Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Adirondack Chair

I’ve been talking about building an Adirondack chair for so long that it’s embarrassing. It’s been at least four years if not more. There always seemed to be other projects that were more pressing, and my excuse was that I still didn’t know exactly how I wanted to build it. Over the years, I sat in a lot of chairs trying to figure out what makes a comfortable Adirondack chair and I finally decided that a contoured seat makes a huge difference. Unfortunately that also ups the difficulty of the build and gave me another reason to put it off.

Finally I stumbled across some plans from Woodworkers Journal that looked like just what I wanted. Even better, they had done a refresher of the plans complete with a 15 minute video series showing all the steps. Bingo.

A couple weekends ago, I headed to Home Depot and picked up a bunch of cedar boards. The plans say pine but I decided to go with cedar as it seemed like something that would stand up to the weather better (not sure if that’s true.) Instead of trying to find the minimum sized boards that I needed, I bought a few bigger 8″ wide boards with the intention of trimming them down to size. The cost was about the same and it was a lot easier to find bigger boards without warping or cupping.

While I’ve done a lot of wood projects over the years, this is the most complicated plan I’ve ever followed and easily the nicest looking piece of furniture I’ve ever attempted. There were a couple new skills involved in the project. One was template routing. I spent a lot of time drawing out all the different pieces onto 1/4″ plywood and then I cut them out with a jigsaw and sanded them to perfect shape. To make the actual cedar pieces, I used double sided tape to stick the template onto the cedar and then used a flush trim bit in the router table. The top of the bit is a bearing that rides along the template and then underneath it’s cutting away the cedar allowing me to perfectly replicate the shape of the template on the cedar. Pretty cool!

templaterouting

The second new skill was cutting a taper into the back slats. I haven’t yet built a really nice tapering jig, but I was able to throw one together with some hold down clamps. It wasn’t pretty but it did the job well and gave me repeatable cuts at the right angle.

taperingjig

I was surprised at how well the whole thing went together. The only real hiccup was the upper back frame (part H) came out about an inch too narrow. It didn’t cover the entire top of the back legs. I checked my measurements over and over against the plans, couldn’t find the problem, and finally just cut a new piece that was a little wider. I don’t understand how there could be a bug in the plans after they made the video and didn’t catch it, but whatever. This works and it looks good.

There are a few things that look a little off if you are paying attention, but hey, most of the time you’re sitting in this chair you’ll be drinking a beer in the sun. It’s plenty good for that and very comfortable. Mission accomplished!

I still need to figure out how I’m going to finish this (or if I’ll just leave it bare). After that, the next step is to redo it all over again so that we have two. It should go MUCH faster this time since I already have all the templates. Plus, I feel confident that I can cut all the pieces first and then assemble them. The plan is very forgiving about pieces being off by an 1/8″ here or there and not having a huge effect on the outcome (for the most part.)

adirondackchair

benmartens March 6, 2015 Woodworking

Casper

caspermattressZappos, whom I mentioned yesterday, is not the only online retailer disrupting a market that you wouldn’t initial think of as a good fit for online sales. Casper is doing it too because buying a mattress is a pain. You go to some sleezy store that is always having a sale that ends in 30 minutes, get endless upsold by a salesman who is throwing out terms you don’t understand, and then you walk away paying gobs of money and wondering if you got scammed. It’s not hard to see how this market was ripe for disruption.

If you’re in the market for a mattress, check out Casper. You get a 100 night risk-free trial, free 5-day shipping, You can read a full writeup on the company in this NYTimes article, but basically you get a high quality memory foam mattress for well under $1000. Similar mattresses can easily run double or triple that, if not more.

But augh! What if I don’t like it! No problem. Call Casper in those first 100 days and they’ll send a courier to your house to pick it up. I don’t think it’s going to be too long before we’re in the market for another mattress and I’ll be surprised if we don’t give Casper a shot. Why not?

benmartens March 5, 2015 Links

Zappos

zapposlogoZappos, mostly a shoe company, is an old company in Internet time. They officially launched back in 1999 and ever since then, they have built their brand on incredible customer service and easy returns. Buying shoes online is difficult since you can’t try them on, but Zappos makes it easy: don’t like them? Return them for free for up to one year.

They’ve branched out a bit to cover some clothing and accessories, but Tyla and I have only used them for shoes. We’ve always had a positive experience. You get a huge selection and you can be sure you’ll get one that fits without paying lots of money for shipping.

