Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Retro Game Night

Even with all the online multiplayer gaming available to us these days, it’s still fun to get together in the same room. Last week I had a couple people over, but instead of playing current games from Steam or XboxOne, we fired up some old Nintendo games! I had two USB NES controllers and the night was a lot of fun. Some of us never had a Nintendo growing up so we saw lots of great games for the first time (15-20 years late!) One of my “new” favorites is Bomberman 2. The concept is simple enough for anyone to pick up on quickly, but since it’s a head-to-head strategy game, there’s a lot of replay value.

That night got me thinking about the Raspberry Pi that Ken gave me a while back. I pulled it out and installed Emulation Station on it. The games play really well but I haven’t quite got the sound figured out yet. Debugging that had me digging through Linux config files and trying to remember VI commands. Yay Linux.

If I had infinite time, I’d love to build another arcade machine, but this one would probably be a coffee table. I’ve added it to my project wish list so there’s a chance it will happen, but the list grows three to four times faster than I can complete the items!

benmartens July 9, 2015 Gaming

Drill Press Table

If a tool isn’t convenient to use, it’s tempting to find a way to skip using it. That’s the case with my drill press. Often I only need to make one or two holes with it and rather than drag it out from under the bench, I just use a hand drill. To make this a more useful part of the process, I created a table for it.

The design comes from one of Steve Ramsey’s older videos, and he got the design from a magazine. You only need a few scraps of wood to build it and it has a lot of great features. A couple toilet bolts slide into the T-track and go up through the fence to make the fence easily adjustable (or removable). The piece of wood directly under the drill bit slides out and is replaceable so after it gets beat up, you can just slide a new one in.

I built this in an afternoon and I’m really happy with how it turned out. The only change I’d made if I was redoing this would be to make the T-track narrower so that the toilet bolt head couldn’t spin in the track. That would make it easier to tighten the nuts on top.

I’ve found a spot for this on my bench so we’ll see if I’m able to save some time and use it in more projects.

drillpresstable

benmartens July 8, 2015 Woodworking

Daily Contacts

acuvuemoistI’ve been wearing contacts since sixth grade. More specifically, I’ve been wearing A contact since sixth grade. There were only a few years in there where I had to wear a contact in both eyes. I’ve always had the disposable ones that last two weeks before you’re supposed to toss them.

I recently switched to a new eye doctor and he gave me a trial of the Acuvue Moist daily wear contacts. As the name implies, you open up a new package and then toss the contact away at the end of the daily. The benefit is that you get a fresh feeling contact all the time and you don’t have to buy any contact solution. When you’re traveling, that’s one less liquid to worry about in your carry on.

I was previously using the Acuvue Oasys and these new ones are about double the cost. But since I only need a contact in one eye, that extra cost still fits mostly within my annual health plan budget.

So far I’m really liking them. One of my favorite parts is being able to pop my contact out whenever I feel like it without going in to the bathroom and putting it in it’s case. Is it worth the extra cost? Ehhh… if I had to pay very much out of pocket, I probably wouldn’t do it, but for basically free? Yeah, why not?

benmartens July 7, 2015 Commentary

Miter Saw Cart

I’ve had my 10″ Ridgid sliding miter saw sitting on a cart for quite a while. With my smallish work area, it’s nice to be able to roll it around. The cart was originally built mainly as an outfeed table for my table saw, but I rarely used it that way. While the miter saw fit well on the cart, it was tricky to cut longer boards because I had no good way to prop up the ends.

One of Jay Bates’s earlier videos (before he got better at editing them) showed some foldable arms that he built for his miter saw cart. It seemed like an easy solution and I was able to build it with scraps leftover from the table saw stand.

You can pretty much see the entire design by looking at the pictures below. There’s not much to it. The hinge points are just Kreg screws that are normally used for pocket holes. Since they are only threaded halfway, it makes an easy hinge point.

