Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Amazon Promotional Credit Balance

slowershippingcreditIf you’re a Prime member, you’ve probably noticed that at checkout you can choose a slower delivery and get $1 towards books, movies, etc. While I love the free two day shipping, I’ve been choosing the credit for things that I don’t need quickly.

But finding out how much credit you have built up turns out to be a bit complicated. Ignore all the step-by-step instructions and just go to this link: http://bit.ly/mp3-balance

You’ll quickly see how much money you have available. The only thing it doesn’t tell you is when various parts of it expire. Generally it seems like the credits are good for about two months. I figure it’s free money so if I have a purchase that can use them, great, if not, oh well. And I’m sure that makes Amazon happier. They end up saving money overall because they don’t have to ship so much stuff with the higher two-day shipping cost. It’s brilliant… I pay them $100/year to ship things to me at normal speed in exchange for credit that I don’t always use. These guys are good.

benmartens February 16, 2015 Links

Wall Mount

Lots of kids are injured every year from falling TVs. The number is increasing rapidly as people have moved from big heavy CRTs to light LCD TVs. The best number I could find was 12,000/year back in 2011. That’s not a huge number. There are plenty of riskier things to worry about first, but wall mounting the TV is something I’ve wanted to do anyway so this was a good excuse.

I picked up one of the more popular models from Monoprice for only $37. And I know some of you are content to leave your cables dangling down the walls, but that would drive me nuts in my own house. Running them through the wall is pretty simple with a kit like this for $40 from Amazon. It complies with code by splitting the box for the power and the low voltage cables.

Installation was pretty quick and simple: find two studs, drill the holes, and attach the mount to the wall. The laser level was a big help for this. That’s a paper bag you see taped to the wall to catch some of the dust.

wallmount1Next I used the included templates to trace out the holes for the power extension kit and cut holes in the drywall. Yes, I could have just added a new outlet here, but doing it this way means that I can connect this outlet to my battery backup and add some extra protection for the TV.wallmount2The final step was attaching the mounting brackets to the back of the TV, removing the old base, and then hanging it on the wall. The mount pulls out pretty far from the wall so that the TV can swivel 90 degrees in each direction (nice if we are watching from the kitchen), and it also tilts in the other two directions. My mount is really level, but the 5 degrees of tilt would help you correct most mistakes.wallmount3I’m very happy with how this all turned out. It was pretty cheap and only took about 2 hours to finish. If you’re comfortable wiring an outlet and operating a drill, this is something you can accomplish. Just make sure you’re in the center of those studs! I used a stud finder and then pounded a small nail in multiple times across the entire face of the stud to find both edges. It’s all covered by the mount anyway so the extra holes don’t matter (and they are easily patched if needed.)

I’m still debating if this is a little too high. There’s plenty of adjustment in the mount that screws to the back of the TV so I might lower it just a bit.

benmartens February 13, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Stove Cover

When we have parties at our house, the counter between the kitchen and the eating area is usually covered with food. The stove makes a big chunk of that space unusable. One day I had the bright idea of building a cover for it using some of the scrap 3/4″ oak plywood leftover from the desk project. I bought a 1×8″ piece of oak and set off building the box.

I wanted to crank this out pretty quickly and new that it would only get used a few times per year, so I kept it really simple. The joints on the corners are simple butt joints held together with pocket screws. The top fits down inside the box and rests on support rails.

Storage was a key feature since we won’t be using this 99.9% of the time. We decided it would fit well in the drawer below the oven, but to fit there, it needed to be cut in half. So I built the cover as a single piece and then ran it through the table saw as the last step. That’s where it went a little wrong. I got some tear-out on the plywood. I improvised and cut a thin strip of oak to overlap the gap. It covers up the tear-out and also will make sure food doesn’t fall through the gap. It’s not ideal but it looks fine.stovecoverbox1

I finish it all with a cherry stain and then four coats of spray lacquer. It got it’s first use at the Super Bowl party and worked very well.

If you’re interested in this idea but don’t want to build one, you can buy them online.

benmartens February 12, 2015 Woodworking

Amazon Fire TV Review

topgearworkbenchAfter Ken gave me a 32″ TV for the garage, I decided to pick up an Amazon Fire TV to go with it. Yes, I have a Chromecast sitting on a shelf already, but the Fire TV has a remote which is a big win. I don’t really like the idea of leaving my phone sitting out on my workbench to control the TV.

I started with the Amazon Fire TV Stick since it’s cheaper and takes up less space. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi signal isn’t strong enough in my garage. I even added a second access point right across the wall in the living room, but it still wasn’t enough to hold a steady stream. I suspect there is some sort of barrier between the house and the garage.

By that point, my long-lived hatred of Wi-Fi for stationary devices had boiled over so I took back the stick and ordered an Amazon Fire TV box.

