Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Arm And Cross Check

armdoorsBefore you take off on a flight, you’ll hear “Flight attendants, arm and cross check doors for departure” and then when you land you hear a similar message about disarming the doors. Have you ever stopped to wonder what that actually means?

Once the main cabin doors are closed, they need to have the emergency slides made ready to fire in case the doors are opened in an emergency. Cross checking means that they go across the plane to make sure the flight attendant on the other side did theirs correctly.

benmartens September 25, 2015 Commentary

Lake Cavanaugh

For a long time, Tyla has wanted to rent a house on a lake to spend time playing with Oskar (and oh yeah, the rest of the family too.) We booked it early this year. Unfortunately we had to put Oskar down before we made it to the cabin, but the vacation must go on!

So Tyla, Elijah, and I headed to Lake Cavanaugh with Tyla’s family. Booking it in mid-September, we really didn’t know what kind of weather we were going to have. We were very blessed to have 80 degree sunshine the whole weekend! It was perfect for swimming and boating in the provided canoe and kayak.

The house was a VRBO rental and it could easily have handled twice as many people. Elijah loved playing foosball, ping pong, air hockey and pool. The house was great!

I had never heard of the lake before this, but I was really impressed. It’s only about 1.5 hours from our house (northeast of Arlington, WA) and even though it’s close, it feels very secluded. The lake water is VERY clean and the lake is big enough to easily support a lot of people skiing and tubing. The only downside is that the lots are very narrow so the houses and docks are really crammed together.

We made a lot of great memories that weekend. It also happened to be my birthday so this was a pretty great way to spend a birthday. I hope we’ll be able to visit the lake again!

lakecavanaugh1 lakecavanaugh2 lakecavanaugh3 lakecavanaugh4lakecavanaugh5

benmartens September 24, 2015 Family, Travel

Fantasy Football – Week 2

roethlisberger2015week20-2. It’s a rough start to a Seahawks team that has one of the toughest schedules in the league. (For examples, they face more teams coming off bye weeks than anyone else and have fewer opponents on a multi-game road trip than anyone else.) Was Kam the reason? No. Fine him. Dump him. Or better yet, find some way to make him holdout past the point later in the season when he loses his pension and any benefit he had from being in the players union. Penalties were a big killer in the game. As Cris Collinsworth pointed out 572 times during the game, Aaron Rodgers invented the free play and the Seahawks gave him plenty of opportunities to show it off. We’ll see what happens with the home opener, but though the Seahawks haven’t looked terrible, they’re not hitting the ground running.

In our league, the winners from last week continued their winning except for Tim. There are still three people tied at the top (Logan, Austin and me.) Luke, Jim and Andy are still looking for their first wins.

Now on to the weekly awards. I’ll put the new season records in bold.

This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Ben 144.81 Ben 145.30  (Week 1) Tim 195.50 (2013)
Lowest Team Score Andy 70.73 Was Dad 84.40  (Week 1) Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout Dad beat Andy by 45.86 Ben beat Dad by 60.90 (Week 1) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Austin beat Jim by 2.49 Was Tim beat Luke by 8.33 (Week 1) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Ben Roethlistberger had 36.66 for Dad Was Tom Brady had 35.62 for Ben (Week 1) Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013)
Longest Winning Streak Ben, Logan, and Austin have 2 game winning streaks Was Ben, Logan, Austin and Tim have 1 game winning streaks Micah had an 8 game winning streak (2011)
Longest Losing Streak Jim, Luke, and Andy have 2 game losing streaks. Was Jim, Luke, Andy and Dad have 1 game losing streaks. Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens September 23, 2015 Fantasy Sports

Music Tastes

goodmusictasteIf I flip on some music, I generally turn to a country station. But over the last few years, I’ve become more and more frustrated with country music to the point where I installed my own FM whole-house transmitter to play the country music that I enjoy. Today’s country music has strayed a long way from it’s roots and every song is about a truck in a field with a bonfire.

I’m a grumpy old man. I get that. But it looks like I’m more normal than I thought.

A study from a few months ago shows that people around my age “discover less-familiar music genres that they didn’t hear on FM radio as early teens, from artists with a lower popularity rank. Second, listeners are returning to the music that was popular when they were coming of age — but which has since phased out of popularity.” I’d say that sums me up pretty well. The study also shows that if you are male and/or a parent, the effect is increased.

So I may be a grumpy old man, but at least I’m not alone. Get off my lawn!

benmartens September 22, 2015 Commentary, Music

Marker Box

My desk is closest to our team whiteboard at work so I end up with lots of dry erase markers, permanent markers, post-it notes, and erasers floating around. I headed out to the garage to play around with some scrap wood that I picked up from Crosscut in Seattle.

The box is REALLY simple. I screwed around trying to make some box joints but didn’t get them to look good enough for this so I dropped that and just did rabbet joints. I don’t know what kind of wood this is, but for the buck or two I paid for it, it turned into something useful. Simple, but useful. I finished it off with a few coats of spray lacquer.

markerbox

benmartens September 21, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

Fine Dust Collection

If I’m doing woodworking in the garage, we usually end up with a bunch of fine dust particles on our cars in the morning. It has gotten a lot better since I started hooking up my shop vac to all the tools, but there is still plenty of fine dust that escapes into the air.

