Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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!

tvoverworkbench

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.

One of the first animals that Elijah learned to mimic was the elephant.

Two monkeys

He spent a lot of time watching the tigers.

I'm not sure if Tyla or Elijah enjoyed the petting areas more.

benmartens January 21, 2015 Family, Photography, Travel

Red Hook Tour Updates

redhookfalsestartA 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

Sucked Out On The River

kearsegamewinningIn poker, there is a term called “sucking out on the river.” It means that a player who has almost no chance gets super lucky on the very last card played and comes back to win. Usually that player jumps up in surprise, screams in victory, and then sheepishly turns to the opponent and says “… sorry.” You know you got away with something you didn’t deserve.

That’s what the Seahawks did yesterday against the Packers. Neither side played great, but Seattle was the worse of the two for the first 55 minutes. They had FIVE turnovers and their offense was pathetic. With just under 5 minutes left in the game, they were down by 12 and the only points they scored were from a fake field goal by their special teams. The Seahawks then rattled off some combination of very lucky and very skilled plays that will be remembered for a long time by fans on both sides.

I, and other fans in the house, had come to grips that the Seahawks were going to lose. It stunk but ok, whatever, it’s just sportsball. The painful part was watching them go out in such a horrible way. This wasn’t the team that had gotten to this point in the season. They were down to their last card and they sucked out on the river.

So congratulations Seahawks. Sorry Packer fans. This game was a hot mess all around, but for most of the game, Green Bay was less of a mess. At least there were no bad calls that decided the game this time.

The Seahawks head to Phoenix to face the Patriots. If the Seahawks didn’t get this all out of their system, they are going to get annihilated. They better spend these two weeks taking a hard look at what went wrong and figure out plans both to stop Tom Brady and also to wring some points out of their meh offense.

bostick

benmartens January 19, 2015 Sports

More Blog Books

This blog has been running every (week)day since July of 2002. Along the way, I’ve been collecting the posts, the moblog/Instagram photos, and the tweets into books which cover one year each. I just finished off the books for 2012-2014 and this is getting to be quite the pile of dead tree. Most of the recent books are around 600 pages each. As I’ve said before, I don’t really think anybody is going to buy their own copy and probably they won’t even be read, but it’s kind of fun for me to have them sitting on my shelf. If I keep this blog up for the next 30 years, this is going to get a bit ridiculous though.

But imagine opening a trunk somewhere and finding a daily journal from one of your great great grandfathers. That would be pretty cool right? Unfortunately my descendants will be a bit disappointed when they read some of the drivel here, but still, there might be something that makes them read a few posts.

Or will books just be a novelty at that point? Would it be better to save these off as PDFs? How on earth would you make sure that a PDF file got handed down to your great great grandchild? How do we even pass this stuff down to our kids? I have 3.2TB of data backed up to CrashPlan right now. Is Elijah really expected to sift through that and find the good parts? I have no good answer to this. Instead, I offer you pictures of my custom dead trees.

book2014 bookshelf2014

benmartens January 16, 2015 Books, Site News

Pantry Organization

We have a bunch of boxes for the various sizes of plastic bags, ceran wrap, aluminum foil etc. They used to reside in a drawer but that drawer got taken over with safe toys for Elijah so he has something to pull out and mess around with. That moved all of our boxes to the top shelf in the pantry and it was difficult to find the one you wanted. We also ended up buying more when we already had some that were just too hard to find.

Tyla flipped around on Pinterest a bit and quickly found some ideas to solve this problem. I looked at the ideas and said “I could build that.” So then I kind of had to back it up. Luckily it’s a super simple project. Basically I just built what look like magazine boxes (open, sloped top) and screwed them to the wall.

While it’s a simple project, it’s incredibly convenient. I made six of them to hold the various types of bags and wraps. They work great! Some day I might paint them white but more likely they’ll probably just remain as-is.

pantryboxes1

pantryboxes2

benmartens January 15, 2015 Woodworking

Table And Chairs

For Elijah’s Christmas gift, I decided to build him a table and a couple chairs. The actual construction was pretty straightforward. I headed to one of my favorite woodworking sites: Ana White’s site. From there I pulled up the “Clara Table” and the “Four Dollar Stackable Chairs“. The total cost of the pine for two chairs and the table was less than $30. Hard to beat! I had them built pretty quickly.tableandchairs1

