Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Meat Week – Pizza

Ok, this isn’t just a chunk of meat, so maybe I should have called this “Grill Month” or something. The name needs work. Whatever you call it, we’re still going strong on our streak of only having dinner from the grill.

We like to get pizza from Papa Murphy’s. It’s a “take and bake” place meaning that they make the pizza for you and then you bake it at home. They have grilling instructions and I decided to give it a shot.

The pizza came out really well. I used an aluminum pizza pan with holes in it as the barrier between the grill and the paper tray on the bottom of the Papa Murphy’s pizza. The crust was nice and crispy and there weren’t any burned spots. It tasted pretty much the same as it would from the oven which makes sense because all I did was basically use the gas grill as an oven. We’ve made our own pizzas from scratch and cooked them on the grill before but this worked significantly better.

We aren’t able to cook two pizzas simultaneously in our oven very effectively so maybe this would be a good way to cook the second pizza if we’re trying to get two of them out around the same time.

grilledpizza

benmartens August 12, 2015 Food

If You’re Excited About The Start Menu In Windows 10, You’re Doing It Wrong

Windows-10-Start-MenuHow’s that for a click-bait post title? A little long maybe… anyway, I say it with tongue in cheek. Obviously you can use your computer however you want. But my point is that people who are excited about the start menu are usually using their computer a little bit inefficiently. Ever since Vista, there has been an awesome keyboard shortcut that obviates the need to use the mouse in the start menu. To start ANY program on your computer, press the Windows key on your keyboard and then start typing. Whether you’re on Windows Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10, the Windows key will bring up a search box and then as you type it will start filtering through the programs you have installed. Once it finds the one you want, just press enter. I do it so quickly that you can’t even really see what’s going on as the screen flashes around. And that’s the point. It’s FAST.

Here’s an example: press the Windows key and then type notepad and press Enter. Don’t worry about what is happening on the screen. When you’re done, Notepad will be open. Do the same thing for Word, Chrome, Excel, Spotify, Solitaire, etc. It’s so much faster than using the mouse to fumble around and navigate to find the program you want to use.

I think this is one main reason why Windows 8 never bothered me. I don’t really care about the start screen because I never click around it and it only flashes on my screen for fractions of a second throughout the day.

benmartens August 11, 2015 Geek

Authority

credibilityI had a crazy English professor in college. She started the semester off by telling us we were all getting A’s and that this class was about self-discovery. The liberal arts students mostly took it seriously. The rest of us science and engineering students pretty much blew the class off and spent time on our “real” classes. For example, one day a few of us walked in and the prof wasn’t there yet. Somebody walked up to the board and wrote “Class is cancelled” and then wrote the date and the prof’s name. We all left and future students saw the note, and, thinking it was legit, they left too. By the time the professor arrived, she had no choice to but to comply with the note that she didn’t write. We actually got out of two classes, but the second one was even worse than the normal classes. She spent the entire class talking about authority. It was painful enough that we never pulled the stunt again* so I guess she got her way, one way or another.

I think back on that regularly and chuckle, but that whole scenario is applicable to what we deal with on the internet every day. Some random person writes an article and bam, it’s fact. We all joke “It must be true, I saw it on the internet”, but then time and time again we get sucked into giving something way too much credit because it’s on a website that looks like it must be legit. Whether it’s diagnosing a disease, predicting earthquakes, or one of millions of other topics, the ability to understand how much authority or credibility the author has is so important. I don’t know how to teach this to my son, but it’s high on my list of things that I want him to learn. How do you pick up a piece of text and decide how much to believe it?

We used to base a lot of decisions and beliefs on common knowledge from our local circles, but now we have access to huge amounts of actual data on a huge range of topics. Seeking out that data is a good step, but you still have to be able to filter out the human interpretation of the data. It’s not like the old days where you had to be a published author to get read. Now any yahoo with a computer can write on the Internet and pretend they know what they are talking about …

* Well… we never pulled it again on her. Back then mail servers were much less secure/complex so somebody sent an email that appeared to be from one of our profs to the entire class saying class was canceled. They were careful to not include the prof on the email.

benmartens August 10, 2015 Commentary

Meat Week – Burgers

Burgers are a staple of the grill. Everybody has done them. It’s maybe not even worth a blog post (though that bar is VERY low on this site) so I decided to spice them up a bit.