You can buy some fancy dust filtration systems, but those are out of my budget range right now. So instead I made a DIY version. I bought a cheap box fan and a furnace filter. I attached the furnace filter to the fan with some wire and hung the fan up in the rafters. Now I turn that on whenever I’m woodworking and it helps to catch some of the fine dust particles.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a good deal for the money that I spent on it. I guess you could say it’s “fine.”

diyairfiltration

benmartens September 18, 2015 Woodworking

Long Timelapse Tips

GoPro-HD-Hero-2During our Indiana trip, I made a six-day timelapse. That was by far the longest one I’ve ever attempted. How did it work? Here are some tips:

  • The GoPro is a great device for this. You can set it to snap a photo every 2, 5 or 10 seconds. Generally I do 2 seconds but since this one was so long I did 5 seconds since I knew I would speed it up a lot anyway.
  • Set the GoPro to the lowest resolution possible. On my camera that is 5 megapixels. Even that is a waste since you’re going to end up resizing down to 1080p anyway. The lower resolution will help you save room on the memory card and also saves battery life.
  • Don’t skimp on the memory card. 32 and 64GB cards are super cheap. Just get a big one and remove this potential problem from your setup.
  • Get a portable USB battery pack. I use this one, but there are lots of options. Get one that takes AA batteries. When you run out of battery, you just slap new batteries in there and you’re instantly ready to go instead of waiting for a recharge. I use and recommend Eneloop AA’s and the Lacrosse BC-700 charger. By using the battery pack to keep the internal GoPro battery charged up, I’m able to confidently let the camera run for 4 hours and it will probably go a lot longer. I changed out the batteries at lunch and at night. That way I didn’t have to worry about them dying on me.

When I was done I had over 30,000 photos. How do you process all of those into a movie? There are LOTS of options, but here’s how I do it (for free):

  • Install IrfanView. It has a lot of features, but I use it to batch resize and crop all of the photos down to 1920×1080. I also rename the photos to something like image#####.jpg so that there is a sequential number for every image.
  • Install ffmpeg. Decipher the command line parameters to build up the video that you want. Here’s the line that I use:”c:\program files\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg” -i image%05d.JPG -r 30 -s hd1080 -vcodec libx264 -y out.mp4
  • Techincally you could be done at this point, but I usually take that MP4 into Adobe Premiere Elements and crop it up, speed it up, slow it down, etc.
benmartens September 17, 2015 Geek, Timelapse

Fantasy Football – Week 1

brady_2015week1Welcome to another NFL football season! The Seahawks opened with a dramatic loss. Fans around the country cheered in the first quarter when they went for it on 4th and 1 and got a first done with a run. Fans around the country collapsed in sadness when a similar situation occurred in overtime and they couldn’t make it happen again. That Super Bowl play call is going to haunt the team forever.

Last year, the top four in our league were Austin, Jim, Tim and me. This year started off with all of those same teams (except Jim) winning. The road ahead is long and fraught with suspensions so don’t despair yet if the season isn’t start off to your expectations.

Now on to the weekly awards.

This Week Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Ben 145.30 Ben 145.30  (Week 1) Tim 195.50 (2013)
Lowest Team Score Dad 84.40 Dad 84.40  (Week 1) Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout Ben beat Dad by 60.90 Ben beat Dad by 60.90 (Week 1) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Tim beat Luke by 8.33 Tim beat Luke by 8.33 (Week 1) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Tom Brady had 35.62 for Ben Tom Brady had 35.62 for Ben (Week 1) Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013)
Longest Winning Streak Ben, Logan, Austin and Tim have 1 game winning streaks Ben, Logan, Austin and Tim have 1 game winning streaks Micah had an 8 game winning streak (2011)
Longest Losing Streak Jim, Luke, Andy and Dad have 1 game losing streaks. Jim, Luke, Andy and Dad have 1 game losing streaks. Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

I got lucky. My sixth round draft pick QB weaseled out of his suspension and had the most points in our league. But how did all of our first round draft picks handle week 1?

  • Adrian Peterson – 6.7 , Jim
  • Eddie Lacy – 16.9, Tim
  • Marshawn Lynch – 14.9, Dad
  • Le’Veon Bell – Suspended two games, Logan
  • Jamaal Charles – 18.8, Ben
  • Dez Bryant – 7.3, Andy (Out 4-6 weeks for broken foot)
  • DeMarco Murray – 16.00, Luke
  • Antonio Brown – 23.89, Austin

Power Rankings for our league will return in week 5. My super accurate, statistically backed algorithm needs 4 weeks of data to get calibrated.

Good luck on another season!

benmartens September 16, 2015 Fantasy Sports

TV Season Premieres

muppets2015It’s that time of year when new TV shows start up again. Tyla and I have been cutting down the number of shows that we watch, but there are still a few that we enjoy (marked in bold below.) I’m going to give the new Muppets show a try too since I liked the old one so much. The others I’ve included because I know some of you watch them.

9/14 – Dancing With The Stars (ABC)
9/21 – The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
9/22 – The Muppets (ABC)
9/23 – The Middle (ABC)
9/23 – Modern Family (ABC)
9/23 – Survivor (CBS)
9/25 – The Amazing Race (CBS)

If you want the full list, check out Metacritic.

benmartens September 15, 2015 Commentary

Enable Cortana

hiimcortanaBy default, Cortana is disabled in Windows 10 but I recommend that you enable it. If you have a microphone, you can talk to your computer and ask questions, set reminders, search the internet, start apps, etc (and of course you can type to Cortana too.) It will be extra handy once all those reminders and alarms sync with the phone, but for now they just sync across your Windows 10 devices.

It’s really easy to turn it on. Either click the Search icon in your taskbar or press the Start button and type Cortana. Then click the little gear icon on the left side of the menu. The top toggle button asks if you want to turn Cortana on. Yes! After you turn it on the first time, it will walk you through some quick setup steps.

Now that you’re all set up, check out some of the cool things you can do with Cortana. This is one of those features that will keep getting better over time, but it’s already pretty useful. I love having Cortana on my phone, especially for the time and location-based reminders.

benmartens September 14, 2015 Commentary