benmartens – Page 110 – Studio711.com

Automated Light Switches

There are a LOT of ways to automate your home. In addition to all the products that have hit the market recently, there are some well-established systems that have been around for a decade or more. If you’re an expert, this post will make you cringe, but with all those caveats, here is one way to automate lights in your house.

I’ve installed some Wemo switches around the house. The next thing I wanted was to have the lights turn on and off on a schedule but be sufficiently randomized that you couldn’t sit outside with a watch and predict when the lights were going to turn on. Since we all watched Home Alone, we all know that’s how burglars operate.

WeMo publishes and SDK for Android and iPhone but none for just a standard Windows application. I really wanted to be able to control this with code that runs on my server. So instead of hacking the network traffic and trying to send the signals that the switches expected, I did it simpler (and probably uglier.)

WeMo switches can interact with IFTTT. The “If This Then That” site does just what it says: if something happens then do something else. They call each one of those pairs a “recipe.” I connected my light switches to my IFTTT account and then set up some recipes so that if I send an email to IFTTT with specific hashtags I can turn the various light switches on and off. Then I wrote an app that sends those emails at random times within a fixed schedule. It has been running for a while and it works great!

It’s nice to walk into the house when it’s dark and already have lights on at the appropriate times, and since we have LED bulbs all over the place, it costs almost nothing to have these extra lights on.

benmartens November 24, 2015 Gadgets

Teddy Ruxpin

Tyla recently pulled out her the Teddy Ruxpin she had when she was a kid and asked if I could get it to work. Thankfully she still had one of the tapes for it too and I was able to get it all working with just a fresh set of batteries.

Our first thought was, “Wow! This thing must be worth a fortune!” It was such an iconic toy from the 80s. I looked it up and… nope.

You can go to illiop.com to learn how to figure out what year your Teddy Ruxpin was created and estimate it’s value. If you have a mint condition Teddy Ruxpin with it’s original box, you might hope to get $100. Tyla’s has been played with but it still works so maybe we could get $50 out of it. In 1985, the bears sold for $69.95 (or $155 in today’s money).

So keeping iconic childhood toys isn’t a great investment, especially when millions of them were produced, but it’s still a fun blast from the past. Elijah thinks it’s the coolest thing ever. He sits on the floor and holds Teddy’s hand while Teddy sings songs.

benmartens November 23, 2015 Throwback Thursday

Power Outage Debrief

After coming home from vacation in August in the middle of a power outage, Tyla and I decided to buy a generator. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it would be a big help. I figured we’d never lose power again since we finally shelled out money for a generator. Wrong!

On Nov 17, we had a really big windstorm and it knocked out power for around 300,000 homes. We lost power at 2:15pm. After waiting an hour to make sure it wasn’t a short term outage, I headed home to fire up the generator. We ended up getting power again at 12:15pm the next day, but even with the 22 hour outage, we succeeded in keeping the fridge running, using a space heater to keep the eating area warm, and running some lights. It’s amazing how much better it feels just having lights on in an outage like that!

Tyla and I have really ramped up our disaster prep in the past couple months and I’d give us a B- on this event. Here are some of the things I learned:

