Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

2015 PNW WELS Softball Tournament

Every year, many of the WELS churches in our area get together for an all-day softball tournament. Our church has participated sporadically but this year we combined with Divine Peace in Renton to scrape together enough people for a team… barely. We had no practices and some of our team members didn’t arrive until we were taking the field for the first game. Nobody know what positions they were going to play and Pastor Herrmann ended up being the pitcher basically because he was the last person on the field, not because he had ever done it before. Amazingly, we played pretty well! We were winning the first game until our opponents had a big rally that we couldn’t stop and they won in the last inning. That team went on to lose in the championship. We won the second game and then lost the third which knocked us out of the tournament.

All in all, I’m surprised at how well we did, especially considering that some of the other bigger churches have teams that play together in regular leagues. And oh yeah, we only had 9 people instead of 10! It was also fun to play against ChrisH who is the principal over in Bremerton now. The last time we played on a field together was high school!

welssoftball2015

benmartens September 11, 2015 Sports

Space Heater vs. Furnace

spaceheaterFall is around the corner and with that, the furnaces will be clicking back on. I never wrote about it, but when Elijah was born, we wanted to keep his room warmer than normal. It got a bit cold because of some old windows in his room. I thought it would be more efficient to put a space heater in his room rather than to turn the furnace up and heat the whole house.

WRONG.

That month our electric bill was about $70 more than normal while our gas bill only dropped $20. As soon as I saw that, I boxed the space heater back up and put it in the garage. (And yeah yeah yeah, space heaters in the babies room. I know I know…)

I keep an Excel sheet of all our utility expenses so I’m reminded of my dumb experiment every time I open that up and see the chart.

benmartens September 10, 2015 Commentary

Indiana Vacation

I use that word “vacation” lightly. It’s true that I wasn’t at my normal day job, but I spent the trip doing more physical labor each day than I normally do in a week (or a month!)

Dad and Mom already have a two car garage, but they are adding on to the end of it to have a nice shop work space and another garage bay to hold their tractors. It will be a huge win for them to keep their Allis Chalmers WD45 in the garage instead of under a tarp near the woods. Other than having the foundation poured, Dad is doing almost all of the work by himself. It’s a huge undertaking and this was a fun opportunity to make some memories with him.

Luke, Rachel and David were there for the first couple days. It was fun to see Elijah and David interacting together. They’re the only cousins they have and they rarely get to see each other. David is 7 years older than Elijah so Elijah was pretty excited to hang out with David. The reverse probably wasn’t always true!

Elijah was in tractor heaven. Mom and Dad have three tractors: the big orange Allis Chalmers, a John Deere lawn and garden tractor that they got in 1981 and a newer John Deere mower that they got recently from GrandpaH. On top of that, a neighbor stopped by with his big John Deere 3320 tractor with a bucket on the front. That one came in really handy for getting material up to the roof. Elijah had a ball riding ALL of them multiple times. It was part of his daily routine and now that we’re home, he still talks about it and he uses a blanket to cover his tractors just like my Dad puts a tarp over some of his tractors.

Dad, Luke and I made great progress on the project. When I arrived, there was no roof. When I left, we had started the shingles. Dad and I both thought we’d have been farther along than that, but being novices meant that we did a lot of things twice. We kept joking that when we build the next garage, things will go a lot faster.

It was a great week. The weather mostly cooperated and nobody got hurt. Mom and Dad have continued the shingling work and are probably going to be done by the time you read this. That will be a huge step in the project. Next up will be finishing off the front wall and getting the windows and doors in. If Dad can get the building wrapped and the siding up before winter, that would be a huge win, but he’s just taking it as it comes. There’s a lot to learn along the way!

I set up the GoPro every single day and ran it all day long. I’ll do another post about how to handle these super long timelapses, but for now you can just enjoy the results.

indiana2015_0 indiana2015_1 indiana2015_2 indiana2015_3 indiana2015_4 indiana2015_5 indiana2015_6 indiana2015_7

benmartens September 9, 2015 Family, Timelapse, Travel

Washington Sign

Don took on a big project this summer and replaced his fence. I took some boards that were in reasonably good shape thinking I would make something out them. They sat in the garage for a while before I decided to glue them up into a panel. I trimmed off the rotten ends. Then I put them on my hold down jig and ran them through the table saw to trim off 1/4″ on one side. Once I had that nice straight edge, I could flip them over and run them against the fence to trim off 1/4″ on the other side. With those nice clean edges, I was able to put glue on them and clamp them together.

So then I had a big panel… and I still didn’t know what to do with it. I finally decided to cut out the shape of Washington state. I messed around with blowing up a picture and trying to print it out on a tiled series of paper sheets but gave up and just printed an 8.5×11. Then I drew a grid over the picture, drew a bigger grid in chalk on the panel and I drew the shape by hand.

I was going to use my shiny new bandsaw to cut out the shape, but once I realized how dirty all those boards were, I decided I didn’t really want to dull my brand new blade. So I did it with my little handheld jigsaw instead. I did use the bandsaw to trim a 1×4″ sheet of plywood to put on the back of the panel just to give it some extra strength in case those edge glue ups don’t hold over time.

It was a fun project because I didn’t know what I was going to end up with and I’m going to give it to Don and Nancy as a gift.

washingtonwoodsign

benmartens September 8, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

NFL PreSeason

preseason-football-rabid-fans-nfl-sports-ecards-someecardsYay! The NFL Preseason is over! It frustrates me every year. People get so worked up about the games and who wins and loses. It doesn’t matter. It’s glorified practice and a way to trim down the rosters. I’d love to see the preseason completely removed or at least cut down to a single game. There’s no point in it except for the NFL to make money (which is why it will continue forever or until the players go on strike because of it.)

However, every time I get frustrated about the preseason, I remember that one time when Dad took me to see a preseason NBA game between the Bulls and the Supersonics. They were playing in town at Notre Dame and I actually got to see Michael Jordan and Shawn Kemp playing each other on the same court. It was a highlight of my childhood.

So in that sense, I guess the preseason is good. Ticket prices are a little lower (though they’re still $75/game for the cheap Seahawks tickets) and maybe it gives a different set of fans the opportunity to see some of their heroes play, if only for a few minutes of the game.

benmartens September 7, 2015 Sports

Giving Feedback To Microsoft

sendfeedbackWe all find things that we like or dislike (usually the latter) when we’re using applications or websites. The good news, is that more and more apps (especially from Microsoft) are coming with easy ways to give feedback. It’s generally in the upper right hand corner and it often looks like a Smiley Face. You might also find a button or a menu option called something like “Give Feedback”. Wherever you find it, I encourage you to use it. As an employee on a team that makes a product with easy user feedback options, I can tell you that one report from a user carries a LOT more weight than me giving feedback to my own team. We love to hear from you and it’s one of the most important signals we have for improving our products. (And if you throw in a positive note every once in a while, that’s appreciated too!)

benmartens September 4, 2015 Commentary