winning streak Was Ben, Logan, and Austin have 2 game winning streaks (Week 2) Micah had an 8 game winning streak (2011)
Longest Losing Streak Luke and Andy have 3 game losing streaks Was Jim, Luke, and Andy have 2 game losing streaks. (Week 2) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

Don’t forget that there is a very early game in London on Sunday so make sure your rosters are set.

Power Rankings return next week!

benmartens September 30, 2015 Commentary, Fantasy Sports

Hyperlapse

A while back, Microsoft Research announced a technology called Hyperlapse. The idea is that it takes something like bumpy GoPro video, smooths it out and speeds it up. I didn’t play around with it much until the other day when I installed a preview of the professional desktop application. I dropped in a ski video from a 2013 trip to Crystal with AndyM. The result was pretty impressive! Sure it’s not going to make a great ski video, but it’s cool to see the “flow” down the mountain. It almost looks like the camera was flying above the ground.

benmartens September 29, 2015 Geek, Video

Chicken Pasta With Sundried Tomatoes

chickenpastatomatoesI guess we were a little burned out with all our grilling because we’ve been eating everything from the stove or the oven since that ended. We’ve been eating some great food though! We just tried a new recipe for chicken pasta with mozzarella and sundried tomatoes. It was deeeelicious! You can find the original recipe here.

Ingredients

  • 3 large garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 small jar (3-4 oz) sun-dried tomatoes in oil, or use 3-4 oz fat-free sun dried tomatoes
  • 1 lb chicken breast tenders
  • salt
  • paprika (just a little bit)
  • 1 cup half and half
  • 1 cup mozzarella cheese, shredded
  • 8 oz penne pasta
  • 1 tablespoon basil (if using dry basil), if using fresh basil you can add more
  • 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (at least, add more to taste)
  • 1/2 cup reserved cooked pasta water (or more)
  • salt, to taste

 

Instructions

  1. Note: if using sun-dried tomatoes in oil (in a jar), make sure to drain sun-dried tomatoes from oil, before using them. Reserve 2 tablespoons of this drained oil for sauteing as described below:
  1. In a large pan, on high heat, sautee garlic and sun-dried tomatoes (drained from oil) in 2 tablespoons of oil (reserved from the sun-dried tomatoes jar – see note above) for 1 minute until garlic is fragrant. Remove sun-dried tomatoes from the pan, leaving the oil, and add chicken tenders, salted and lightly covered in paprika (for color) and cook on high heat for 1 minute on each side. Remove from heat.
  2. Cook pasta according to package instructions. Reserve some cooked pasta water. Drain and rinse the pasta with cold water (to stop cooking).
  3. Slice sun-dried tomatoes into smaller bits and add them back to the skillet with chicken. Add half and half and cheese to the skillet, too, and bring to a gentle boil. Immediately reduce to simmer and cook, constantly stirring, until all cheese melts and creamy sauce forms. If the sauce is too thick – don’t worry – you’ll be adding some cooked pasta water soon. Add cooked pasta to the skillet with the creamy sauce, and stir to combine. Add 1 tablespoon of basil, and at least 1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Stir to combine.
  4. Add about 1/2 cup reserved cooked pasta water because the creamy sauce will be too thick (do not add all water at once – you might need less or more of it). This will water down the thickness of the cheese sauce and make it creamier. Immediately, season the pasta with salt and more red pepper flakes, to taste, if needed. Let it simmer for a couple of minutes for flavors to combine.

  1. Note: Make sure to salt the dish just enough to bring out of the flavors of basil and sun-dried tomatoes.

benmartens September 28, 2015 Food