Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Canon T2i Review

I’ve been longingly reading dSLR reviews for the past year, and it all paid off because Tyla and I got one for our Christmas gift to each other. The hardest part of the whole thing was deciding between Nikon and Canon. I got a lot of recommendations for both sides, but we ended up going with the Canon T2i. To me, this camera is the leading candidate in the $700-800 range. The picture quality is impressive and the video features beat most of the competition. That being said, you can’t really go wrong either way.

I’ll start with a shopping list of what we bought:

I’ve been very impressed with the T2i up to this point. The battery lasts forever. We took ~450 photos saving in JPEG+RAW and about 30 minutes of 1080p30 video before the battery needed to be recharged.

The best accessory that we picked up was the Caselogic SLRC-206 bag. Click that link and watch the video review from Amazon. It has a pouch in the back to hold a laptop and the inside is full of adjustable compartments to hold all your gear. This bag doubles as our storage bag at home as well as our carry-on when we travel. The smaller Zoom Holster bag from Caselogic is made of similar materials but it will protect the camera a bit when it’s in my pack during hiking.

The 55-250 lens was a cheap pickup because Canon had a $150 rebate for that if purchased with a T2i kit. It’s not a spectacular lens, but for $60, it was a no-brainer. The next lens that I have my eye on is the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens. I also have my eye on a timer remote (for time lapse photography) and a wireless remote (for easy family portraits or night sky BULB shooting.)

If you’re looking for something in this price range, I whole-heartedly recommend the Canon T2i. Are there other cameras that would make you happy? Sure. But I haven’t used the others. All I can tell you is that I’ve been researching this steadily for a very long time and the T2i was my choice. In fact, it has exceeded my expectations.

I’m still learning my way around the camera, but I’ve already got some shots which look pretty good to my eye. I’m starting a photo gallery called “dSLR Favorites.” I won’t make a post every time I come up with a good photo, but I’ll stick them in this gallery. I’m also adding another three picture strip to the sidebar so you can easily see when I add new photos there. I’ve included a couple below, but check out the photo gallery to see all of the ones I’ve added so far. If you want larger versions of any of the pictures, let me know!

PS. I’ve seen the photos that some of you have shot and know that I have a LOT to learn. If you have advice for me, I’d love to hear it! Please shoot me an email and don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I want to learn!

P.S. Tim and Chelsea got a T1i recently and Tim has started a photo blog. His posts will appear in my “Friends’ posts” section on the right side of this page.

benmartens January 13, 2011 Gadgets, Photography

Ceton InfiniTV Media Center Demo

About a month ago, I wrote a post about the guts of my Media Center PC. But what does it really do? Why did I build it? Since you can’t all stop by and check it out in person, I’ve put together a demo video.

It’s dorky, I know. The various cameras aren’t calibrated the same and my shirt sleeve kept flipping up. But by the time I noticed all these things, I was too far in to start over. So enjoy this (amateur) video showing just a few of the reasons why I love my Windows Media Center PC.

If you’re running just about any version of Windows 7 or Vista, you have the Media Center app. You won’t be able to do the live TV portion, but everything else is available to you for free.

benmartens January 6, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

2010 Year In Review

This is an easy one: what’s the biggest news of the year? I’m married! It’s still amazing that somebody as wonderful as Tyla would want to be married to me, but I’m thankful that she does.

At the end of last year, we were smack dab in the middle of planning mode. The first four months of this year continued that trend. I still maintain that the smartest decision we made during the planning phase was hiring Wendi, our wedding planner. I didn’t think there was any way that would fit into our smallish budget, but trust me, the economics work out. We were able to actually enjoy the planning process (not that I’d want to do it again) and remember every minute of April 10. And what a day that was! The days leading up included a nasty mixture of snow, sleet, hail, and rain, yet Saturday and Sunday were two of the nicest days we had all spring! We planned for rain but reaped the benefits of a gorgeous day. Thank you to everyone who made the long trip out here to take part! If you scroll back through my April posts, you’ll see a lot of wedding-related ones.

