Studio711.com – Ben Martens

RIP Simon

When Tyla and I started making our first trips to Woodland Park Zoo together, we always made it a point to stop and see Simon the siamang. He seemed to enjoy interacting with guests and we got some great pictures with him.

Tyla visited the zoo a few weeks back with Elijah and was sad to learn that Simon died in mid-December. An article from the zoo says that he was 34 and succumbed to a long-term chronic illness. (I had no idea that Simon and I were the same age!)

We’ll miss seeing him there!

simonwoodlandpark

 

benmartens February 20, 2015 Commentary

Kids’ Music

Caspar-BabyPantsElijah loves music. He especially likes to listen to it in the car and when each song ends, he immediately makes the sign for “more.” Finding kids music that doesn’t make my head explode is a challenge, but we’ve locked onto a couple good singers so far.

  • Caspar Babypants – This is Chris Ballew who is/was the lead singer for Presidents of the United States. He lives in the Seattle area and now spends most of his time writing music for kids. He does lots of small, free shows which Tyla really enjoys attending. One of our favorite albums is his cover of a bunch of Beatles songs that have a fun kids message to them. I love the idea that Elijah and I are both enjoying listening to the same guy as we grow up!
  • Raffi – This is more traditional kids music, but he has a good voice and does a good job with his songs.

What else is out there? What albums do you fire up when your kids want music? I’m especially looking for ones that adults don’t mind!

benmartens February 19, 2015 Family, Music, Uncategorized

Comcast Speed

topgunI do a lot of bandwidth speed tests, and I don’t really know why. I even know that Comcast optimizes for sites like speedtest.net to make sure your report shows you are getting what you paid for (at least on that site.) And yet, I still run the tests.

A while back, I started noticing that I was getting more than the 50Mbps down 10Mbps up that I paid for. In fact, my downstream bandwidth was more than twice that! I figured it was a fluke and it would go back down immediately, but it hasn’t. In fact, I found some news articles saying that Comcast was rolling this out across the country. Yay!

As much as I’m thrilled to be getting about 120/10 service for the same price, there aren’t many occasions where I make use of the extra download speed. I’d rather double my upload speed for doing cloud backups and uploading videos to YouTube, but I’ll take what I can get. The extra speed does come in handy for the video games that I download via Steam or on the Xbox One.

It’s a good thing they did this speed boost because it’s just enough to stay ahead of my Verizon phone. There’s one part of Bellevue where I can get over 90 Mbps down and 10 up on my cell phone. That blows my mind.

speedtest123P.S. Insert old timer quote here about remembering 9600bps modems.

P.P.S. 123Mbps is about 15 megabytes per second, a CD every 46 seconds, a DVD every 5.3 minutes, or eleven 3.5″ floppy disks per second.

P.P.P.S. This post should be good for a chuckle in the future when everything is so fast we don’t even think about it anymore.

benmartens February 18, 2015 Geek

Online TV Queue

onlinetvOne of the longstanding complaints about people who want to get rid of cable is that there isn’t a great way to watch live sports without it. That roadblock is pretty much gone with the announcement of Sling. For $20/month, you get 20 pretty good cable channels and one of them is ESPN. Couple that with an over the air antenna and you can watch a lot of sports. Note there are a couple drawbacks of the Sling service, the biggest of which is that you can’t pause or record most of the channels so it’s live only. And of course, there are many of us for whom a digital antenna just won’t work at all for those local stations.

That being said, I ditched ESPN about a year or so ago and haven’t missed it. We saved $40/month and I think it was well worth it. I’m actually pretty willing to cut the cable TV cord completely, but there’s one thing that has me hooked: I really enjoy having all of my shows in one place. My custom DVR records all the shows I want to watch and I also have it set up to download all of the YouTube channels that I watch. That means pretty much everything I want to watch is available in a single interface and I instantly know when new episodes are available. My cable package is only costing me about $15/month right now and that is well worth the convenience of one stop shopping.

The online TV market has grown incredibly in the last year or two, but it lacks the “one spot for everything” feature. It feels like there is a market for some kind of web service that would look at all the shows you watch, figure out where you watch them, and then give you a big queue showing the unwatched episodes. It’s probably technically difficult given all the various sign in requirements on the different sites and this information probably isn’t readily available. If a couple of the major services could get together to do something like this, it would be a fantastic app. I’m not going to hold my breath though.

benmartens February 17, 2015 Geek

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