My basic process is to dump the ground beef into a bowl and add some spices: salt, pepper, garlic, onion, and rosemary are generally in there but it varies from batch to batch. Then I mix it all up with my fingers, taking care to mix as little as possible just to get it all combined. Then I form it into patties that are roughly 1/2 pound each. I keep them uniform thickness and make them extra large and a bit flat. They will contract as you cook them.

I get those patties made about 30 minutes before I need to put them on the grill so they can warm up a bit. The grill gets preheated to around 450-500 and then the patties go on. I give them about 3-4 minutes on each side and once the thermometer reads around 140, I pull them off.

For these burgers, I melted some cheese on top, toasted the bun on the warm grill grates and then added some bacon and a fried egg. YUM.

Along the way I also made a batch of sliced potatoes. I love fries with my burger but I imagine this is a little healthier than frying (though potatoes aren’t very healthy no matter how you eat them.)

Burgers are cheap and as easy or complicated as you want them to be. It’s a great meal to try over and over and come up with your own perfect process. The only thing I’ve found that really screws them up is using beef that has been previously frozen. Burgers made from thawed meet regularly fall apart on the grill for me.

meatweekburger

benmartens August 7, 2015 Food

Welcome to Bremerton

I apologize in advance for those who didn’t attend Peace Lutheran Church in Granger, IN in the 80s and 90s. You’ll probably just want to skip this post. Even if I explained it all you’d probably just say, “Meh.” Then again… maybe you say that after all my posts?

On Sunday, July 26, Tyla and I headed over to Bremerton for church. It’s a 90 minute drive if you head around the south end of the sound and skip the ferries so it’s quite a hike for a church service, but this one was special. Chris Hintz was getting installed at Christ the King as their new principal! Pastor and Mrs. Hintz were there too and Pastor even gave the sermon.

It was so much fun to catch up with them again after all these years! I haven’t seen them all since Chris and Nikki’s wedding in the summer of 2005 down in Arizona. After spending so many days together growing up, our lives took us in opposite directions.

It’s pretty crazy to think that our tiny little grade school now has three alumni (Chris, Ken and me) who graduated within five years of each other living out in the Pacific Northwest! Hopefully we’ll all be able to get together soon.

But the craziness doesn’t end there… the Christ the King church building is the same design as Peace in Granger! It’s not brick for brick the same, but it’s probably 80-90% similar. There’s no mistaking that the two buildings came from the same set of plans. Pastor Hintz said that the WELS had a set of three designs that they were recommending for new buildings around that time and this was the biggest of the three. It was so weird to be sitting in church in Washington with the Hintz family watching Pastor Hintz give a sermon!

Chris and I played together for three years on the Michigan Lutheran High School baseball team. We’ll be playing against each other in a few weeks at the area church softball tournament. I tried to snag him for our team but his own church wisely scooped him up first. I hope that we get to play against each other! It would be awesome to be on the same field as him again.

So welcome to the Pacific Northwest Chris, Nikki and family. We’re excited to have you out here and looking forward to getting together with you soon.

hintzinstallation

benmartens August 6, 2015 Commentary

Meat Week – Salmon

salmonI’ll say up front that I’m from Indiana. There’s not a lot of seafood in Indiana. It’s not really my thing and I know next to nothing about cooking it. But every once in a great while, I cook some salmon. Meat Week seemed like a good reason to try it again.

The salmon came from Safeway and was one of the half price specials because it hadn’t sold the day before. It had good color, still looked wet and had well-defined edges. I think those are the main ways you tell if it’s still good or not.

I marinated it for a few hours in equal parts soy sauce, warm water, and brown sugar with a little vegetable oil thrown in as well. I grilled it flesh side down first on indirect heat and then flipped it over after about 3 minutes. It seemed to be taking forever to get up to about 140 degrees so I flipped on the burner directly below it and finished it off.

I have very little to compare it to, but Tyla and I both enjoyed it. Feel free to correct me in the comments if I did something terribly wrong.

benmartens August 5, 2015 Food

Grizzly Band Saw

grizzlyg0555lanvThis weekend I placed an order for a big tool that I’ve never used before: a band saw. Specifically, it’s a Grizzly G0555LANV 14″ Deluxe Bandsaw Anniversary Edition. As I’ve gotten more into woodworking, I’ve realized that it is an incredibly useful tool that will open up a lot of builds that just aren’t feasible right now. This is sort of a middle of the road model. It’s not a smaller benchtop unit, but it’s a fraction of the price of some of the big name brands. Grizzly makes great tools with no frills. No, it’s not the same quality as a Powermatic, but it’s also going to be a quarter or a fifth of the price. For a home woodworker like me, even the Grizzly is probably overkill.