Here’s a protip for you: If you use the Windows 8 Zappos app, you get FREE 1 business day shipping!

benmartens March 4, 2015 Links

Open Space

newbuilding1At the beginning of February, my group at work moved into a new building. Technically it’s an old building but it was completely gutted and renovated. Instead of most people having their own office (or sharing with one other person), we now sit in big open areas. The only personal space you have is a rolling desk with your computer on it. The idea is that you can easily unplug and roll to sit next to whoever you’re working with. There are no walls between you and your teammates so you can chat more easily.

I have to say that I loved having my own office and I’m not a huge fan of the change. There are definitely some advantages especially when it comes to pair programming or just asking quick questions. But overall I find it pretty distracting and it also makes it more difficult to handle the quick personal phone calls like scheduling doctor appointments, etc.

It sounds like all of the buildings on campus are moving toward this so there’s no getting away from it. This stuff goes in phases so I’m sure in 10-20 years we’ll all be moving back into our own offices because that’s the cool new thing.

newbuildings2

benmartens March 3, 2015 Commentary

Location Sharing With Windows Phone

squadwatch-iconTyla and I are regularly texting each other saying that we are leaving various places, headed home, etc. There aren’t many people that I’d share my location with, but letting Tyla know where I am would be pretty useful (and vice versa.)

Microsoft recently launched an app called SquadWatch which purports to do just that. It was built as a fun project by some employees and it feels like it has some growing pains. The first day I wasn’t able to get our phones linked together and since then it has taken quite a while to acquire the location of the other phone. If they get their act together, this could be a good app.

While I was reading about SquadWatch, I learned that there’s another location sharing app called Glympse. Right now it has significantly better reviews that SquadWatch so I’ll be checking that one out as well.

This seems like a super valuable tool for families, but I can see how it could feel like Big Brother watching over you. Will my son be ok with something like this when he’s older? That opens up a whole other set of questions that I’m not ready to answer yet. Parenting is hard.

UPDATE: There appears to be one major difference between the two apps. Glympse lets you share your location with someone for a specific period of time (similar to Waze), but SquadWatch appears to actually contact the other phones to determine their current location. That’s much more useful for my purposes. Once you have set up the “squad”, you can always know where the other people are. There are still some performance and reliability issues with the app but I’m going to keep it on my phone.

benmartens March 2, 2015 Links

Summer Plans

relaxsummerI feel like I missed last summer even though I spent more time outside than I have in a long time. Nearly every evening for two months was spent outside with Tim working for 4-5 hours in the evenings on the front and back yards.

So what’s on tap for this summer? What monster house project will I tackle? NOTHING. We’re specifically saying no big projects this summer. We want to leave our time free to enjoy the weekends and get outside as a family.

But home improvement is kind of a hobby I guess, so there will be some smaller projects. For example, I’ve got an endless list of woodworking project ideas, and there will be a day coming soon when Tim and I will put plants all around the house. I bought a basketball pole that needs to be installed and Tyla wants a desk in her craft room. So I’ll still have projects to do but nothing will be so important that I have to put it before normal fun summer activities.

We’ve been getting lucky the past couple months with temps well-above normal. I’m sure we’ll be in for more cool, rainy weather, but these past couple weeks have given me a strong case of spring fever. The grass is growing, the cherry and magnolia trees are blooming. Bring on the summer of nothing!

benmartens February 27, 2015 Home Improvement

WiFi Access Points

unifinetworksOn January 1, I took over as the IT guy at church. We had a pretty bare bones set up and I was given the funds to spruce things up a bit. Once I got our internet speed upgraded from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps (for the same price with some billing fixup) and got new computers installed, the next task was to get better WiFi coverage.

A bit of searching around led me to these UniFi Access Points. They’re simple looking devices that can be managed from a central server app. These are slightly more complicated than your typical home networking gear but well within the reach of any aspiring nerd.

There are tons of complex features that you can enable like zero handoff switching between access points so your VOIP calls don’t stutter, but even just setting it up with the defaults gives you a great experience. I need to do some more testing, but it appeared that my devices were automatically connecting to the strongest signal instead of waiting until the first signal completely died out to grab a new one. The range was good and now with three access points, we can cover all of the buildings with a strong signal.

I’m tempted to install these at home too. Our house is just big/complex enough that we get a pretty weak signal in some parts. Two or three of these would make a big difference.

benmartens February 26, 2015 Gadgets

Sling Television

Sling-TV-logoOne of the major things that held me back from cutting back on cable last year was the loss of ESPN. Turns out, it wasn’t that big of a deal. If I had it, I probably would have watched it, but I guess I don’t really miss it at this point.

