benmartens – Page 123 – Studio711.com

UMX F4U Corsair Review

For my birthday, Tyla bought me a Bixler 2 which was a nice step up from the foam board airplanes I had been building before. I’ve had a ton of fun with that and only one bad crash (but it was flight ready again in less than 15 minutes.)

For Christmas, she bought me another step up in difficulty: the UMX F4U Corsair BNF with AS3X from E-flit. That’s a mouthful, but as you might have guessed, it’s an F4. And it’s TINY. The wingspan is less than 16″! The “AS3X” part of the name is a little on-board computer that helps keep the tiny plane from feeling too touchy. The net effect is that it flies like a much bigger plane as the computer seamlessly counteracts the effects of wind.

This plane is small but it’s still a bit too fast to fly in our cul-de-sac. It’s a great one for a soccer field though and the schools down the street provide lots of flying opportunities for it.

The tiny plane doesn’t skimp on the details. I took my own pictures but these photos from the marketing site are much better. Want to fly it sometime? I’d be happy to buddy box with you!

eflitef4u

benmartens February 2, 2015 Radio Controlled Flight

Dust Collection

With recent woodworking projects, I have been putting more effort into keeping the dust under control. That has been going well, but it means I’m going through filters on the shop vac very quickly. You can only knock the dust out of them so many times before they aren’t usable anymore and they fill up with dust very quickly. I’m also nervous about burning out the motor on the shop vac because it can’t pull air through the clogged filter.

Full shop dust collection systems are expensive, but I purchased a simpler solution. The Dust Deputy is a plastic contraption that spins the air before it enters the shop vac. Heavier particles fall into a 5 gallon bucket and clean air enters into the shop vac to get the final cleaning from the filter. There’s nothing too fancy or complicated about it. It’s just science. And boy does it work well!

After more than a month of use, my 5 gallon bucket is about half full and the inside of the shop vac is almost perfectly clean. You could run a white glove across the filter and barely get it dirty. That shiny new filter is going to last a VERY long time. Another bonus is that the 5 gallon bucket is much easier to empty than the shop vac container.

If you think about how many filters you’re going to buy to keep your shop vac working smoothly, the cost of the Dust Deputy isn’t too bad. This is definitely one worth considering if you use your shop vac for dust control.

benmartens January 30, 2015 Woodworking

Fixing Christmas Lights

When I finally decided on Christmas lights last fall, I decided to go with the professional grade wires, sockets and bulbs so that I could have the bulbs be interchangeable. That worked well and allowed me to do alternating red and soft-white C9 bulbs. It looked great except for one bulb that didn’t work. Testing it with the multimeter showed that the socket itself was bad. With a normal set of lights, I’d either have to live with it or pay another ~$40 for another 100ft strand of wire with sockets. But what I bought was repairable! (Pro tip: put some tape on your strand to mark both ends and any of the dead sockets. It’s a lot easier to find them when you have it all balled up on your workbench.)I ordered replacement sockets from Amazon. They come in pretty big quantities, but oh well, this will last me forever and I could use them to create my own custom strands if I wanted to. Make sure that you look to see if your light strand is SPT1 or SPT2. That notation specifies how thick the insulation is on the wire.

Doing the replacement is pretty straightforward except that getting the old socket off was tricky. I ended up just cutting and prying away on the old socket until it broke apart. Then I lined up the new socket and clamped it on. As usual, YouTube has a video to explain it.While I was doing all this, I figured I might as well make my strand be exactly the correct length. You can just clip the strand wherever you want and have it keep working, but be sure to clip the two wires at different lengths and then wrap them individually to make sure they don’t short out. Or you can add a new female plug to one end and a male plug to the other and bam, you now have two strings. I chose to add the new plugs. You can buy the male and female plugs on Amazon and learn how to properly install them via YouTube.

Sure this is a lot of trouble to go through for Christmas lights, but you know by now that I like things to work properly. This also makes me feel a LOT better about spending extra money on the professional grade lights. Every individual piece of this setup is replaceable. Whether sockets, plugs, bulbs, or even the wires go bad, I can replace just what’s needed. The worst (most expensive) thing that could happen would be if all of the LED bulbs broke but I’m storing them in a hard plastic container to help protect against that. Next year? MORE LIGHTS!

benmartens January 29, 2015 Home Improvement

Transaction Stats

countmoney I’ve been happily using Mint.com to track my finances for the last three and a half years. One feature they offer is the ability to download all of your transactions. I did that, popped it into Excel, and found some interesting stats. Note that these are for 2012-2014.