The trick is whether or not they will last a long time. I already had one part split as I was putting it together, and of course, as I showed it off to Don, the arm snapped off. I rebuilt that part a little better the next day and now everything folds pretty nicely. I don’t have a whole lot of time or money in these so even if they only last for a few projects, I’ll be happy (and most likely they’ll last longer than my desire to have the saw on this cart.)

mitersawarms2mitersawarms1

benmartens July 6, 2015 Woodworking

Reframing

When I bought the condo in 2006 as a bachelor, I decided I needed something for the walls that didn’t look like it was a college dorm. But I didn’t want to pay tons of money for actual artwork. Instead, I bought a couple posters from the internet and then took them in to get them custom framed. It seemed like a good compromise.

My mistake was going to a place that does SUPER nice frames instead of a craft store that does frames for normal people. I had no idea there was a difference and ended up paying probably three times more than I needed to. Oops.

One of them has a sunset skyline shot of Seattle and it looks pretty nice, but the other is just a generic abstract art piece. I thought it looked fine until I saw the same thing hanging in a cafeteria at work. Hmm…

This past weekend, I decided that I was going to take the frame apart and see if I could put one of my own pictures in there. Overpaying for a frame with a cheapo poster in it seemed silly, but having a beautiful frame for a photo I took myself? That feels more logical/
It turns out that a fancy professional framing job is still the same basic idea as other frames. I peeled off the construction paper covering the back of the frame. Then I opened up the insides and saw that the poster was attached to a piece of foam board and fit into an opening in the matte.

I needed a 24×24″ print to fit in there and that was a little more tricky than I though. Most places only go up to 20×30″. FedEx does bigger prints but they wanted ~$60. Walgreens also does bigger prints and they had a half price sale going on that brought the price of my 24×36″ print down to $15!

I used a straight edge and an exacto knife to trim the photo. I didn’t do anything too fancy to mount it in the frame. I just used a combination of scotch tape and packing tape to fix the print to the foam board. Then I put the frame back together and voila!

The hardest part was probably trying to find a picture that matched the matte well and also looked good with a square crop. The picture would have matched the room slightly better if it had a little red in it, but this still looks pretty good. The photo was taken on a camping trip in 2012 near Bay View State Park.
newpictureframe2

 

benmartens July 3, 2015 Projects

New Horizons

newhorizonsOn January 19, 2006, the New Horizons probe left earth on it’s long journey to Pluto. In less than two weeks, it will make it’s closest pass to Pluto. Let’s take a minute to ponder some of the incredible math/physics associated with this journey:

  • It took just over one year to reach Jupiter for a slingshot boost to Pluto, but even with the increased speed, it has taken another 8 years to get to Pluto.
  • It’s the fastest spacecraft ever launched: 36,373 mph.
  • Pluto is 10.5 times farther from the sun than Earth is
  • From 2007-2014, the probe woke up only once per week to send a message saying that everything was ok and then it also woke up 50 days per year to do some science and course monitoring.
  • When it passes by Pluto, it will have traveled 2.96 billion miles.
  • After traveling all those years and all those miles, it has to hit an area of space that is only 186 miles in diameter to achieve it’s objective.
  • There were three scheduled course corrections although the second was canceled because the first one was so accurate. There was another course correction after passing by Jupiter and one more at about the halfway point in 2010. In total, the spacecraft only burned about 20-30 minutes of fuel to make course corrections!
  • After passing by Pluto, the probe will continue on to examine objects in the Kuiper Belt. The mission could last another 10 years.
benmartens July 2, 2015 Geek

Riding To Work

When we moved to Woodinville in 2011, I noted that our house was positioned very well for me to ride to work. It’s only about a mile down to the Sammamish river trail and then I take that all the way into Redmond with about a mile or so from the end of the trail to campus. Here it is, 2015, and I hadn’t done it yet. So finally I circled a date on the calendar and made it happen.

