Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

No More ESPN

When Tyla and I moved into our house, we signed a two year contract with Comcast in Exchange for about $30/month off of our bill compared to a month-to-month plan. That worked well since I knew exactly what I wanted. Since Elijah was born this summer, our TV watching has fallen off a cliff. We are trying not to give him much time in front of screens for the first couple years and that means that we also get less screen time (good for all of us!)

Our contract with Comcast ended and our bill went up to ~$120/month. That got us the Digital Starter TV package and 25/2 Internet. I don’t pay for a DVR since I built my own and I own our cable modem too. Those two things might make our bill lower than yours for the same package.

Normally I call Comcast every 6-12 months to tell them I’m cancelling or switching to satellite and they give me a lower bill. I even had one rep TELL me to call back in 6 months to lower my bill again. This time I made multiple calls but couldn’t squeeze and promotional deals out of them. I’m not quite ready to pull the plug on TV and get everything over the internet, but there were still ways I could lower my bill.

I ended up with the “Blast Plus” package. That gives us 50/10 internet (double the download speed and five times the upload speed) but it drops us down to the Digital Economy TV package. There are about 40 fewer channels. The major losses for me are all the ESPN channels and Fox Sports One (the old SpeedTV.) It also drops TNT so that means I’ll only get to watch the first third of the NASCAR season before it moves over to the other networks. I thought I’d never get rid of those channels, but I also can’t remember the last time I actually had time to watch them.

This change saves us $42/month! The package is $79.95 plus local taxes and fees. It also comes without any contract so if we change our mind at any point, it’s easy to bump back up to a bigger plan.

If you’re interested in something similar, here is a list of the channels that we keep and the one we lose. It might be different depending on your area.

benmartens January 1, 2014 Commentary

2013 Year In Review

Thinking back on the year, it’s hard to remember anything before Elijah’s birth, but since he wasn’t born until June, there was obviously quite a bit that happened.

As the year began, we embarked on a month long master bathroom remodeling project. It seemed quite stressful at the time as I hemmed and hawed about doing it myself or hiring a contractor and as we tried to figure out what tile to buy. Then once we did find the tile, the wrong stuff was delivered and the replacement never arrived. Thankfully we had hired a contractor who was able to roll with the punches and he helped us find new tile that was in stock and ready for immediate use. There was so much drama around that whole event, but looking back it’s easy to see that God was smacking me upside the head telling me I had picked the wrong tile. I’m so incredibly thankful that it happened as the new design is much nicer than the slightly edgy/modern design that we were originally planning to go with.

Tyla graciously allowed me to get a season pass to Crystal Mountain and spend most of my Saturdays there while she sat at home and grew our baby. It was a tremendous season with huge snow dumps and some runs that will be forever burned into my memory. New skis and a visit from Jay topped off a great season. I imagine the next few years will see dramatically fewer days on the slopes.

We spent a lot of time getting the nursery ready: painting, buying furniture, replacing the blinds, adding curtains, and installing shelving in the closet. By the time we were done, it looked perfect, except that it was missing our son!

Before Tyla got pregnant, we had big visions of what we could do for a babymoon (our last vacation as DINKs.) We stayed a few nights at a resort on Orcas Island, enjoyed some down time and sampled a lot of the restaurants on the island. We look back on those quiet times now and wonder how long it will be until they happen again!

As the due date approached, our excursions got smaller and smaller until we were basically sitting around the house waiting for Elijah to arrive. As I mentioned in his birth story, the delivery process was nothing like we expected but at the end of it, we had a healthy mom and baby so we were happy and thankful.

I took the month of September off for my paternity leave (what an awesome benefit!) Mom and Dad came to visit during that time and it was really nice to have their help. We were able to take some small trips with them too including the Puyallup Fair and Orcas Island. They were also here to partake in the Duck Dynasty themed birthday party that Tyla organized!

During the month of September I also installed cabinets and built a desk to go in the theater room. It feels wonderful to have an actual place to work and lots of storage space.

