Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Scanning Slides

Growing up, my parents usually developed their film into slides. We’d gather around the projector and share memories of our trips. It’s a fun way to experience the photos, but it’s not nearly as convenient as today’s digital format.

Mom decided to protect these memories by scanning them in. That was a monumental task. By the time it was done, she had looked through 4500-5000 slides and scanned in 3320 of them. She estimates that she put about 50 hours of work into the project. It’s not exactly exciting work either! While it’s fun to see the photos, most of your time is spent putting a new slide into the scanner and then waiting for it to scan. This is her pile of slides:

I can’t say thank you enough to Mom for doing this work! Now that they are digital (and because we back up!), these photos will be preserved forever. Imagine how neat it would be to look back at this many photos from your ancestors in the 1800s or even earlier. The family genealogy hobby is going to go through some massive changes in the next century.

To celebrate this new wealth of photos, I’m going to start “Throwback Thursday”. Every Thursday I’ll pick a photo out of the ones she scanned in and tell a little story about it. This first photo comes from my 4th birthday. One thing I remember about my birthdays is that Mom made incredible birthday cakes! As a parent, I look back on that and have no idea how she found the time. This was the first cake that I have memories of. Cake covered with candy? Brilliant!

benmartens January 30, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Maiden Flight

My RC adventure took a big step last weekend. All the pieces came together, and, after hours on the RC simulator, I had my first real flight!

The plane looks really basic and that’s because it is. It’s the FT Flyer from the Flite Test 3-pack swappable kit. They have a series of planes that all use the same power pod (speed control, motor, batter, receiver, etc) and this kit included three different planes. All the pieces of foam are precut and you just follow their build videos to put it all together. Even with all that help, I had plenty of mistakes in my first build, but hey, it flew! Sort of.

On Sunday afternoon as the sun was setting, Tyla, Elijah and I headed down the street to the school and carried the plane out to the soccer field. I powered it up and took off. Success! After a few uneasy loops, I brought it in for an ungraceful landing. It doesn’t look very nice but nothing was damaged. When I picked it up, the rubber band snapped the landing gear back into place and I was ready for my next flight. The second flight was longer and I decided to try to trim it out. I had balanced the plane but it really wanted to dive to the ground. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the plane so I reached down to my transmitter to hit the elevator trim button and hit the power button instead! The motor went to full throttle and the plane dove straight into the ground. Oops! The plane was almost completely undamaged except that the prop was broken. I had plenty of spares but they were all back home and given the lack of remaining daylight, we called it a day.

Later that evening I got it fixed up and eagerly await my next opportunity to snag some daylight and fly again! I’m planning to get more comfortable with this plane, build another one or two from the kit and then hopefully buy something a little nicer. I want to get a lot better with fixed wing flight before moving on to multirotors.

This hobby combines a lot of smaller hobbies like model building, electronics, and video games. I could definitely see this becoming addicting. If any of you local friends are interested in getting a peak at the hobby, please let me know! It would be awesome to have some of you doing it too.

benmartens January 29, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Getting Started With LiPo

Rechargeable batteries have changed a lot since I was a kid. They used to be big and bulky and not hold much of a charge. As I’m learning about RC planes, I’m learning that the new battery technology is pretty impressive. They’re very small, pack a lot of punch and use computerized chargers to make sure they charge correctly. They are, however, a bit more dangerous (or else I underestimated old rechargeables.)

Modern rechargeables use lithium polymer technology (LiPo). These are some of the safety tips I’ve gathered in my research:

  • These things are prone to catching fire in many different circumstances (overcharging, drawing too much current, puncturing or damaging the battery, etc.) They should always be stored in a cool dry place inside a fireproof bag.
  • Never leave the batteries unattended while charging and preferably do it on a concrete surface with a smoke detector overhead.
  • LiPo batteries have both a positive and negative power plug as well as a plug that provides individual access to each cell in the battery. The latter is useful for charging and balancing the cells.
  • LiPos are made up of various numbers of cells. Never charge a cell over 4.2V or let it discharge past 3.0V.
  • For best results, only discharge 80% of the capacity.
  • LiPo batteries should be stored at around 3.7V per cell.
  • Modern chargers are computer controlled and will help keep each cell in your battery balanced, avoid charging too fast, and help you keep within the recommended voltage limits.
  • If you’re going to cut the connector off a battery to place it with a different type, don’t snip both wires at the same time. You’ll short out the battery! (Seems obvious in hindsight but I’m pretty sure I would have done it without thinking if I hadn’t seen a warning.)