We took a month to get Tyla moved in and recover from the wedding. Then we headed out on an incredible honeymoon! I count myself lucky to have had a lot of great vacations over the years, but this one tops the list. We both regularly bring up memories from that trip, and I’m quite sure that we’ll end up on another cruise before too long. It was spectacular in so many ways that I didn’t expect, which is probably obvious after seeing my incredibly long cruise journal. The video is probably a lot better way to consume that information, or if you’re going on a cruise, you can read our tips.

I think the biggest adjustment we made after getting married was realizing that we had a lot more free time together. For the last couple years, we had been carefully scheduling our visits and doing a lot of late night drives back to our respective homes. It was so nice to say goodnight and walk down the hallway instead of getting in the car for a 40 minute drive.

Tyla’s birthday was quite an adventure. We stayed the night at the fancy Heathman hotel and had dinner at Jalisco’s where we had our first date. The next day, we drove to Crystal and went on an incredible horseback ride. It was just the two of us and a guide riding through incredible mountain terrain and even along the Pacific Crest Trail for a while. As far as trail rides go, that was the best one I’ve ever been on. Tyla followed up that birthday adventure with one for me. She rented a condo in Ocean Shores, invited a great group of friends down and we partied the weekend away as I turned 30.

Thirty is officially an adult. Actually, I think I felt that way when I had a mortgage, but now there’s no fooling myself. I never could have predicted what life would be like at 30, but as I look at how it turned out, I wouldn’t change a thing! I’m married, have a great job, and I’m living in one of the most beautiful parts of the country.

Before I crossed the line into my thirties, I completed a hike that I’ve put off for four years: Camp Muir. I haven’t consciously put it off, but every year, the time slipped away without me completing it. At 10,000 feet high, with the last 2000 feet on a snowfield, it’s one of the most strenuous non-technical (no ropes, etc) day hikes in the area. AndyD, AndyM and I completed that hike on a remarkably clear day. It was such a rush to tackle that big unknown and succeed! It’s hard to describe the feeling, but I hope to return again soon. The whole effort drove home the point that if you really want to do something, get a group of people and put it on the calendar. Otherwise it’s probably not going to happen.

We had quite a few camping trips during the summer but the two biggest were Birch Bay State Park and Potholes. The former was fun because of the usual summer camping crew, and the latter was an adventure in a bit more rustic camping in an area that feels like it’s a world away from the cool and wet Seattle area.

I ripped through a good series of hikes in 2010. In previous years, I’ve spent time exploring the various mountain areas, but this year I really focused on the destination of the hikes. I ended up at Annette Lake, Thunder Knob, Snoqualmie Lake, Crystal Lakes, and Talapus and Olallie Lakes along with a couple hikes up the Cable Line Trail to prepare for Muir. Snoqualmie Lake was the biggest surprise for me in the bunch. The lake was beautiful, but Tim and I bit off more than we could chew when we tried to do that in a single day. I ran out of water with about three miles to go and that last bit was miserable. I’m not sure if I’ll continue the lake exploration next year or maybe switch to something like old fire towers.

Other highlights of the year included whitewater rafting, a bunch of dirt road explorations, Lady Antebellum, Jim Gaffigan, a trip to the Olympics, and a lot of other stuff I’m probably forgetting to mention.

Skiing took a major hit as I only got out a couple times in 2010 and there were no big ski trips, but I obviously had more important things on my plate so that’s not a huge disappointment. And I had been hitting it pretty hard in the previous years so a break has been good to refresh the batteries. I’m hoping that this new ski season will give me a lot more opportunities.

There’s no doubt that 2010 will be remembered for the wedding and the honeymoon, but even ignoring those two events, it was still a remarkable year. I saw loads of new sights, crossed a bunch of items off my bucket list, and best of all, my wife was beside me for a lot of the adventures!

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

benmartens December 31, 2010 Commentary

Ceton InfiniTV Media Center

I’ve always been intrigued by the beauty of Windows Media Center. It comes with virtually every SKU of Windows now, but how can I get my cable TV hooked up to it? There have been various methods for the past few years, but nothing was good enough for me to take the plunge of killing the Tivo and switching to Media Center. I’m planning a couple posts about this project, but the first one will be on the hardware side of things.