I usually create these posts by looking through the folder names for all the photos we took during the year. Aside from the trips we took when Mom and Dad were here, they are pretty much all photos of Elijah around the house or within a few miles of it. Our calendar has never been more empty or felt so full. We don’t have much planned but sometimes it seems like it takes all our effort just to get through the day. We love our little man more than we ever could have imagined. I treasure every phase that he’s going through… but I’ll be very happy when we can all sleep through the night!

This is easily the most dramatic change to my lifestyle that I’ve ever experienced, but it’s wonderful. I’ve been very thankful for all of the time off I’ve had since he was born. It’s tough when I’m working because I see him for about an hour in the morning, and hour in the evening, and then throughout the night when he wakes up. I miss so much of his life! Tyla has been an incredible mother, staying home to take care of him and making sure he gets exactly what he needs.

It doesn’t take a genius to predict that next year will probably revolve around Elijah, and I’m so excited for that. There are some big milestones coming up as he learns to crawl and then walk. I try not to wish too much for the future and enjoy each day as it comes!

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

benmartens December 31, 2013 Commentary

Drones

Amazon made news a few weeks ago when they announced that they were working on drones that would deliver your packages. Anything called a “drone” now gets instant media blitz. I do believe it was largely a PR move. Paul Thurrott had a great tweet: “The sheer amount of free PR that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos got for his BS ‘drone delivery system’ is awe-inspiring. Media, you just got played.”

It’s easy to poke holes in the proposal. How are you going to keep it from murdering a dog when it lands? Why won’t people just shoot them down? The batteries won’t last long enough. The FAA will never allow it. Some of these have more merit than others, and sure, we’re a long way from making this possible, but there is very little question in my mind that something like this is coming.

There are two great interviews on TheAtlantic.com that are worth reading. The first is with Andreas Raptopoulos, the founder of a company who is creating a network of drones to deliver packages. The second one is with an emerging technologies ethics and policy implications expert from UW named Ryan Calo. The interviews say that there are already quadcopters which can go 50km on a single charge, and that’s with today’s battery technology. Imagine what they could do in five years.

Even if the regulations in the US are very strict, the implications for third world countries is huge. Those countries have little or no regulatory oversight. Drones make a lot of financial sense when there isn’t an existing infrastructure like UPS or FedEx (or even well-maintained roads.)

When you hear “drones” in the mass media, it’s usually equated with science fiction or something evil. In the next decade I think we’re going to learn that neither is true.

benmartens December 30, 2013 Commentary

Converting DC To AC

[UPDATE] A couple days after I declared success on this project, the village piece stopped lighting up even when I put batteries back in it. If any of you electrical wizards out there can tell me what I did wrong, I would love to know. Or maybe it’s just some crazy coincidence that both bulbs burned out at the same time mere days after I changed the power source. Occam’s Razor disagrees with that theory. I’ve left the post as it was originally written so you can debug it for me (and laugh at my feeling of success.)

Tyla always sets up our Thomas Kinkaide Christmas village as part of the decorations. Just about every piece has a plug so it all goes into a power strip which, this year, we can control with a remote. But there were two pieces that ran on batteries and thus had separate switches. This year I set out to convert them to use power from the wall just like the rest of the pieces.

The first piece I tried were the street lights. They took two batteries. I purchased an adjustable power adapter, set it to 3V, touched the wires to the right places and POOF. I blew out the lights. I still don’t know what happened because I had tried quite a few things before I realized the lights were broken, but I think I might have hooked up the power while the batteries were also inserted resulting in 6 volts to the lights. Oops. I immediately went online and purchased replacement streetlights. They’re from a different village set but look fine in our set. This new set was sold with a power adapter so I had no problems there.