The problem came when I tried to finish them. We decided to paint them with leftover white and blue paint that we had tine the garage. The painting was fine but I wanted to put a hard finish on them since he’ll be abusing them and eating off the table. I have always turned to polyurethane tin the past, but it failed me miserably on the table top. There were huge blemishes in the finish.tableandchairs2Thankfully the table top is built out of solid pine boards so I was able to sand it down without worrying about damaging something like plywood. And sand it I did. I sanded it down FIVE TIMES. It took a couple weeks as I experimented with different finishes. (Special thanks to John F for giving me some tips.) I tried a bunch of different things but everything dried tacky or had terrible brush marks. I ended up with a coat of shellac to cover the latex paint and then four coats of spray lacquer. That has been holding up pretty well but for some reason, some of his wooden toys do feel like they stick a bit to the surface if they are left there for a couple days. I don’t understand what causes it.
tableandchairs3This project took way more time than I thought it would, but I learned a lot (spray lacquer rocks!) and I smile every time I see Elijah use his table. Totally worth it.

benmartens January 14, 2015 Woodworking

Spider Quad First Flights

quad_rainiercroppedMy new Flite Test spider quad was all put together and the first flight was a success. So what do you do on the second and third flights? Strap a GoPro to it! I specifically built it in this style with the front arms spread wide so that the video image wouldn’t have any obstructions. Might as well see how it works.

It works fantastically! There is no fancy camera stabilization system on this. The camera hangs from some bent wire that absorbs some vibrations. That, combined with time spent balancing each propeller, produces some pretty clean video. It’s significantly better than I expected and will be more than fine for the type of projects I have in mind for it.

What you see below is from the second time out. It turns out that my house DOES have a view of Rainier. You just need to get a few hundred feet up in the air to see it. Enjoy!

P.S. So why am I calling this a “quadcopter” or “multicopter” instead of a “drone”? I’m not a big fan of the word drone because it feels like the media has given it a negative connotation. Plus, I believe that a drone is something that is capable of autonomous flight. Granted, this quad that I’ve built could be autonomous with about $50 worth of electronics but it’s not a drone yet.

benmartens January 13, 2015 Radio Controlled Flight, Video

Nokia Lumia Icon

lumiaiconsOur two year contract with Verizon was up at the beginning of December so it was once again time for the big decision of whether or not I stay with Verizon. I’ve been their customer since 2000 so obviously I’m ok with them for the most part, but as far as Windows Phone support goes, they are horrible. For example, if you go into a store right now and try to buy a phone, they sell two ancient (2+ years old) models. The only other option is the newer HTC One. On top of that, they are extremely slow with doing updates for the phones. Our old phones still don’t have the major Windows Phone 8.1 update which was released last summer. It’s to the point where I pretty much don’t expect updates to my phone via Verizon. They hate Windows Phone.

So I thought the only option we really had was the HTC One. Logan has that and likes it, but it was a no go for us because it doesn’t have a dedicated camera button. To launch the camera, you have to unlock the phone, start an app and then take a picture. With a young kid in the house, these devices get used as a camera more than they do as a communication device.

I started looking around at other carriers. AT&T has a much better relationship with Windows Phone. At least they pump out updates on a reasonable basis. The problem there is that they have no coverage in my building at work or at Tim and Chelsea’s house. Fail.

T-Mobile? I’m actually willing to give them a shot because I can bring my own phone and do whatever I want, but I wasn’t crazy about losing the network coverage that Verizon provides.

That’s about when I discovered that Verizon did actually sell one of the flagship Windows Phones earlier in the year. The Lumia Icon was for sale for about six months until they inexplicably pulled it off the market with no explanation. However, many physical stores still have them in stock. It’s a fantastic phone (similar hardware to the HTC One), but it seems very unlikely that it will ever get an update. But even with that major caveat, we went for it.

I have to say that I love the device. It’s a huge speed boost over our HTC 8x’s and the 1080p screen is beautiful. The battery easily makes it through a day. It also, like our 8x’s, has wireless charging and we finally bought some wireless charging pads. I haven’t found a way to make them super reliable yet though. They don’t always hold a connection to keep the charge flowing. Hopefully I’ll have an update on that in the future.

As for the lack of updates? This phone still comes with Windows Phone 8 which means no Cortana. However, you can update it yourself (and probably void your warranty), if you are a developer. I took that plunge and have had pretty good results on my phone. Tyla’s phone is still running as-is from Verizon but I’m close to giving her the update too. I don’t love running my phone on a non-supported firmware, but seriously Verizon, UPDATE OUR PHONES.

They make me so mad but when the time came to actually pull the trigger and leave, I couldn’t do it. They have incredible coverage and in the end, I guess that trumps every other bad thing about them… for now.

benmartens January 12, 2015 Gadgets