That being said, there will come a point where I really want to watch ESPN or some other channel that I lost access to. There’s now an awesome online solution for this and it’s called Sling Television (no relation to the Sling Box.) It’s basically an online cable subscription. For $20/month you get ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food, HGTV, Travel, Cartoon Network, Disney, ABC Family, CNN, and a couple others. There are a few $5 add-on packs if you want more sports, etc. Notably the ESPN package includes access to WatchESPN.com. The best part is that it’s super easy to sign up and super easy to cancel and it comes with a free 7 day trial.

If you’re a cord cutter but can’t give up access to live TV and some of these channels then this could be a great solution. The major drawback at this point is that only some of the channels have any type of DVR functionality (they store ~3 days of content) but stations like ESPN don’t enable this. And only some of the stations allow you to watch On Demand back episodes. If you’re looking for live TV, this is the way to go, but if you want to time shift your TV, you’ll want to pay more attention to what you actually get during the trial period.

While this might not be the perfect service for all circumstances, it’s still fantastic to see us getting closer to the dream of watching what we want, when we want, where we want, on whatever device we want.

benmartens February 25, 2015 Gadgets

Drones

dronefieldThere’s so much negative press around the radio controlled hobby right now. Any time I see a headline with the word “drone” in it or I hear someone on the radio start talking about “drones”, I feel compelled to look away or change the station. It’s almost certainly going to frustrate me. Sometimes neighbors walk up when I’m flying my multicopter and say “Is that a drone?” The snarky reply I want to give is “Only if you watch too much TV”, but instead I try to give them a little education about what it can and can’t do.

It’s not their fault for being uneducated about a hobby that is going through a massive period of change. The electronics needed to succeed in remote control flight are orders of magnitude better than they were 10 or even 5 years ago. This technological growth is allowing whole new groups of people to enter the hobby, and while the vast majority of us are responsible, there are always a few people who feed the media frenzy around “drones.”

Why the big change now? Ten years ago, if you wanted to fly anything remote controlled, you needed to like learning/building as part of the hobby. You probably needed a friend to help you decipher it all and you probably flew at a club site where lots of other people could teach you how to fly safely. With all the new technology, you can walk into a hobby store, plop down your credit card, and walk out with something that would have been science fiction a decade ago. You don’t need to know anything about actual flight. Just push the stick and the computers will translate that into some sort of “safe” flight using lots of sensor to back you up. What might have taken you a month of learning and training with other people helping you can now be accomplished in hours on your own.

It’s that “on your own part” that is causing all the trouble. You didn’t build it yourself to learn how it works and what is dangerous about the device, and you didn’t have someone there how to be safe. It might all be ok, but you learn how to fly completely reliant on all the onboard computers and sensors. You might not even know that there’s a GPS receiver on there that is keeping your multicopter from flying away. What happens when that GPS receiver loses it’s signal? What happens when the accelerometer board has a glitch? Can you fly it manually and safely get it back home or are you going to crash into the White House lawn or a crowd of kids in a park? This is how news stories get made.

It’s easy to cross the line here and sound like an old curmudgeon that doesn’t want new people in his hobby. It’s awesome that so many people are getting excited about this hobby, but it’s not awesome that they are taking a “shortcut” and skipping a lot of the background needed to do it safely.

The FAA is scrambling to try and enact some regulations around this. So far, most of those have been overreaching and ridiculous. We already have laws to cover things that people are concerned about with “drones.” We don’t need extra ones. But what might make sense is requiring a license before you can fly either privately or commercially. Make people take some basic training/online test that teaches about the safety rules and guidelines both to protect other people and to protect the pilot.

Eventually we’ll get to a point where the onboard sensors and computers are SO good that you really can fly these without much training or knowledge. It’s just this interim period that is dangerous for the future of the hobby. Overreactions at this point can put a real damper on the progression needed to get to that safe point.

benmartens February 24, 2015 Radio Controlled Flight

Free OneDrive Storage

onedrivelogoOneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) has been continually improving their offering and they have a pretty impressive service at this point. I regularly use it whenever I want to share a bunch of files with others, but it’s also great just for storing your documents, photos, etc. I’d put it one step behind a dedicated backup tool like CrashPlan.com but it’s a solid option whether or not you have another backup solution because OneDrive allows you to easily access your files from any computer and it also caches the files locally so you don’t have to be connected to the network to use them.

If you ever use OneDrive or you even think there’s a chance that you might use it in the future, be sure to click this link to receive an extra 100GB free for the next two years. That’s on top of the 15GB free you get just for having an account. Go get yours before this freebie is gone!

benmartens February 23, 2015 Geek