The second village piece was a little skating rink. Now it should be noted that there’s only one place to buy pieces for this village set (The Bradford Exchange.) They’re extremely annoying to deal with. Anything you order takes at least a month to arrive, most pieces are limited editions, and you often have to sign up for a set of pieces that arrive installments just to get the one you want. The net effect is that if destroyed this village piece, there was pretty much no way to replace it. I was appropriately nervous given the broken streetlights staring at me from the trash can.

I measured the voltage of the adjustable wall wart and even though I had it set to 3V, it said 3.2V. For most projects, I would have just tried that to see if it worked, but I decided to learn something new and build a circuit to knock the voltage down to something more like 2.6 or 2.7V which is what two lightly used AAs would produce.

To that end, I purchased an LM317 adjustable voltage regular and dug out the rest of my electronics parts. After watching some YouTube videos and lots of trial and error, I ended up with a simple circuit that spit out 2.72V. Perfect!

The next task was to transfer this off the breadboard and solder the connections. I made everything nice and neat with shrink wrap and a small box to hold the voltage regular and it’s heat sink. (I added a heat sink after taking the picture above.) I used red and black wires to help me remember positive and negative voltage, but it dawned on me later that I should have used white so it was easier to hide under the fake snow. The wire was twisted using a trick I learned from Ben Heck: clamp down the wires on one end and stick the other ends in your power drill. Voila! I also added a plug near the village piece for easy setup, takedown and storage.

The last piece of the puzzle was connecting the wires to the terminals where the batteries would normally go. I could have soldered them on, but I was trying to modify the village piece as little as possible. So instead of anything permanent, I created wooden batteries! I cut 1/2” dowels, drilled pilot holes in each end, and attached screws. The first battery got the positive and negative leads from the plug attached to its ends. The second battery just has a wire running between the two ends to transfer the power. Now I have removable “batteries” and I suppose I could use this same setup to power other 3V battery devices.

It was pretty nerve-wracking the first time I tried it (after measuring the voltage a hundred times), but everything works! I was able to turn the wall wart down to 4.5V and still get 2.7V out of the voltage regulator. The heat sink is doing it’s job and the box has a very tiny bit of extra warmth but nothing anywhere near dangerous. Here’s what the finished product looks like with the light inside the cocoa stand and the large pine tree:

If we get any more battery powered pieces, I should be able to add a couple more leads off of this same voltage regulator, make some more wooden batteries, and be done pretty quickly.

benmartens December 27, 2013 Geek, Projects

Fantasy Football – Week 16

Congrats to Logan! He came from the third seed in the playoffs to win it all. Dad and I posted the two of the lowest scores of the week in the “battle” for third. Dad claimed that spot. Jim lost the last six games of the regular season and then won the two games of the playoffs to land in fifth and Luke won the 7th place game. Here are the final standings:

  1. Logan
  2. Andy
  3. Dad
  4. Ben
  5. Jim
  6. Tim
  7. Luke
  8. Austin

Thanks to everyone for a great season! It was one of the closest ones I can remember, and there were almost no deadbeat weeks! I hope to see you all back next year.

Now on to the weekly awards for one last time:

  • Highest Team Score: Luke had 148.72 (Record, Week 4: Tim had 195.50)
  • Lowest Team Score: I had 73.90 (Record, Week 6: Jim had had 72.17)
  • Biggest Blowout: Luke beat Austin by 33.41 (Record, Week 3: Dad beat Andy by 63.83)
  • Closest Win: Logan beat Andy by 14.84 (Record, Week 1: Logan beat Tim by 0.89)
  • Highest Scoring Player: Peyton Manning had 40.00 for Andy. (Record, Week1: Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy.)