These little technological wonders can crank out a huge number of amps for longer than seems possible, but you need to treat them with a lot of respect. FliteTest has a good video and accompanying article about batteries in their beginner series.

benmartens January 28, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Finding A Sirius Station With Power Query

We got a 6 month trial of Sirius with our Ford Escape and then extended it for another six months once we finally got a good offer from Sirius. Listening to music without commercials is addicting and they have a lot of good stations to choose from. The one thing they are missing is a feature on their website that lets me tell them the artists I like and then gives me the stations that play those artists the most. But hey, it’s just data right? I should be able to figure this out. I do, after all, work on the team that is producing the premiere (I hope) data experience for Excel: Microsoft Power Query (part of the Office Power BI suite).

The first step was finding a playlist history for all the Sirius stations. A quick Bing search revealed http://www.dogstarradio.com/search_playlist.php. It has a bunch of search parameters and best of all, they are dumped right into the URL so you can easily build your own searches just by modifying the URL.

Next I built a function inside of Power Query that takes an artist name and returns one page of results. I wrote a function on top of that which calls the first function multiple times to collect each page of data. (Unfortunately there’s no way on the website to view the entire result list at once.) The last step was feeding in a list of artists I’m interested in. I grouped the data by radio station and the count of the songs that were played. Voila. I should be listening to channel 31 “The Coffee House” which features singer-songwriters, or as I call it “guy with guitar.”

I wish Sirius offered this feature directly on their website, but it’s really cool that I was able to answer it myself with Power Query in a few minutes between meetings at work.

benmartens January 27, 2014 Uncategorized

Your Favorite Team

There are a lot of transplanted people in my group at work and with all the recent hubub about the Seahawks, there have been some interesting discussions about team loyalty, bandwagons, etc. I’ve heard two opposing viewpoints:

  1. You grow up being a fan of a team and you are their fan forever.
  2. You should cheer for the team in the town where you live.

I think I do a little of both. I’ll always have nostalgia for the Cubs and Purdue, but as I’ve moved around, I’ve also cheered for the local team. I even cheer for UW now after they broke my heart beating Purdue in the 2001 Rose Bowl. It’s easier to follow the games on TV, easier to attend them, easier to find apparel, and it’s more fun for me to be cheering along with other city residents. Tell that to group #1 though and you get told that you’re a disloyal bandwagon fan.

Which side do you fall on?

benmartens January 24, 2014 Sports

Death Of Expertise

MattB posted an article on Facebook that I felt deserved it’s own post here. It’s from thefederalist.com and is called “The Death Of Expertise”. The article discusses how our society is full of people who search the internet for 5 minutes and then denounce legitimate experts as idiots. Here are a couple quotes from the article but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

Yes, it’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us. But mostly, experts have a pretty good batting average compared to laymen: doctors, whatever their errors, seem to do better with most illnesses than faith healers or your Aunt Ginny and her special chicken gut poultice. To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly…

People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to insult. To correct another is to be a hater. And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded…

Thus, at least some of the people who reject expertise are not really, as they often claim, showing their independence of thought. They are instead rejecting anything that might stir a gnawing insecurity that their own opinion might not be worth all that much.

benmartens January 23, 2014 Links

Custom Closet Storage

We have a closet underneath our stairs that opens out into the kitchen and family room area. That’s where a lot of our cleaning supplies get stored along with extra trash bags, paper towels, etc. We’ve always wanted to have that be a little more organized so I embarked on a small project to build some shelves and cabinets.

I started by designing the project with Google Sketchup. I’m really liking that tool and hope to use it more. It’s a great way to visualize the design decisions and then also to take measurements of the various pieces that need to be cut. The entire project was built out of 1/2” MDF with a little bit of 1/4” MDF for some facing. I cut everything to size first and painted it before I assembled it. I’ve never painted/stained a project BEFORE putting all the pieces together but it sure made painting a lot easier. I’ll probably try that again, but I won’t do it for a project like this where everything needs to fit precisely into a pre-defined space. As I started installing it, I realized that the closet wasn’t square so I ended up with some goofy looking gaps and pieces that didn’t fit quite right. The pictures below show it loaded up with our supplies and honestly you can’t see most of the issues. I do need to cover up the screw holes around the door (this would have been a good use for a finish nailer) but that should be pretty quick.