The magic card that makes this all possible is the Ceton InfiniTV 4. It’s a PCIe card that accepts a cable card and records 4 HD streams simultaneously. One PCIe slot, one cable card, four TV streams. The cards came out towards the beginning of the summer and I watched as people worked through some of the early bugs. Ceton had trouble manufacturing enough cards to meet the demand. That meant that once I decided to take the plunge (8/31), I had to wait over two months for my card to arrive.

The next question was what hardware I needed around the Ceton. I had a four year old Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4GHz) with 4GB of RAM. I didn’t really see how that could handle that much HD video processing, but I decided to start there and see what happened. The only upgrade I needed immediately was a new video card with HDMI out. The HDMI out would give me HDCP and multi channel audio.

I picked up the PowerColor Radeon HD 4350 512MB 64-bit DDR2 PCI HDCP Ready Video Card.  I thought I only had one PCIe slot which would be used for the Ceton card so this was one of the few PCI options. What a train wreck this ended up being. The PC would blue screen when I tried to install the drivers, and even when they were installed, I couldn’t play back live or recorded TV. After blowing an entire weekend trying to debug the thing, I shipped it back and headed to Fry’s to get something from the NVidia camp. I ended up with the Evga GeForce GT 430 1 GB DDR3 PCI-Ex card. Note that it’s a PCIe card. Stupid me, I had missed a PCIe slot because it was hidden behind/underneath some other junk in the PC. Once I removed it all, I had a clean shot to two PCIe slots which gave me a lot more options for the video card. The GT430 was super simple to install. Everything worked right away, and while it’s not passively cooled, it’s very quiet and the fan rarely runs.

The machine is an old Dell and the only fan is a VERY large fan at the front of the machine directing air over the CPU cooler. It runs very quietly but I was concerned about whether the video card and Ceton card would generate too much heat. I added an 80mm to the back of the case to pull air out, but it’s a bit noisy and I’m doing some testing to see if it’s really necessary.

The Ceton card was pleasantly simple to install. I called Comcast with a bit of dread, but that was very smooth. They asked directly if I was installing it into a Media Center or Tivo (an option I’ve never heard before) and then transferred me over to their Media Center guy. In theory there shouldn’t be any difference so maybe he’s also the Tivo guy. Either way, he was the most informed cable card guy I’ve talked to at Comcast. When it didn’t work the first time, I was able to give him precise feedback through the excellent Ceton diagnostic tool and he was able to debug/retry on his end. In about 15 minutes we had everything working beautifully.

The machine isn’t terribly loud, but the OS drive is the noisiest part. Since this is going to sit in the living room, noise matters. I ordered an Intel X25V 40 GB Solid State Drive to serve as the OS drive. It’s a bit slower than their top of the line SSD but it’s still faster than a platter drive and it will be perfectly silent. Plus, it’s just the OS so it’s not going to have a lot of writes other than the page file.

The last piece of the puzzle was hooking this thing up to my Harmony One remote. It’s the cornerstone of my whole setup so it needed to work with this PC. There are some “Media Center compatible” remote/IR receiver combos available, but you have to be careful because they don’t all support the RC6 Media Center standard. I ended up getting one of the original IR receivers that came with the Dell Media Center machines back in the day. I found it on eBay (first time I’ve used that site in YEARS) but it worked very well. I programmed the Harmony remote to think it was talking to one of the Linksys extenders. It works like a champ. When we drop out of the Media Center interface, I’ll use a regular wireless mouse and keyboard.

For now the machine is sitting in the computer room and we watch it via the Xbox360 in the living room. I’ve been running it through it’s paces and once I’m convinced that it performs well, I’ll swap out the Tivo. The only bug I’ve found so far is that when I record NFL football games on the local Fox affiliate, it will cut out every once in a while with a copy flag error. There’s a beta firmware available from Ceton that fixes this. I had a very good experience with Ceton support and was added to the beta. Hopefully this fixes my issues without adding too many other ones. Once I ditch the Tivo completely, I’ll be much less likely to get on betas or apply any other updates/patches to the machine. Windows Update is even turned off. I’ll do that myself at specific times after I’ve made a backup to my Windows Home Server.

