Studio711.com – Ben Martens

11 Years of Blogging

This website started 16 years ago and 5 years after that I started writing at least one blog post per week day. The site has never grown huge but it’s a fun way to communicate with friends and family and it’s cool to have a fairly detailed account of my life over this time. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if any of my ancestors had done something like this. Will Elijah or later descendants read through this mess of posts?

To celebrate this anniversary, I have a small giveaway. Two randomly selected readers will get coupons for a free on-demand movie from Comcast. I know, wild and crazy huge prizes, right? Send me an email or use the contact form with the subject “FREE STUFF” and be sure to include your email address so I know how to contact you. Good luck!

Contest ends 8/2/2012 11:59PM Pacific Time. Full contest rules are available at this link.

benmartens July 31, 2013 Site News

Foscam Review

Walking out the door in the morning and saying goodbye to my wife and son isn’t fun. I know Tyla does a lot more work during the day than I could handle, but I feel like I’m missing so much of Elijah’s life! Thankfully Tyla agreed when I brought up the idea of buying a web cam so I could peak in during the day to see my family.

I ordered the Foscam FI8910W from Amazon and so far I’ve been very impressed with it. It has pan/tilt controls from either a web browser or via your phone and it’s visible either inside or outside of your network. The picture is 640×480 and it does have a pretty good night vision mode. It also has two way audio so the remote viewer can listen in and talk into the room.

My only concern with it is security. It’s very easy to set up, but part of that easy setup creates a web page for your camera with a default password. It’s ridiculously easy to “hack” into people’s cameras with a Bing search and the default password. Obviously I have it locked down more than that, but I still wonder if I can do more. For now it’s sitting in my guest network so there’s no access to our other resources and has some longer non-default passwords. I’ll be looking at a few other options like a reverse proxy with SSL to really encrypt it.

But other than that, I give the camera two thumbs up!

benmartens July 30, 2013 Gadgets

First Rounds

Logan and I grabbed our temporary badges and headed to the Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club with Don for our first shots as members. Being a Saturday, I expected it to be swamped with people. There was a hunter safety class between 9 and 3 so we arrived at 3 and found a nearly empty range. In fact, over the 2+ hours that we were there, we had the range to ourselves for a good chunk of it.

Logan and Don brought four of their rifles and some pistols. I brought my brand new Browning Buck Mark Camper UFX .22. I put at least 100 rounds through it and had a blast! I’m far from a crack shot but I already found this gun to be incredibly accurate. Someone had left a golf ball sized whiffle ball out at the 25 yard berm and I hit it on my first attempt. It feels good in my hand and was very reliable. I only had 1 shell that half ejected, but that was easily remedied and I was on my way.

It takes me 40 minutes to get to the range so it’s not super convenient, but I think this place is going to be a major source of fun for me over the years (and for Elijah when he gets older!)

benmartens July 29, 2013 Sports

Xbox Live Gold Free Games

If you have an Xbox Live Gold membership, it just got a little sweeter. Microsoft is giving away two free games per month! Make sure you take the opportunity to “buy” them even if you don’t download and play them right away because that way they’ll be attached to your account forever. (Thanks to JimM for sending me this list.)

  • June 16: Fable III
  • July 1: Defense Grid The Awakening
  • July 16: Assassins Creed 2
  • August 1: Halo 3
  • August 16: Mass Effect
  • September 1: Nexuiz
  • September 16: Alan Wake
  • October 1: Dead Rising
  • October 16: Joy Ride Turbo
  • November 1: Halo Wars
  • November 16: Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
  • December 1: Project Gotham Racing 4
  • December 16: Gears Of War 2
benmartens July 26, 2013 Gaming

Snoqualmie Valley Rifle Club

There’s a small shooting range at the bottom of the hill on 202 leading up to Snoqualmie Falls. You’ve probably driven by it numerous times and never noticed the dirt road leading off into the woods. MikeF took me there as a guest a few months ago and I’ve been trying to find time to join the club ever since.

That time finally came in July. Logan and I headed to the monthly club meeting to turn in our paperwork and pay our dues. Then we attended a one hour safety briefing at the range and received our badges with the gate code.

Why join the club? We always shoot trap at the range in Kenmore, but their rifle/pistol ranges are very restrictive. You can only put one bullet in your gun at a time, the longest range is 100 yards, and more than a few people have told me that the rangemaster loves making people feel like idiots. No thanks. For the cost of less than six range days at Kenmore, you can get unlimited access to the Snoqualmie club. It’s basically a big field with a bunch of safety rules that are policed by the members who are present. The range is 200 yards long and there aren’t too many rules about what you can shoot or how you can do it as long as you’re being safe.

The club has been around since 1946 but they had been closed to membership for quite a while. A couple years ago they opened up applications again and have been getting a steady stream of 10-20 new members every month. They’re now up around 800-900 members, but apparently traffic at the range has been pretty low. Once the ammo shortage clears up and our national leadership changes out, I expect traffic to pick up again. Since there is no room to expand the range, my guess is they will shut off new applications again. As long as I keep my membership active each year, we’ll always have a great place to shoot!