It never occurred to me that when I need a generator, there’s a good chance that it’s raining. The generator shouldn’t sit in the rain so it needs protection. I used our pop up tent but that was a little sketchy given the high winds. I thought it was going to blow away. I think I’ll try to fashion some kind of plywood that just sits on top and latches on to provide a rain shelter. It will be a lot faster to set up, and if I make it correctly, it will be easy enough to store along a wall in the shed.
It also never occurred to me that because we were running an extension cord inside, we’d have to leave a door or window cracked open which lets heat escape. I got around this by jamming a large towel in the crack and that helped.
We have a bunch of small battery backups around the house basically wherever we have fancy electronics (computer closet, desktop computer, theater setup, and downstairs TV). Those are really handy in power outages because you just move them wherever you want power and plug in a lamp, etc. They’ll run LED bulbs and charge phones for quite a while. Unfortunately, I was not able to charge them back up with the generator. While the generator provides a pretty clean voltage signal, the frequency fluctuated about +/- 1Hz from 60Hz. That was enough to make the battery backups freak out and keep switching back to battery mode. My initial plan had been to run the generator into various battery backups and then run equipment off of those batteries to keep the signal really clean. That failed so I had to hook things up without that battery in the middle and I was a little nervous about the dirty power running to stuff like the fridge which has lots of electronics in it. Everything worked ok so maybe I was worried about nothing. It would still be nice to find a cheap way to clean up the power signal a bit so we could use the batteries more effectively.
I was shocked at how little power the fridge used! I don’t know what the startup surge was, but once running, it only used 150 watts! If you put it in “Max Cool” it would ramp up to 500 watts once it pushed below 0 degrees in the freezer, but 150 watts? I could probably have been running this off my battery backups all along! Sure it wouldn’t have lasted indefinitely but I could have at least gotten one or two cooling cycles in the fridge.
The next time we think that the power might go out, we should set our fridge to Max Cool. It drops the temps by about 5 degrees in the fridge and freezer for the next 24 hours. If the power does go out, that gives us more runway before we have to use the generator.
I had no idea how quickly the generator would use gas. It was dependent on our usage and it turns out that we used very little of the available capacity. I never really saw the gas gauge move. Unfortunately I topped the tank off a couple times so I can’t get an accurate measurement of the gas we used when I drain the tank, but still, it would easily have run for many hours.
Because of the concern about running out of gas (which can damage connected devices) and because I didn’t necessarily trust the generator to run trouble-free, I didn’t let it run overnight to keep the fridge cool. That meant setting an alarm every ~2.5 hours to wake up, turn on the generator, and run the fridge for 30-45 minutes to cool it back down. It was a very restless night for me.
The overnight temp dropped into the mid 30’s. We keep the house at 69 degrees and by morning it was down to 59. If it was just Tyla and me, we could survive but it’s hard with a toddler who likes to throw off blankets while he sleeps. I was prepared to use our 1400 watt space heater in the bedroom periodically the next night, but then I chatted with our HVAC guru and he approved my plan to hook the furnace up to the generator. When he installed it, he put a switch in the line so my plan was to take the switch apart, wire in a male extension cord plug and then connect it to the generator with an extension cord. I don’t know how much wattage it would draw, but it’s a gas furnace so I just have to run the blower so I should have plenty of juice. It would have been awesome to get the house warmed up, but doing that also meant that when the power came back on, I’d have to undo my change to have the furnace running on the power grid again. In the future I think I’d probably wait until the house got really cold to do this, but it’s awesome to know that I CAN do it in a pinch.
We had already been considering adding wiring to our panel so that we can transfer over to the generator. I’m still interested in that and it would have made our experience a lot nicer, but I’m still not sure it’s worth the money. I’m batching up some other panel work that I want to have done (whole house surge protector and per-circuit usage monitoring/logging) so maybe it will make more economic sense to do them all at the same time. Now that I know how much work is involved manually hooking things up, I have a better feeling for how valuable it is to have it wired into the panel.
Food and water were never a concern. We have a big bin of food stored in the pantry that is our “emergency stash.” As long as we have some kind of fire, there’s lots of food that we can eat and the food will keep for at least a year in that bin. We didn’t even have to break into that bin though.
Our gas supply was inadequate. Now that I know how much gas the generator uses, I will keep more on hand. Previously I had 2 gallons in the garage, but I’m bumping that up to 8. I’ll keep rotating it every few months to make sure that it doesn’t go bad.

Overall I’m very happy we bought the generator. At less than $500, I feel like we’ve already come a long way towards feeling like we got enough value out of it to make it a good purchase. The next time this happens, I will have a lot better idea what to expect and will hopefully be able to relax a little more. This time felt pretty hectic and I didn’t get much sleep.

benmartens November 20, 2015 Home Improvement

One Million Words

The median word count for a book is about 64,000 words. Moby Dick has 212,000 words. The NIV Bible has 728,000 works. This blog? Over ONE MILLION WORDS. Granted, the vast majority of those million words are not worth much, but I guess there’s something to be said for quantity over quality.

Microsoft Word can calculate the reading level of your text using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula. I ran that for each year of the blog and the average is somewhere between 6 and 7. I found a few sites that recommended targeting a 7th grade reading level for general audiences so I guess I’m a little below that. The reading level is based on the average length of a sentence and the average number of syllables per word. You can see that it has been increasing over the years, and since I’m a data scientist now, I’ll include the R-squared value on the trendline.

There should probably be some sort of prize for those of you who have been reading all this stuff since the beginning. A million words. That’s a lot of time. The average adult reads 300 words per minute. That’s 55 hours of your life devoted just to reading this website. That’s a lot of time, but it’s actually quite a bit less than I expected it to be when I started doing the math. So meh, cancel the prize. You only wasted two and a half days over the past 12.5 years.

