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Canon Speedlite 430EX III-RT

Tyla and I usually go for some bigger family gift at Christmas instead of exchanging gifts with each other. Our first gifts like this was the camera and that has gotten a lot of good use. This year we decided to add a nice flash to the camera.

I chose the Speedlite 430 EX III-RT. As the name implies, this is the third version of this model. It has way more features than we’ll ever need but it also means that I probably won’t ever feel the need to buy a different one.

It’s a fully automatic flash so it gets all the info it needs from the settings on the camera. The RT means it supports radio triggering. My camera doesn’t have a built in radio trigger but I could add one on and have the flash fire even if it’s not attached to the camera.

I really enjoy the ability to rotate the flash in two directions to bounce the flash off a nearby wall, etc. It gives a much more natural looking photo instead of the traditional on-camera flash look. I have a LOT to learn about how to use a flash but here’s one of my first tests.

Here’s the baseline. This is the built-in flash on the camera.

This is the new flash with the diffuser attached (it comes in the box with the flash.) It’s a little better but it’s still obviously a picture with a flash.

And finally here’s what it looks like with the new flash bouncing off the side wall. This one looks a lot more natural.

I’m excited to do some reading and really learn how to make good use of this gadget!

benmartens December 29, 2015 Commentary

Flash Fill

If you spend much time in Excel, you have probably found yourself doing some repetitive tasks to clean up a column of data. Or maybe instead of doing it manually, you might craft some formulas to do it for you. If you’re just doing a one-off cleanup, make sure you consider the Flash Fill feature in Excel. I recently used this in a demo to my team at work and many people in the room were surprised by it so I figured there were probably a few of you reading this who could benefit from it as well.

The basic idea is that you have one or more input columns and an output column. You provide an example or two of what the output should be and then you click the Flash Fill button. A magical wizard in your computer figures out the pattern and repeats it for the rest of the column. It really does feel like magic the first couple times you use it. Sometimes the algorithm gets it wrong for a few cells so you can just make a correction and it will update it’s algorithm and redo any cells that need it.

This video has a bunch of great examples:

If that’s not enough for you, check out prose-playground.cloudapp.net. The tech behind Flash Fill is open sourced out of Microsoft Research and this is one of the sample sites they have created. If you want to use the SDK, you can get it from GitHub.

benmartens December 28, 2015 Geek

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, 2015 Commentary

Wise Men Timing

For as l can remember, I’ve thought that it was silly to have the three wise men in the nativity scenes. They didn’t show up until Jesus was at least a few months (maybe a year or two) old. So I sat down to do a blog post explaining how we know this and… NOPE. I was wrong.

Ok, well we can’t technically say for sure exactly when they arrived, but most of the evidence does indicate that they probably arrived the day (or a couple days) after Jesus was born. This site has a great explanation of how we know this and what a possible timeline looks like. I ran it by Pastor Herrmann and he gave it the thumbs up.

So where did I get this notion in my head that Jesus was quite a bit older? The Bible says that King Herod ordered all of the babies under two years old killed to try and wipe out what he perceived as a threat to his throne. Why would he do this if he knew that Jesus’s birth was very recent? We don’t know. Herod was an angry, mean guy so maybe he could have just been covering all his bases. Or maybe he expanded the time range to make sure that his guards got the message and didn’t have to try and figure out how many days old a Baby looked. Or maybe he wanted to send a message to the population that he was the man in charge. We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.

I guess the nativities still are incorrect. The shepherds and the wise men probably weren’t there at the same time, but I’ll let that slide.

In fact, none of this really matters or changes the story. The important part is that on that night in Bethlehem, the Almighty God came to earth in the form of a baby and started on the journey to the cross. Because of our faith in his life, death and resurrection, we’ll get to meet him in heaven and ask him all these questions!

benmartens December 24, 2015 Commentary

Fantasy Football – Week 15

Johnny Money actually played pretty well against the Seahawks. The defense was underwhelming for the first part of the game but they figured it out eventually. Kudos to the coaching staff for making changes throughout the game just like they have been throughout the season. The Seahawks have now clinched a playoff spot which I was betting against at the beginning of the season. If the season ended now, the Seahawks would play the Redskins in their first game. Any hope at a Super Bowl has to run through the Panthers, Cardinals and Packers. All of those would be a challenge at best. It sounds like Lynch has a chance to be back for the playoffs which would be important. I suspect those would be his final games as a Seahawk but we’ll see… I’m in favor of getting rid of his big salary (and his attitude) and betting on Rawls.

Our league broke my little heart. I fretted over my roster all week making some small adjustments. Everything went pretty well and I was only a couple points from a perfect roster but it wasn’t enough to topple the 91.16 points that Austin got from Cam Newton and Antonio Brown. Very impressive. Logan won his game so next week will feature Austin vs Logan for the championship. Austin wasn’t part of the money pool so Logan wins that already (for the second year in a row!)

I have to also point out that last week Logan and I swapped the spot for the top seed. That happened because of about a four point difference in his game. If that had gone the other way, Logan would have played Austin … and lost by 1 point. Ha! Ok ok, I’ll quit my moaning.

In other league news, this was tied the highest total points (sum of all teams) for the year. We had the same output in week 3. Andy broke his losing streak with a win over Tim and had his highest point total of the year.

The Power Rankings a little extra silly this time but here they are anyway:
1. Ben
2. Logan
3. Austin (+1)
4. Dad (-1)

If I had to put down money, I’d put it on Austin. He would have beat Logan 7 of the last 8 weeks and Logan has a lot of injury trouble. That being said, I think it’s going to be really close.

Now on to the weekly awards.

	This Week	Season	All-Time
Highest Team Score	Austin had 162.66	Tim 200.51 (Week 3)	Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score	Jim had 111.50	Andy had 41.29 (Week 14)	Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout	Luke beat Jim by 25.4	Ben beat Dad by 111.43 (Week 8)	Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win	Andy beat Tim by 8.13	Ben beat Andy by 2.46 (Week 7)	Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player	Cam Newton had 51.60 for Austin	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	Austin has a 3 game winning streak.	Ben had an 8 game winning streak (Week 8)	Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak	Jim has a 3 game losing streak.	Andy had a 8 game losing streak (Week 14)	Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

benmartens December 23, 2015 Fantasy Sports

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