Let me know if you’re interested in checking it out. Members are allowed to bring a guest or two on each visit.

benmartens July 25, 2013 Sports

Music Library

My music collection is over 70GB. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember curating it. And now I’m coming to the realization that I should probably delete it. There’s very little point to keeping a local music collection anymore with all the various cloud music services that are available. We subscribe to Xbox Music which means that we get unlimited access to play any of the songs on the service from our phones, computers, or Xbox’s. Why bother monkeying around with local files?

I came to this point quite a while back with movies. When DVDs went out and BluRay came in, I vowed to not end up with shelves full of discs I never used. If I want a movie, I can rent the disc from Netflix or stream it on Netflix or Amazon. That has been a good choice too so I just need to pull the trigger with the music.

The only difference with music is that we’re still holding on to a few music players without internet connections, namely a bunch of Zunes and a cheaper player that I use on my motorcycle. That’s about the only time when we really need to have local files.

Are you still downloading MP3’s or are you just streaming full time from the internet?

benmartens July 24, 2013 Geek

Bottoms Up!

I love beer. The Pacific Northwest is one of the best places in the country for a beer drinker. There are 186 breweries in Washington alone and it seems like new ones are popping up regularly. With all the great beer around here, I was amazed when I saw the latest list of beer consumed per capita by state. Washington ranks 45th on the list! You people disappoint me.

Here’s the full list in order from most to least:

  1. North Dakota
  2. New Hampshire
  3. Montana
  4. South Dakota
  5. Wisconsin
  6. Nevada
  7. Vermont
  8. Nebraska
  9. Texas
  10. Maine
  11. Louisiana
  12. Mississippi
  13. Iowa
  14. Delaware
  15. Wyoming
  16. South Carolina
  17. New Mexico
  18. Missouri
  19. Hawaii
  20. Oregon
  21. West Virginia
  22. Alabama
  23. Ohio
  24. Colorado
  25. Arizona
  26. Illinois
  27. Alaska
  28. Pennsylvania
  29. Minnesota
  30. Oklahoma
  31. Kansas
  32. District of Columbia
  33. Idaho
  34. Florida
  35. North Carolina
  36. Michigan
  37. Arkansas
  38. Virginia
  39. Rhode Island
  40. Massachusetts
  41. Tennessee
  42. Indiana
  43. Georgia
  44. California
  45. Washington
  46. Kentucky
  47. Maryland
  48. New York
  49. New Jersey
  50. Connecticut
  51. Utah
benmartens July 23, 2013 Links

Android Dominance

It’s pretty common these days to hear that Android is taking over, but when I saw this chart [source], I was amazed at how far Android has come. In just three years, they’ve gone from 10% market share to ~80%.

I’m not sure what Apple has planned to combat this. So far they’ve been sticking to the original model that they debuted in the very first iPhone: a grid of icons on a tiny/thin phone. And where does Windows Phone or Blackberry fit into this? They’re also-rans, making up ~5% of the market.

Seeing outside of your bias is difficult, but I do firmly believe that for Windows Phone is the best phone OS for most of the population. I seriously doubt it will ever reach those kind of market numbers, but who knows. Defeating PlayStation seemed like an impossible task for the original XBox, but XBox is now at least splitting the market and has a huge following.

benmartens July 22, 2013 Gadgets

NSA Spying

I’m not going to debate whether or not it’s good for the NSA to be tapping all of our communications. There are plenty of talking heads screaming at each other already. What I’m here to say is: DUH.

When the news broke about all this wiretapping stuff, I thought, “Don’t we know this already?” I guess not, but it should be assumed. And even if the NSA wasn’t doing it in what they claim is an attempt to protect you, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing it all the time to serve you ads. Forget the NSA, everything you do online is already stored in huge databases whether it’s your ISP, companies following you around the web serving you ads, or the end service that you’re using. Most of your traffic flies around the internet in plain text and is trivial to read/store. It’s not just on the internet either. Stores are tracking you as you walk around based on the signals emanating from your cell phone. And when you’re outside, companies have huge databases full of your location at all times of the day based on which cell phone towers you’re connected to. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff. It’s very simple technology that’s already widely used.

We should make sure all of these companies and organizations are following our current laws, but more importantly we all need to take it upon ourselves to be smart about what we do and how we store our data. If it’s important and it’s not encrypted, then you’re basically screaming it through a megaphone on a busy street corner.

Your data security is your own responsibility. If it’s important, then it’s important enough to encrypt. And if you don’t want to encrypt, don’t send anything over the network that you don’t want the world to read.

benmartens July 19, 2013 Geek

Light Painting

Last year at the Scherschel Fireworks Extravaganza, we messed around with using sparklers and long exposures on the camera. This year I wanted to try it again, but instead of sparklers, I had picked up some red, green and blue battery powered glow sticks. They had lanyards attached to them which made them very easy to swing around. The results were quite interesting and I’d love to try it again. Here are a couple examples. For the bottom one I moved around creating the light swirls and then stood very still and briefly shone a flashlight on my face for a spooky effect.

If you want to try this yourself, you’ll need a camera with manual controls and a sturdy tripod. Specifically I took these photos with a 30 second exposure, an aperture setting around f/10 and ISO 100. It takes a few test shots to dial it in just right, but once you do, it’s easy to repeat.

benmartens July 18, 2013 Photography