Our two most popular merchants are Amazon (544 transactions) and Safeway (521.) Home Depot (238) is next on the list. This means that we are spending money at Amazon or Safeway an average of once every two days. By the way, our favorite butcher is #14 on the list!
Since one of our grocery stores is #2 on the most popular merchant list, it’s no surprise that the biggest spending category (by count) is groceries with 818. Restaurants (332), home improvement (300) and gas (280) round out the top four.
What are our most visited restaurants?
Chipotle (31), Dairy Queen (25), Whidbey Coffee (17), Five Guys (14), Red Robin (14), Papa Murphy’s (13), Brown Bag Cafe (11), Fiesta Mexicana (10), Factory Donuts (7), Mod Pizza (7), Qdoba (7), Sushi Zone (7), Cafe Veloce (6), Jimmy John’s (6)
This list is a little bit skewed because sometimes another party will pay and then we’ll give them cash, but it’s a good rough idea of where we like to eat.
One third of the money we spent ran through a credit card. We average around 1.5% cash back so that adds up pretty quickly. I recommend the American Express Blue Cash card and the Amazon Visa for places that don’t take American Express. (This only works if you don’t carry a balance on your credit cards.)

If you don’t have an idea what your spending would look like in a similar study, I encourage you to at least sign up for Mint and let it start tracking your spending. Knowing where your money is going is the first step towards making important decisions that could dramatically affect your life.

P.S. It might sound a bit crazy that we go to the grocery store every two days. It turns out that going there is a great activity with Elijah. He enjoys it and we can either walk or drive because it’s less than a mile down the street. It also gets us out of the house so Tyla can have some quiet time to herself.

benmartens January 28, 2015 Geek

Garlic Chicken

Whenever Tyla suggests that we eat a really healthy meal, one of my first thoughts is a Garlic Chicken recipe from our favorite low carb recipe site (genaw.com). I admit that it doesn’t sound particularly appetizing when you look at the recipe, but the result is pretty good and it’s all good for you. Pairing it with a nice green veggie like steamed broccoli or peas helps to balance it out visually so you don’t just have a big plate of brown and orange.

Ingredients

6 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped

1 small yellow onion, peeled and sliced

3 large carrots, peeled and sliced thin

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, chopped into stew-size pieces

1/4 cup fresh parsley for garnish, chopped or torn

Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Combine the garlic, onions and carrots in a wok, and cook until the onions are translucent.

Add the chicken and cook until the chicken is done and the carrots are somewhat soft.

Toss in parsley just before removing wok from heat.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

benmartens January 27, 2015 Food

Blocking Traffic To Azure Websites

dosattack This is a geeky post but I feel the need to give back to the community and help others who might stumble on a similar issue. Regular readers can feel free to skip this. Tomorrow’s post will return to more normal topics.

After moving my website to Azure and switching to WordPress, I noticed that my site was running pretty slowly. It kept getting worse to the point where a lot of users were seeing timeouts and errors. Bumping up the website to run on a bigger machine helped temporarily but the dual core CPU was still pegged at about 85%. For a site that gets a few hundred hits per day, this seemed ridiculous.

I stumbled onto a great Azure feature called DaaS – Diagnostics as a Service for Azure Web Sites. That tool helped me identify that about a few clients were hitting a link that used to serve up data to the CascadeSkier applications. All of the clients should have been updated by the end of last year, and none of them should ever have been requesting that file 1000 times per minute like these were. I don’t know if a few of my apps had gone wacky or if this was something more malicious. Either way, I had to solve it from my end.

Simply hitting a file that doesn’t exist shouldn’t take that much CPU effort to respond to except that WordPress was configured at the root of the site. WordPress did a bunch of checks to determine that the URL was indeed invalid and then served up a fancy 404 page. To mitigate this, I checked in a very simple file that returned a blank page. This took the average CPU usage from 85% down to less than 5%! I was able to drop back down to the smaller single core machine and save money.

When I asked the Azure team about blocking specific IPs, they said that isn’t supported for the Azure Web Site product, but they do support blocking based on the number of concurrent requests and the number of requests in a period of time. I’ve set this up to help protect against potential related issues in the future.