Stats mostly via TMQ:

  • Hosting the New Orleans Saints, the Carolina Panthers gained 157 offensive yards in the first 59 minutes and 65 yards in the final minute.
  • The Detroit Lions have lost five of six; in all the losses, the Lions could not hold a fourth-quarter lead.
  • The Miami Dolphins’ possession results at the Buffalo Bills: punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, interception, punt, downs, interception.
  • The Cincinnati Bengals and New England Patriots are a combined 32-5 when BenJarvus Green-Ellis scores a touchdown.
  • Nick Foles, who started the season as a backup, has 25 touchdown passes and two interceptions. Joe Flacco, who started the season as the defending Super Bowl MVP, has 18 touchdown passes and 19 interceptions.
benmartens December 26, 2013 Fantasy Sports

Merry Christmas

It’s somewhat of a tradition around here to post our Christmas card along with the text of Jesus’s birth from Luke chapter 2. This year I decided to do it a bit differently. You saw the Christmas card yesterday, and today I thought I’d ramble for a bit about Christmas.

There are lots of phrases bandied about this time of year like “Jesus is the reason for the season” and “Don’t forget the true meaning of Christmas.” Christians know exactly what those phrases mean, but there are probably quite a few people out there for whom those phrases are nothing more than cryptic codes. So today I’ll explain why I celebrate Christmas.

The short explanation is that Christmas is the day that Jesus, the son of God, was born on earth. While the almighty God coming to earth in human form is quite the event in it’s own right, there’s so much more to it than that.

Let’s start back at the beginning. When God created the world, He created Adam and Eve as perfect human beings. They sinned, rebelling against God’s perfection and forever changed the course of history. God demands perfection. Do you want to get to heaven? Great, all you have to do is be perfect every single day of your life. If you deviate from perfection even a single time, that’s it, you’re going to hell. And I’ll give you a hint, no one has ever done that. Adam and Eve sinned and from then on, every one of us were born sinful. God’s rules are simple. Heaven is for perfection, hell and eternal death is for everything else. That’s a pretty grim judgment for us.

When God confronted Adam and Eve about their sin, he explained those consequences to them but then promised to send his son to earth. His son would live a perfect life, be killed as the payment for all of our sins, and then rise again to declare his victory over death, sin and hell. The entire Old Testament (roughly the first two thirds of the Bible) teaches us about God’s law, showing us the many ways in which we have fallen short of His perfection, and it continues the promise that God’s son would come to save us.

This is where the story of Christmas comes into play. God placed his Son, the baby Jesus, in Mary’s womb and nine months later, in a stable full of animals, the son of God was born as a human being. His name, of course, was Jesus, and in addition to being fully human, he was also God. On the night he was born, the star appeared, the shepherds saw it, and your nativity scene came to life. So that’s pretty impressive. The all-knowing, all-powerful God is now here on earth in human form. But if the story ended there, we would all still be going to hell because we’re still sinful and sin equals death.

Thankfully, Jesus went on to do what none of us could do: he lived a perfect life. He was then crucified, and with his death, he paid the price for all of our sins. Three days later, he rose from the dead and about a month later, he ascended back into heaven.

We’re all still here on earth, sinning our lives away no matter how hard we try. But because of Jesus, we have hope. Because I believe that Jesus died for my sins, I know that when I die, I’ll go to heaven because God the Father accepts Jesus’s death as payment for my sins. If God actually did ask me why he should let me into heaven, my answer would be simple: “I believe that Jesus’s death paid the price for my sins.” There’s nothing that I can do to improve on that. No amount of trying to be good or making up for things I did wrong can get me into heaven. I’ll be there solely because when God looks at me, he sees me through the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s a free gift for anyone who believes.

Knowing all that, is it any wonder why I celebrate Christmas? Yes, I enjoy the Christmas lights, Bing Crosby singing about a White Christmas, and stuffing my face with food on Christmas Day, but it all comes in a distant second place to celebrating the birth of my Savior.

P.S. I’m turning off comments on this post because I’m not looking to start a public discussion, but if you want to know more about what I believe, you can of course ask me or check out this website from our church group.

benmartens December 25, 2013 Commentary

Christmas Card

In the past I’ve always hand-designed our Christmas cards. This year, free time is at a premium and Snapfish has so many great designs that we decided to use their service. I was very pleased with the end product.

benmartens December 24, 2013 Commentary