Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Blue Iris and Foscam

We’ve had a Foscam FI8910W around the house for a while and I’ve enjoyed being able to look in on Tyla and Elijah while I’m at work. It has worked so well that we decided to expand our collection a bit. We now have a camera watching our front door and another in the garage. It’s a really easy way to watch for packages, make sure we shut the garage doors, and keep track of people who come up to the front door.

To manage all three cameras, I picked up a copy of Blue Iris. It has an incredible array of options including the ability to tweak the motion detection to your heart’s content and then set up alerts that will send you emails, text messages, and much more. Any motion gets recorded to our main file server and backed up into the cloud. There’s an app for all the phone platforms that lets me view live feeds from all the cameras and see recent alerts.

I’m really impressed with the system. These cameras are only $60 each now. It makes me want to pick up a few more.

benmartens January 15, 2014 Gadgets

Default To Most Recent Facebook Stories

I’m sure Facebook has some business reason for forcing me to view my news feed in the “Top Stories” order, but it’s really frustrating to me. I don’t care about what they think are the top stories. I just want to see things in the order they happened. Thankfully they change the URL when you change your sort order, so if you want to always view your news feed in “Most Recent” order, change your bookmark to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr.

benmartens January 14, 2014 Geek

Chromecast Review

When we ditched a bunch of our cable stations, I picked up a Chromecast to help simplify streaming. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it’s a little device a little bigger than a USB stick. It plugs directly into an HDMI port on your TV. You then install a plugin for the Chrome browser (or on your Android phone) and you can use your laptop or phone as a remote control to choose videos on YouTube, Netflix, and some other streaming sites. The reason it made such a splash is that after you pick your video, you don’t have to stay on that page with your laptop. You can keep browsing around while the Chromecast streams the video. And oh, yeah, it’s only $30.

We don’t have Android phones so that immediately decreases some of its value for us, but I did install the plugin for Chrome. I think I can easily say that if you want to watch YouTube on your TV, there is no better way to do it than with a Chromecast. The other apps work equally well.

The only place where it falls down is if you want to display an entire Chrome browser tab on your TV. That is acceptable for text browsing, but if you’re streaming a flash video, it’s unwatchable on the TV.

After I played with it for a while, the device went back in the box for future use. Our TV doesn’t have any spare HDMI ports in the back so it would have to stick out the side. I don’t need it often enough to have it sticking out like that.

benmartens January 13, 2014 Gadgets

Goodreads

The ratio of good books I hear about to good books I have time to read is approximately 7000 to 1. Ok, maybe it’s not that bad, but I do have a huge backlog of books that I’d love to read. Keeping track of them was a bit ugly in the past but it got a lot cleaner once I started using Goodreads.

The concept is pretty simple. Think of it like a Netflix catalog and queue except it’s for books instead of movies. You can easily add books to your queue, keep track of books you’ve read, write reviews for books, and see recommendations of other books you might like based on what you’ve already read. There are apps for just about every platform (on Windows Phone look for “Social Reads”.) If you have one a Kindle Paperwhite 2, Goodreads is integrated straight into the operating system!

With so little time to read, I want to make that time count. Goodreads has really upped the average quality of books that I’ve read since I started using the site.

benmartens January 9, 2014 Books, Links

Christmas Timelapses

I took the GoPro along on our trip to Indiana and made a few timelapses. I thought they would be good for the video that I put together, but they ended up getting cut. They are still kind of fun to watch though so I uploaded them to YouTube. There’s a video of Dad, Mom, Luke and David walking back up the driveway toward the house, a video looking out the window from O’Hare (gate C17 I think?) and a long video of us unwrapping Christmas gifts.

benmartens January 8, 2014 Timelapse, Video

Christmas Photos

For Christmas, Tyla and I packed up Elijah and headed off to Indiana. We had no idea what to expect flying with a six month old but he was incredible! He wasn’t completely silent but he was close, even sleeping through a couple of the landings. We couldn’t have asked for a better little traveler.

We spent a nice week with the family. Luke, Rachel and David came over for most of the time that we were there too. For the first time in my life, there was no big Martens family reunion at Christmas. It was a bummer but it was also nice to stay in one place for the whole trip instead of driving 4 hours to Illinois.

My camera was clicking away throughout the trip. This post includes a bunch of the photos, but I also took a lot of video. That hasn’t been edited together yet but stay tuned!

A lot of these photos were taken in low light. Our new lens did a good job, but even f/2.8 wasn’t enough. Post-processing in Lightroom helped a bit but we really need to invest in a good flash.

benmartens January 6, 2014 Family, Travel

NFL Jerseys

A couple weeks ago, TimS told me about a website that sells NFL jerseys for really cheap. They come from China so it’s a good bet that they are unlicensed. There seem to be a lot of websites that do this but the one we looked at was UnboxingJerseys.com. They have tons of jerseys from lots of sports. I even found an old school Ryne Sandberg Cubs jersey on there. Lots of the jerseys are available for $20.

Ordering from them is sketchy. Don’t use a credit card that you care about getting stolen. Every email you receive from the website and the payment company are full of typos and grammatical errors. Shipping takes about two weeks. You’re only paying $20 so don’t expect a perfect replica. For example, on the Seahawks jerseys, there are multiple green colors used. But from a distance it looks good and you’re not paying $250 from nfl.com.

benmartens January 3, 2014 Links, Sports

Waze For Windows Phone

Waze is a traffic app that has been around on iPhone and Android for quite a while, but it finally came to Windows Phone. It quickly replaced the other traffic apps that I use. Waze combines public traffic data along with data that it receives from everyone who is using the app. That means that theoretically every street in your area could be covered as long as someone has driven it recently. The more you use Waze, the more points you get. You get points for the distance you’ve driven as well as for reporting accidents, police, road hazards and more. What are the points good for? Well, not much, but they of course encourage competition. You can link the app to your Facebook friends list to see which of them are also using it and see how many points they have.

There are about three major choices I can make for my commute. Chose the wrong one can easily turn 30 minutes into 50 minutes. Waze has been doing a great job of making good picks for my commute and I use it every day!

benmartens January 2, 2014 Links