The net result is that my little website is now consuming an appropriate amount of resources and the average time to serve a page has dropped dramatically. If you’ve been visiting the site over the last week, you can probably see the difference.

benmartens January 26, 2015 Site News

Workbench TV

A lot of my projects have how-to videos on YouTube so it’s not uncommon to have my laptop sitting on the workbench while I work. That’s not terrible, but it would be nicer to have a more permanent installation. After a chat with KenC and some swapping, I ended up with a 32″ LCD. It’s a bit bigger than my initial thought but it ended up working quite well.

He included a mounting bracket with the pile of goodies and since the studs are bare in the garage, mounting was a breeze. The next concern was protecting it a little bit from the saw dust. Using scrap lumber, I whipped up some shelves to cover the top and the sides. They’re not beautiful but I didn’t have to buy anything extra to build them so the price was right.

I’ll have a future blog post with more details but to get content to the TV, I’m going to be using an Amazon Fire TV. For the sound, Ken mentioned that the speakers weren’t great, and indeed, they are not. They would be sufficient for this purpose but I’m going to try to hook up some old computer speakers to the headphone port and see if that sounds better. They can sit right inside the new shelves.

Thanks Ken for helping me upgrade my shop!

benmartens January 23, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Elijah’s Vocabulary

There are so many times during the day when I stare at Elijah and wonder what he’s thinking. He jabbers all the time, but what is he telling us? He picked up some baby sign language pretty early on (“more”, “all done”, “milk”) but now he’s building up his verbal vocabulary too. Here’s a list of what he has under his belt so far:

no	apple	cracker
thank you	juice	water
two	hi	car
truck	tractor	trash
diaper	bye bye	uh oh
oh no	shoes	cheese
slide	ball	keys
eye	Jesus	What’s that?
tree	Ike

In fairness, some of these words are only distinguishable in context by Tyla and I but others are decipherable by the general public.

The list of words he understands is much bigger. I’m always talking to him, and sometimes I’m amazed at the complicated instructions he can actually follow. For example, one day I said, “Can you please pick up this piece of paper and throw it into the trash can?” I turned my back not expecting him to do it and when I looked again, he was toddling over to the trash can across the room. One of our favorites is that he understand “May I please have a hug?” Sometimes he’ll say “No”, but that’s fine because it just makes the hugs more enjoyable.

benmartens January 22, 2015 Family

Point Defiance Zoo

Over Christmas break, we took a trip down to the Point Defiance Zoo. It’s farther away than Woodland Park but Elijah and I had never been there and it had been a long time for Tyla. Unfortunately the day we picked turned out to be extremely cold (well for Seattle anyway) so we didn’t stay super long, but we did enjoy ourselves. It was nice having an aquarium right inside the same park so that we could spend time inside. Elijah was interested in some of the animals but the best part was the big slide on the playground.

Normally I’d carry our big Canon dSLR on a trip like this, but I decided to only use our new Lumia Icon phones and see how that worked. I was extremely impressed! I missed not having the depth of field options to work with, but the photo quality was more than passable. The Icon takes 43 megapixel images which is kind of silly, but the point is that there is a lot of detail there so you can crop the photo and sort of get an analog to an optical zoom. The Icon also saves images in both JPEG and DNG (a RAW format) which made it nice for editing later in Lightroom. While none of the photos turned out spectacular, I didn’t regret leaving the dSLR at home this time.

Note that with this new website platform, you can now click on any image to view it full screen.

benmartens January 21, 2015 Family, Photography, Travel

Red Hook Tour Updates

A couple year ago, Red Hook in Woodinville did a big remodel of their bar and restaurant. I’m guessing around the same time is when they also made changes to their tour. Most notably, the price is now $5 instead of $1. It’s still worth the money, but it kind of takes the fun out of going multiple times in a row. Maybe that’s the point. You also now drink out of plastic cups and get your souvenir tasting glass at the end. The content has changed a bit too. There’s less trivia and more storytelling, but that could have been a style preference on the part of our guide. All the key parts are still there though.

They have a new seasonal beer there called False Start. It’s only available at the brewery but you can get a growler filled. It was created to be a good football-watching beer. It apparently took a long time for the lawyers to work out the name with the Seahawks (hence one of the meanings for “False Start”) so now it’s a just a generic “yay my favorite sports team” beer that just happens to be blue and green and have a name that brings up thoughts of Century Link Field. Try a glass or two when you’re there before it’s off the tap list.

benmartens January 20, 2015 Commentary

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.