Every time I do one of these posts looking back at the volume of text I’ve accumulated, I’m left wondering about when I’ll eventually stop writing. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know when this post will come to an abrupt end.

benmartens November 19, 2015 Site News

Fantasy Football – Week 10

In all likelihood, the Seahawks have pretty much knocked themselves out of the playoff hunt with this latest loss. On any Sunday in the NFL, you have a hard enough time beating your opponent, but if you’re also beating yourself then you’re pretty screwed. The Seahawks destroyed themselves with penalties. They put a lot of points on the board but the defense gets credit for 14 of those. Sure there were a couple close calls and plays where the game could have gone the other way, but that’s the difference this year: they’re always playing from behind and hoping to get lucky.

In our league, Logan reinforced my loss from last week and got me thinking about the possibility of ending the season with a seven game losing streak. To top it off, I lost Julian Edelmen to injury. Earlier this season I also lost Arian Foster and Jamaal Charles. It’s hard to survive losing three superstars like that so we’ll see where the season leaves me.

Dad and Logan both won their games so they are just one game behind me with 4 games left until we start the playoffs. Austin continued his push from last week and is looking very strong. His optimal roster was over 180 this week. Speaking of optimal rosters, Andy almost started his optimal roster, but instead of starting Peyton Manning, he should have started Philip Rivers… who was on a bye. Peyton had -6.6.

Austin has now claimed the top spot in our power rankings and Jim climbs into 4th place.

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

Now on to the weekly awards.

	This Week	Season	All-Time
Highest Team Score	Austin had 152.68	Tim 200.51 (Week 3)	Tim 200.51 (2013)
Lowest Team Score	Andy had 62.50	Was Austin had 64.70 (Week 5)	Luke 47.01 (2011)
Biggest Blowout	Austin beat Tim by 48.43	Ben beat Dad by 111.43 (Week 8)	Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win	Dad beat Luke by 1.81	Ben beat Andy by 2.46 (Week 7)	Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player	Kirk Cousins had 36.96 for Logan	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	Andy has a 4 game losing streak.	Luke, Austin and Tim had 5 game losing streaks. (Weeks 5, 7 and 8)	Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

benmartens November 18, 2015 Fantasy Sports

DeWalt Planer

One of the last (haha) tools that I had on my radar was a thickness planer. If you have no idea what that is, it’s basically a machine that will make two faces of the board parallel with each other and will also thin a board down. In the past, Tim was nice enough to loan me his for a month or two while I worked on Tyla’s jewelry box, but I didn’t want to keep borrowing his every time I needed one.

My original plan was to save my pennies and probably buy one next spring. But on the woodworking discussion list at work, somebody offered up their DeWalt DW-733 for about 30-40% of the price of a new one. He said it was barely used and came with an extra set of blades. It’s probably not the model I picked (and you actually can’t even buy it anymore), but it was in the same category and the price was right. I also prefer buying used items from people at work because it’s more likely to be a good/easy transaction than when you go through Craigslist. So I went for it!

I’ve been using it on my latest project to plane down maple and walnut and wow, this thing works great! I think it would work better if I had a better dust collection system to pull all the chips away from the board, but still, it’s a great machine. I love how easy it is to dial in the exact height and to see how much wood you’re going to take off with the next pass.

It’s a great tool to use in conjunction with my bandsaw. I can take a 3/4″ piece of wood to the bandsaw, saw it in half (the thin way) to get to 3/8″ pieces and then plane both down to 1/4″ or whatever I need. Without the bandsaw, I’d be planing off 66% of the wood and that’s a lot of money being turned into wood chips.

I’m quite happy with this purchase. One of my next projects needs to be a cart for this thing though. At 80lbs it’s a beast to pick up off the floor.

benmartens November 17, 2015 Woodworking

Broken Window Theory

Everybody has their own mental bar denoting what a “clean” house looks like. If you’re happy with the state of your house and the amount of stuff you have in it, then you can probably skip this post. But if you’re not, there are a bazillion different books, websites, and videos giving you ideas about how to improve the state of your home. I’ll make it a bazillion and one by sharing my own thoughts.

I hate cleaning, but even more than that, I hate looking at a mess and knowing that I have to “waste” my time and clean it. So my basic approach is to ABC: Always Be Cleaning. (Every self-help article like this needs a cheesy acronym, right?) For example, when I finish making dinner, I don’t leave the dishes in the sink to greet me the following morning, I take 5 minutes and clean them up. Doing little bits of cleaning here and there feels a lot less painful than ruining two hours of my Saturday because the kitchen turned into a nightmare.