That arrived and … it was a brick. I had ordered a refurbished model to save $20, but it still should have worked. A quick call to a very nice tech support lady got me a new one shipped out.

The replacement unit worked fine. I ran a cable from my network closet to the workbench and voila, I have TV out in the garage.

The Fire TV is a slick little device. It’s a lot like a Roku device if the Roku device first booted into the Amazon app. The other bonus feature is that the remote lets you do voice search. That’s a lot faster than typing character by character with a D-pad on the remote.

You can load other apps onto it. The main excuse for doing this was so that I could have YouTube up showing an instructional video for whatever I’m working on. While there isn’t a dedicated YouTube app for the Fire TV, they do have a simple app that opens up YouTube in it’s big screen experience mode. You can pair the website with your phone and then control it from your phone (similar to a Chromecast but more generic.) Then you can use the remote to pause, rewind, etc.

If you’re looking for a box to add smarts to your TV, this is a solid choice if you’re an Amazon Prime member. If you’re not, then I’d probably go with the Roku.

benmartens February 11, 2015 Gadgets

Epson GT-S50 Long Term Update

epsongts50In October 2012, Tyla and I bought an Epson GT-S50 document scanner. We debated for quite a while about it since it was pricey, but more than two years later, I’m still loving this device. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to scan in your documents, but if you’re going to do it a lot, this is the way to go. It scans the pages ridiculously quickly, handles multiple pages with ease, scans both sides in a single pass, and in the end it creates a searchable PDF file.

The best part of all this is that when I’m done scanning the papers, they go in the shredder. And because it’s so easy, there’s no debate about whether something is worth keeping or not. Everything gets scanned and shredded. We’ve scanned over 3600 documents! That means 3600 pieces of paper* that didn’t end up in a filing cabinet somewhere in our house. And that is my favorite feature.

* This number includes scanning in a bunch of older documents that were previously in a filing cabinet as well as some stacks of photos.

benmartens February 10, 2015 Gadgets

WordPress Review

wordpresscirclelogoA little over a month after moving to WordPress, I’m giving it a resounding two thumbs up. This is a huge upgrade over my ancient fork of the Community Server codebase. Here are a few things that I really enjoy:

  • Themes are easy to search, install and tryout. There are a huge number of people actively designing themes so it was easy to find one that provided the features I wanted, including a good experience on mobile devices.
  • Updates show up as notifications in the admin page. Click the button an voila, you just upgraded WordPress.
  • The database backend runs MySQL which was new for me, but it’s been a good experience to learn. My favorite part of it is that the database schema is so simple. There are only a dozen or so tables and you can understand most of it by just looking at the table and field names.
  • There are an enormous number of plugins available, and like the themes, they are easy to search and install. I have plugins for things like Google Analytics, Microsoft Application Insights, Instagram, Twitter, Akismet comment spam blocking, and a sitemap generator for the Google and Bing indexer robots. Updating these plugins is just a simple click.
  • One of the best plugins I’m using gives me a calendar view of my posts. You know by now that I write posts out in advance and schedule them to come out one per day around the middle of the night. Seeing the calendar view is an easy way to make sure that I haven’t missed a day, and it’s easy to swap posts around if I want to reorder them.

The list goes on an on but I’m very happy with this. My recommendation of WordPress for your website is pretty pointless. They’ve been around for 11 years. 60 million websites use them including more than 20% of the top 10 million websites. I’m really late to the game, but I’m glad I’m joining the game.

benmartens February 9, 2015 Site News

Fitbit Aria Review

fitbit-ariaTyla and I both weigh ourselves every morning and write down our weight. While the day to day change isn’t always something to get worked up about, it’s important to understand your trend as it stretches out to weeks and months.

We decided to step the geek up a notch and buy the Fitbit Aria scale. It connects via Wi-Fi to your home network and automatically uploads your weight to your Fitbit account. You can then view the charts and history online or in a phone app. This is definitely a luxury purchase, but it’s a nice convenience.

Once you get it up and running, it works like almost any other scale. But getting it up and running was the big issue for us. I spent a very long time wrestling with it, talking to tech support (no help) and surfing the web. I tried it with my phone and two different laptops. I tried setting up a Wi-Fi network just for the scale that had no security on it. Nothing worked. Finally, I pulled out an old Android phone that KenC gave me and it worked the first time.

Fitbit ships an application that runs on Windows and is supposed to do the setup, so surely this can’t be everyone’s experience. But this still seems like a pretty big hole in their testing. I’m using a very common router (WNDR3700) and fully patched phone and laptop OS’s. This should be a mainstream case.

Oh well, we are up and running now so there’s no need to do any more setup. And if I do change the network or something, I’ll know to grab an Android device!