As for whether or not the older machine could handle it, I have been very pleasantly surprised. Even at full load (recording 4 HD streams, playing back one locally and streaming another to the Xbox360 extender), it uses less than 40% of the CPU and there is plenty of memory overhead. Almost everything is happening at the hardware layer. Note that all of the video is on a single hard drive. The bandwidth required for four HD streams doesn’t come close to the overall throughput of the drive, but there are a lot of seeks going on. RAID seems like overkill at this point but it’s still on my radar if I hit little glitches. I’d definitely recommend putting the OS on a separate drive though.

That’s about it for the hardware side of the setup. Once I get a little farther along in the process, I’ll put together a post about what I can do with this that I couldn’t do before. The scenarios are pretty impressive if I can piece them all together well.

benmartens December 3, 2010 Gadgets, Projects

First Ski Day of 2010-11

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, I headed up to Mt. Baker with AndyM and LorenzP. If I didn’t have people to go with, I don’t know that I could have crawled out of bed when my alarm went off at 4:30am. It’s about 3.5 hours from my house so I don’t get up there very often. However, they have the most open terrain in the area right now so that was our destination.

The forecast called for 1-2 feet of snow overnight on Thursday but that never really materialized. I was pleasantly surprised by the coverage of the runs though. I left my rock skis at home and wasn’t disappointed. We didn’t venture off the groomed runs very much though because there were still a lot of rocks, trees and stumps poking through the snow. It will take another 3-4 feet of snow to open up those areas.

We only did about 10,000 vertical feet (roughly half of a normal day for me) but my legs were burning at the end. I guess I haven’t used a lot of those muscles in a while. Thankfully nobody ended up with injuries on the first day of the season.

All in all I spent as much time on the road as I did on the hill, but it was still good to get out there and make some turns. It was also fun to ski with these guys for the first time. We all skied at roughly the same speed so hopefully we can team up again. With no wedding to plan this year, I’m looking forward to hitting the slopes a bit more than I did last year.

benmartens December 2, 2010 Skiing

Christmas Decorations

Our house now looks like Christmas is approaching. Tyla was able to really do a nice job with a bunch of the decorations that she had. A tree with some ornaments was as far as I ever got on my own, so it’s nice to have her added touch.

As we were joining our ornament piles for the first time, we realized that we already have a nice little collection of ornaments that we’ve bought together. I thought it would make for a good post (and a good reminder for when we’ve forgotten the stories down the road.)

The first fall/winter that we were dating we went ice skating in Bellevue. Later that Christmas season, we were in Leavenworth and picked up this ornament in one of the shops. Even ~5 months into the relationship, I guess we knew it was going somewhere.
We picked up this sled that says “Whistler, Canada” up in Whistler after we got engaged.
A little version of our cruise ship hangs from the tree to remind us of our honeymoon. My only complaint is that they placed the string in the wrong spot so it looks like the ship is trying to take off.
The most recent addition to our collection is a Hallmark keepsake ornament that says “Our first Christmas together” and has a 2010 tag on it.

An ornament can bring back a lot of memories and these four bring back a flood of them for me!

benmartens November 29, 2010 Commentary

Ski Season is Here

It’s not even Thanksgiving but it feels like winter here in Seattle. Because of the proximity of the Puget Sound, we rarely get much below 40 degrees, but highs today and tomorrow will struggle to reach 30. The TV weathermen have been building hype around snow which whips everyone into a frenzy, but anyone who looks at the maps will see that the chances are very very low for any snow to stick unless you’re in Bellingham, in the foothills, or down south.

The good news is that all this cold weather has meant snow in the mountains. The resorts are slowing coming out of hibernation. Whistler opened on Friday. Crystal opened a couple lifts on Friday as well but they are usually willing to open with very little snow. I’ve heard reports of a lot of rocks in the snow there. Mt. Baker is almost 100% open. They have quite a bit more snow up there which is usually the case. Stevens Pass needs another good dump (realistically Crystal does too) and Snoqualmie will be the last to open because of their lower elevation.

It’s fun to see the ski season spinning up! I’m hoping to get out over Thanksgiving break for some warm up runs. The skiing doesn’t get really good off the trails until we have ~5 feet on the ground so it will take a couple more good storms to get us there. Usually by Christmas you can ski anywhere you want without too much fear of destroying your gear.