Coupled with that, I also force myself to clean up the area before starting any project. Even if I clean up at the end of a task, the area slowly gets messy again. This is especially true out in the garage. So before I start that next big project, I pick up all my tools, clean off my bench, and organize the piles of wood. Then I’m excited to work in that nice clean area instead of tripping over stuff on the floor and never having room on the bench.

My approach can be neatly summed up by the Broken Window Theory. If you read that linked Wikipedia article, you’ll see the theory summed up like this:

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.

It’s pretty easy to tell when an area is clean. I feel an emotional response to setting that first piece of junk in the nice clean area. But then I get used to seeing it there and it doesn’t bother me so much. In fact, it gets easier and easier to just throw more junk in that area because hey, I have to clean it out anyway, right? Pretty soon it’s a huge mess and now I have to do one of those big huge cleanouts and my quality of life is negatively impacted because I’m annoyed by the thought of that big cleaning event coming up.

It’s surprising how often this theory applies. For example, we talk about it regularly at work when someone proposes a less than beautiful piece of code. Just take the time to fix it now because your hack will open the floodgates for more hacks until we’re left with a nightmare that we don’t have time to re-architect. If you want to get a little geekier about it, you might propose that messes grow exponentially.

If you’ve already got a system that works for you, then stick with it! But if you need a little more encouragement, remember the broken window theory.

benmartens November 16, 2015 Commentary

End Loader

For the past years, every few issues of Wood Magazine have had plans for a construction toy. I recently purchased the plans for the End Loader and completed it. It was another big learning experience for me. Aside from the quick planes I did recently, this is the first toy that I’ve built. The biggest thing I learned is that precision matters. You can’t be too precise. I made a large number of these pieces twice just to get them perfect. I also spent a lot of time sanding to try and get it as clean and smooth as possible. Because it’s so small, people look at it very closely and even small flaws will stand out.

Along with the plans, I also purchased the kit that contains wheels, smokestack and the hardware needed to complete the project. I don’t have great equipment for making those circular pieces so buying the kit let me focus on the rest of the loader.

It took me about two weeks to complete and I’m thrilled with how it came out! One of the hardest parts was getting it all sprayed with lacquer. Lacquer is supposed to be sprayed above 65 degrees or in low humidity. I couldn’t spray it in my garage since the fumes are so intense and they can actually ignite from the pilot light in the furnace. I set up a pop up tent on the back patio, hung tarps from three sides and hung a space heater from the top, pointed down at the table. I also brought all the pieces and spray inside to let it warm up to room temperature. That setup might have been overkill, but I didn’t want to screw this up after all the time I put into it.

I’m very happy with how this turned out. It will end up being Elijah’s Christmas gift. Last year I built him the table and this year he gets a toy. I think it would be fun to build something for him each year but we’ll see how that holds up.

The next project or two will be quicker and easier but I think I might do one or two more of these toys. I have plenty of walnut and maple leftover from this project.

benmartens November 13, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

Zion School Fire

My brother-in-law, LukeS, is the principal and upper grades teacher at Zion Lutheran School in Toledo, OH. He had a rude awakening around midnight Monday night. The school was on fire! The boiler room is a complete loss and there is water damage throughout the school. The local news has two video segments (1 and 2) showing the result of the fire and there is a LOT of work to do to get the building back into shape.

It’s going to take a long time to get the building fixed, but this is obviously the middle of the school year. They are hoping to get some portable buildings in place for a temporary school location, but their insurance will only cover $10K toward that. To help cover the large price gap, they have started a Go Fund Me page. Please consider helping them out with a donation, and whether you donate or not, please keep them in your prayers.

benmartens November 12, 2015 Commentary

Fantasy Football – Week 9

I was up by less than a point against Luke at the end of the Cowboys Eagles game on Sunday night. If the Cowboys missed their field goal, the game would have been over and I would have had 9 games in a row. As they snapped the ball for Dan Bailey to kick it, the announcer said that he was one of the best in the game. Perfect. A jinx! The kick went up and started curving left. He was going to miss! CLANG! It hit the upright… and fell through. The game went into overtime and my streak ends at eight wins. It was fun while it lasted. Kudos to Luke for starting an optimal roster.

Elsewhere in the league, Tim defeated Logan and Dad beat Andy so Logan and Dad are once again tied for second. Austin has sole ownership of 4th and everyone else is tied for 5th with five games left until the playoffs start. Week 10 features me against Logan, Dad against the streak killer (Luke), Austin against Tim and Jim against Andy.

In the last two weeks, Austin has moved up 5 spots in the power rankings. Could he be making another run like he did at the end of last season? And after two weeks out of the top four, Tim has re-entered the list.

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