P.S. I feel obligated to mention that the money for this purchase came through my health plan at work which can only be used for a specific set of items. If we were using our general funds for this, I think we’d still be doing manual logging.

benmartens February 6, 2015 Gadgets

Time Management

TimemanagementOn a recent episode of the Making It podcast, the topic was “how do I quit my job and build stuff for a living?” Bob Clagett chimed in with some very thought provoking comments. (Note that he says these come from the book “Quitter” by Jon Acuff.) Bob doesn’t make stuff full time. He still has a day job. So how does he divide up his time? Here are the three work categories he uses along with my thoughts on them.

  1. Day job. I like my job but if I could do anything in the world, I wouldn’t be doing my current job. If you’re in the same boat, it doesn’t mean that your job needs to be a complete waste of your time. What can you learn from your job that benefits your passion? Also remember, that depending on your situation, your day job is probably what you do to make your passion possible. It generates the income and provides you with health insurance.
  2. Spend time with family. Having a good family life isn’t something that happens by accident. It takes work and you should be accounting for it when you’re planning out how to spend your time.
  3. Do what you love. This can be the easiest bucket to fill, but it’s also one that we can misuse easily. This isn’t a bucket for surfing Facebook, reading random internet sites (ahem, like this one), or staring at the TV. Pick one or two things that you love and really want to focus on and devote your time to them.

Few things in my life had made me more conscious of how I spend my time than having a child. These three buckets are a great place to start. I’m still trying to work out how things like paying bills, making dinner and cleaning up fit into this but I suppose that could fit into building a good family environment. And of course, as a Christian, my faith is the most important thing to me. That should weave it’s way through all aspects of my life but also deserves it’s own bucket of dedicated time.

It has already been useful to think of my time in terms of these buckets. Instead of thinking “is this a worthwhile activity”, it’s better to think “is this the most rewarding/important thing I can do right now?” I do try to set aside one evening a week to just veg out and watch a movie or something, but most nights, I need to take advantage of my limited non-work time to fill up the other buckets!

benmartens February 5, 2015 Commentary

Ford Ousts Microsoft

fordsync3previewThe next version of Ford Sync won’t come from Microsoft. They’re tossing out the old system and starting with a newer one that, frankly, makes more sense to me. Here’s the problem: your car lasts 10 years and your phone is out of date in two years. The existing Ford Sync systems are basically a point in time piece of technology that needs to live the lifetime of your car. Why bother baking all that into the car? All you need is a big touch screen with some microphones and buttons placed around the car that all work in concert with your phone. Your phone already has the Internet connection and is being regularly upgraded, so let the phone be the brains of the operation. The car should just be a dumb terminal that gets smarter and more useful when a phone is within range. That seems to be more the direction that Ford is taking with the new system and it’s the way that the systems from a lot of other companies work too.

I have my eye on one of the new F150s but I struggle with the decision about Sync. I like having the big screen with navigation in my car, but the Waze app on my phone is so much more useful. Is it worth spending the extra money to get the current full Sync system like we did in the Escape? Probably not. The basic functions that let you connect your phone via Bluetooth are useful, but the rest of it just gets out of date pretty quickly.

Hopefully we are heading in a direction where the carmakers don’t try to compete too much in the fast paced consumer technology world, or if they do, they give us a way to upgrade the hardware. Even if you velcro’d a tablet to my dash, I’d be pretty happy. At least I’d know I could replace it in two years with something cooler/better and it would probably interact with my phone a lot better than the system you developed years ago based on even older hardware.

benmartens February 4, 2015 Gadgets

Rough Ski Season

Last year was a huge change for me as I dropped from 15-25 ski days per year to just one. This year I had hoped to get out at least two or three times, but I’m wondering if that will happen. This year has been a horrible snow season and the resorts are still barely open. If you go, be prepared to dodge a lot of rocks and bare spots. This is what skiing is normally like in November if they open early, not in late January in what is normally the height of the ski season. How bad is it? Here are a photos from Baker, Alpental and Crystal, respectively. Lots and lots of rocks and trees poking through.

nosnow_baker_2015

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nosnow_alpental_2015

If you stay on the groomed runs, you might have some luck, but even then, it’s usually either icy or soupy. There’s just no new snow to make things nice. Stevens seems to be doing the best but even that is pretty tough. Anything off the groomers is not really an option. Here’s a shot from the back side and that doesn’t look like nearly as much fun as usual.

nosnow_stevenspass_2015

This doesn’t meant that every single day has been worthless. If you go with the right attitude, choose your day somewhat carefully, and have a good group of friends with you, there is fun to be had. Personally I know I only get a couple days a season now so I’m waiting for a day that will really be worth it. So far there hasn’t been anything close.

benmartens February 3, 2015 Skiing