That date ended up being the hottest day of the year to that point, but I didn’t let it deter me. The ride into work was pretty nice for the first 8.5 miles. I even had a bald eagle flying overhead right above the trail for a little while. But there was a problem lurking. Google Maps has a nice bike route feature that includes an elevation view. As you can see, there’s a 400 ft hill on each end of the route.

hillsbikeride

That last 1.5 miles up to campus is brutal. I started off thinking that I would slog it out and make it all the way without stopping. I failed that, but I only walked for about 100 yards of the hill. And I’m not going to lie… when I made it to the top of the hill, I felt like I was going to pass out and I had to sit and rest for a while. I’m an old man. But the trip was a success. I made it in 1 hour and 2 minutes, just like Google predicted.

Work provides us with a badge-locked storage area for bikes and a locker room with towel service so that I didn’t stink all day. It was the first time I’ve ever used those perks of the job and they’re pretty nice to have!

The flaw in my plan was that I underestimated how tired I would be after riding to work and then working all day. So I swallowed my pride and asked Tyla if she wanted to meet me at a park along the trail right before where I would need to break off and head up the big hill to our house. The ride there wasn’t too bad although there was about a 10 mph wind blowing in my face and I was pretty tired by the time I got to the park. It’s a good thing we set up that rendezvous. I was happy to throw my bike in the car and drive up the hill.

Will I do this again? Maybe someday. It would be fun to get in shape and be able to handle this a little better. I do think that I’d want more of a street bike instead of a mountain bike. And it’s hard to justify the extra time out of my day when time is so precious right now.

ridetowork

benmartens July 1, 2015 Sports

Leap Second

What would you do with an extra second?! The possibilities are… limited. But that will be your opportunity tonight. The moon and redistribution of mass on Earth (earthquakes, moving glaciers, etc) effect the speed of rotation of the earth. Atomic clocks obviously aren’t affected by these things so for the same reason that we need leap days, we also need some smaller adjustments.

Wikipedia says this has happened 25 times since 1972 and tonight will be the 26th time. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service schedules these events six months in advance on an as needed basis.

I’ll spend my extra second sleeping… or more likely I’ll spend it trying to get my son to go back to sleep.

benmartens June 30, 2015 Commentary

Church Website Updates

When I stepped out of the property manager role at church at the end of last year, I stepped into the IT role. After a network and PC update, it has been going pretty smooth so I decided to look for something else to break fix.

We had been using a service for our web and email hosting that catered to churches. It’s a great way for non-technical people to get a church website going. Unfortunately it’s pretty limited. I got control of our domain name from them, switched to a new email provider and then moved our web hosting to SquareSpace. I literally spent 15 minutes copying and pasting the old content into a new design template and it already looks so much better. BethH is going to take it from here and actually spend some time with the design, layout and content to make it even nicer.

You can see it at http://www.calvarylutheranbellevue.org/ or check out the before and after below. I don’t love the long domain name but we’re kind of stuck with it now. I might purchase a shorter one and forward everything to the longer one but we’ll see.

It’s really nice to have control of all the various pieces and to be using a top-notch web host like SquareSpace. If you need to create a website, you need to check them out. While they will hold your hand for a very simple setup, you can also get really geeky and dive deep into lots of different options.

Before:
calvaryoldsite
After:
calvarynewsite

benmartens June 29, 2015 Geek

Door Stops

We have central air conditioning in our house, but we prefer to leave the windows open instead when possible. That means we end up with various shoes, books, and hampers sitting in front of each door upstairs to keep it propped open. On Sunday evening, I was looking for a quick and easy project to build without any planning so I decided to build some door stops.

I glued together a bunch of scrap wood, used the table saw to trim it up and then the miter saw to cut the wedges. A couple coats of spray lacquer finished off the job.

This was a super simple project, but it makes me happy when I see them sitting under the doors upstairs. They look nicer than the random objects we used before, and each piece of wood that I used in the doorstops brings back memories of other fun projects. It was rewarding to walk into the shop for an hour or two with no plans and walk out with a finished project.

doorstop

benmartens June 26, 2015 Woodworking