I struggled for a long time about whether to buy this new or used. I know that I could have saved money buying a used one, but since I have almost zero experience with a band saw, I did not believe that I could accurately evaluate a used model to know if I was getting a good deal or not.

I’m lucky to be located pretty close to one of Grizzly’s three showrooms, but I still chose to have it shipped from Bellingham. I was able to get it shipped for $35 (had to pay for curb side service since I don’t have a forklift to unload it myself) and for that much money, it was hard to justify borrowing a truck and making the ~2.5 hour round trip drive.

If you’re not familiar with a band saw, you might be wondering what it is good for. In general, pretty much anything you can do on a table saw, you can do on a band saw and it’s arguably a bit safer for some tasks such as cutting dove tails or box joints. Additionally, you can cut curves and you can resaw thick lumber and save wood. When I built Tyla’s jewelry box, most of the pieces were 3/4″ thick so that’s the stock that I bought. But a couple of the pieces only needed to be 1/4″ thick. If I had a band saw, I could have cut the board in half to make two thin pieces. Since I didn’t have one, I had to run it repeatedly through the thickness planer and turn 2/3 of the board into expensive saw dust.

I’m excited to get this thing set up and learn how to use it! Stay tuned for my first projects. I have a big stack of ideas waiting for me!

benmartens August 4, 2015 Woodworking

Guest Bed

In previous posts, I showed the design of our new guest room bed and the completed base. Yesterday I installed the headboard and called the project done! I’m really happy with how the headboard turned out. I just used plain old 2x4s, 1x6s and 1x4s, but I milled them a bit first and they came out looking nice. Cutting the rounded edges off the 2x4s made them much less recognizable and jointing the edges of the 1x6s made them fit very cleanly together. I loaded up the drawers and we still have room left to spare. As long as nobody crashes to the floor while sleeping on this, I’ll call it a success!

guestbed

Steve Ramsey gets credit for the design, but you can also download my slightly modified queen bed version. Thank you for the inspiration Steve!

UPDATE: In my original post, I forgot to mention how much this all cost. The wood for the headboard was $38 and the wood for the base was $190. Toss in a little paint and some other consumables and this was about $250 in parts. The drawers were a major cost in this build. Dropping those would probably save $80-100.

benmartens August 3, 2015 Maker, Woodworking

13 Years of Blogging

13poolI’ve been doing this for so long that this one almost slipped by me. Thirteen years of daily blogging! I’ll keep this one short and just say thank you. Thanks for coming here and listening to me babble. Writing is therapeutic and has improved (I hope) my communication skill, but if nobody was reading, I probably would have quit a long time ago. I hope that every once in a while you get a smile, a chuckle or a new tidbit of knowledge from this site.

benmartens July 31, 2015 Site News

Earthquake Hysteria

seattleearthquakeEarthquake preparedness kits are selling like hot cakes and it’s in the news. Seattle is going to be obliterated by an earthquake! The end is near! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

The other night I got curious as to why the impending earthquake is all of a sudden big news. Why is everybody freaking out about this all of a sudden? There are articles every year about this, so was there some new revelation or scientific discovery?

Nope. It can be traced back to a click-bait article in the New Yorker. This got picked up and went viral. News flash: There’s a fault line under Seattle. News flash: There are fault lines everywhere. Yes, any fault line could be the source of an earthquake, and yes, you should be prepared for the possibility, but seriously, settle down. You should also be prepared for a house fire, a car accident, a volcano eruption, measles outbreaks and missile attacks from North Korea.

Three local earthquake experts got together to do a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) and it’s a much better source of actual science related to the possibility of a Seattle earthquake. If you’re really concerned about this, note that three LOCAL experts wrote this. They study this stuff as a profession and yet they still happily live and work here.

So yes, it’s possible that we could have an earthquake tomorrow and yes, it might be devastating, but this possibility has existed for a very long time, and lots of data says that it’s not likely to happen for another couple hundred years. There are also threats of disasters. Do some basic preparations and get on with your life.

P.S. Luke 12:22-31

P.P.S. If you want to watch a good interview about this, check out episode 12 of The New Screensavers. That link will take you right to the start of the interview.

benmartens July 30, 2015 Commentary