I got to use some new tools in this project. The table saw was a huge help as I was able to make big, repeatable cuts very quickly. I don’t miss crawling around on the floor, clamping a straight edge onto the big sheet and then using the circular saw to make each cut. I also made good use of a self-leveling laser that I got for Christmas. It made it super easy to attach the closet support pieces to the wall and get everything at the same height.

All in all I’m happy with how quickly this project came together (7 days from first cut to final install). If I can’t learn to live with the gaps then I’ll either rebuild part of it or add some trim, but something tells me that probably won’t happen. I learned a lot from this project and will probably put the skills to use again in one of our upstairs storage closets.

benmartens January 22, 2014 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Seahawks In The Super Bowl

I’ve lived in a lot of different cities which means that cheering for the Bears, Colts, Vikings, and Eagles could have all made sense in the past. With all that traveling, I didn’t really cheer for one team (except for a stint where I cheered for the Cowboys? I think it was because of the Aikman, Emmitt, Irvin trio.)

After a year or two in Seattle, I knew that I wanted to stick around this city for a long time. It was also really hard to follow my old sports teams so I decided to cheer the Mariners and the Seahawks. Last year I finally started watching every Seahawks game.

So I think that makes me a bit of a bandwagon fan. Oh well.

This has been such a fun year to cheer for the Seahawks! I lived in Philly in 2005 when the Eagles lost to the Patriots but I wasn’t really an Eagles fan. This time around it’s exciting to ride the wave of Seahawks fever that is coursing through the city. Aside from a few guys with, um, strong personalities (ie. Richard Sherman), this roster seems like a great group of guys. Russell Wilson seems like a genuinely fantastic individual, and it’s fun cheering for this rag-tag group of low draft picks with low salaries. There’s no way the Seahawks can afford to keep this roster together once contracts run out so we’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

TimS, AndyD and I bought those jerseys from China a few weeks back but Tim and I have pretty much ditched ours. Andy got a mostly gray one which looks quite a bit better than our navy ones. I just ordered a Seahawks t-shirt from nflshop.com so this one will be official with all the right colors, etc and I won’t be embarrassed to wear it.

P.S. Sherman posted an article on Monday explaining his actions.

benmartens January 21, 2014 Sports

Tracking Food

I’m no psychologist, but I’ve found that if I really want to change something in my life, writing it down is a big motivator. I’ve been eating pretty poorly for the past couple months, so I decided to write down everything that I eat for one week.

Wow. It worked even better than I thought. Even though I’m not planning to show the list to anyone else, it’s embarrassing to write down a handful of chips, a candybar or two, or a morning piece of pie.

Writing it down on a piece of paper would probably have been good enough, but I took it one step further and tracked it in the Fitbit website. They have a huge food database so I just enter in what I ate and it adds up the carbs, etc.

I probably won’t keep this up for a long time, but it has been a good exercise and it’s one that I’ll revisit if I find myself snacking a lot again. Let me know how it works for you if you try it too!

benmartens January 20, 2014 Commentary

Fitbit One Review

Last year I picked up new skis with the money from our health plan. This year I don’t have a big purchase like that in mind, but there are a couple smaller things that I’d like to buy. I made the first purchase the day after New Years: a Fitbit One.

Fitbits have been around for a few years and they come in a variety of form factors, but basically they are fancy pedometers. The Fitbit One tracks steps, stairs, and your restlessness while sleeping. It syncs wireless whenever I’m near my computer and uploads all the data to a website. There is also an app for the phone that I use to access the data and enter my weight. (Some day I might pick up the scale that works with Fitbit and automatically records my weight.)

The device is great. It runs for over a week on a single charge. The software is well done too. You can add friends and see how many steps they’ve taken. It builds up a sense of competition and encourages you to get out and walk some more.

The downside is that I feel like I’m going to lose it before too long because it’s super tiny. You know that tiny little pocket inside the right pocket of your jeans? I don’t know what it’s for, but now it’s a Fitbit holder. That seems to work fairly well.

I like the idea of logging data about myself in a variety of ways and this adds to the mix. For now it’s a novelty, but the OCD streak in me will probably want to carry this every day for a long time. It would be kind of interesting to know how many steps I take in a year.

benmartens January 17, 2014 Gadgets