Viva la Nina!

benmartens November 22, 2010 Skiing

CascadeSkier Windows Phone 7 App

Three years ago, I wrote a mildly successful Windows sidebar gadget (~6000 users) that shows local temperatures, 24 hour snowfall and total snowfall for all the local resorts. There are other data sources like that, but what sets this apart is that the data is updated hourly thanks to live feeds from the Northwest Avalanche Center. (Thanks again to the NWAC for letting me use their data!) While displaying all that data, the gadget cycles through web cam feeds from each resort. At the bottom of the gadget is a quick news line to keep people informed of local snow news. Version 4.0 just hit the Windows Live gallery yesterday so feel free to download it for free and try it out. If you want more details, check out gadget.studio711.com.

Many of the users asked if I had plans to make a Windows Phone 7 version of that gadget. I said no at first, but with time and a lot of requests, I changed my mind and decided to give it a shot. Microsoft also really encouraged employees to develop their own applications. I’m sure that’s a large part of why employees are all getting new phones (that and because we’ll make good marketers.) Anyway, I’m proud to say that if you go to the Zune Marketplace and flip through the Sports genre, search for “cascadeskier”, or click this link (with the Zune software installed), you’ll see my app!

The development process was interesting:

  • It costs $99/year to be a developer. Microsoft keeps 30% of the generated revenue. This all covers the cost of identity verification and unlimited application submissions.
  • A very nice suite of development tools is available in a single package. It includes Visual Studio 2010 Express, Expression Blend, and a WP7 emulator.
  • Code is written in Silverlight/WPF. It was my first foray into that world but I’m happy with the end result. Data binding was the most painful part, but after I learned some debugging tricks, that got simpler.
  • The application submission process is very nice. Fill out the form, click upload, wait for them to test it and then it shows up in the marketplace. If you fail the tests, you get a document back detailing exactly what tests you fail. If you clean that up and don’t break anything else, you’ll be in the marketplace. Your app will never be declined without an answer. It sounds simple but it’s a huge plus for developers and a big win over the Apple platform.
  • Updates are super simple. The developer uploads a new binary and the Windows Phone software takes care of the rest. It notifies the user that there is a new version available and points them to the download.

  

I have actually submitted two apps already, but I think the second one will be much less popular. I wrote it mostly for myself. It’s called DiamondStats. It’s a simple app that helps you keep track of your baseball or softball stats. It sound silly but I’m a numbers guy and I’m always thinking about stats while I’m playing rec league softball. (Yes, I know that’s bad. I didn’t do it when I was playing competitively in high school.) Having the app is nice because I can just walk back into the dugout, pop in the numbers and then forget about it. I wrote this for my old phone and then rewrote it for the new platform.

I plan to continue to release updates for the CascadeSkier application. Suggestions are already coming in and some of them have been pretty good. I think the first think I want to do is get rid of the start page where you select from a list of resorts. You should jump automatically to your favorite resort and be able to filter out the ones you don’t care about.

At some point I might port it over to Android, but that’s not real high on my list right now. It will very likely never be on iPhone since I won’t be buying a Mac just to write an app for that phone.

If you download it, please send me your feedback!

[UPDATE] You can view the most up to date information about this app at http://cascadeskier.studio711.com

benmartens November 19, 2010 Gadgets, Geek, Skiing

Creamy Pasta with Sausage and Tomatoes

I was randomly flipping through food.com when I stumbled across this. It turned out to be delicious! The hardest part was finding canned plum tomatoes, but Tyla eventually spotted them on the store shelf.

Ingredients

Cook sausage and crushed red pepper in oiled skillet over medium heat until no longer pink. Add onion and garlic to skillet and cook until onion is tender and sausage is light brown. Add tomatoes, cream and salt. Simmer until mixture thickens slightly (about four minutes.) Cook pasta according to instructions and drain. Add pasta to sauce and cook until pasta is heated through and sauce thickens (about two minutes.) Serve with with parsley and parmesan cheese.

benmartens November 15, 2010 Food