Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Standing Desk Monitor

We have nice standing desks at work. They have electric motors with memory settings so it’s quick and easy to switch between standing up or sitting down. I believe that it’s significantly healthier to stand up at least part of the day, but I find myself being lazy and sitting for most of the day. I also know that it’s relatively easy to motivate myself by measuring whatever I’m trying to improve. Time for a project!

To measure whether I’m standing or sitting, I decided to use a distance sensor that either sits on top of the desk and looks at the floor, or sits on the floor and looks up. I’m sure there are cheaper ways to do this, but I ordered a SparkFun BlackBoard, Distance Sensor Breakout, and a Qwiic cable to connect them. There was no soldering required. I plugged it all in and I was good to go. I laser cut a wood box to hold all the components.

I wrote a simple program for the Arduino-compatible BlackBoard that would send a measurement when it received a keystroke and then I wrote a program that runs on the computer to periodically request measurements (via USB) and upload them to a database in the cloud. I put a website on top of the page and voila!

A friend at work heard about the idea and wanted to compete with me so now we are both running these devices. You can track our progress at http://standupweb.azurewebsites.net/

benmartens September 24, 2018 Gadgets, Geek, Maker

Woodworking Project Recap

When we visited Grandma Martens this summer, she showed us a photo album of a bunch of Grandpa’s woodworking projects. I thought that was a pretty neat idea, and while I’ve blogged about most of them, I thought I’d walk around the house and make a video of my projects. I realize it’s dorky, but what did you expect from me?

benmartens September 21, 2018 Woodworking

Fantasy Football – Week 2

The Seahawks played a game and they lost. I don’t know a lot more than that because my DVR messed up and I saw the score before I watched the game so I didn’t watch the game. Let me guess… they had a really bad offensive line that led to a bunch of turnovers and hits on Wilson? Ok, I actually did watch the recap. I’ve found the summary videos on the NFL to be a great way to keep up with various games.

In our league, we ended up with a 6-way tie for second place. The outliers are Andy on top at 2-0 and Logan on the bottom at 0-2. Logan always said that Jim was his nemesis, but now Jim has left the league. Maybe Tyler is his new nemesis? It hurts to get the second highest score in the league (by a long shot) and lose. Congrats to Tyler for putting up a huge score!

Next week Logan will look for his first win against me and Andy will defend his perfect record against Nick.

On to the weekly awards with new records in bold.

This Week This Season All Time
Highest Team Score Tyler had 183.70 Was: Tim had 157.87 (Week 1) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Tim had 99.59 Nick had 93.70 (Week 1) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Tyler beat Logan by 33.09 Luke beat Nick by 35.63 (Week 1) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Andy beat Luke by 4.31 Was: Dad beat Tyler by 20.61 (Week 1) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Patrick Mahomes had 50.84 as a free agent Was: Ryan Fitzpatrick and his beard had 50.28 as a free agent.  (Week 1) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Andy has a 2 game winning streak Tim, Dad, Andy and Luke all have 1 game winning streaks  (Week 1) Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Logan has a 2 game losing streak Ben, Tyler, Logan and Nick all have 1 game losing streaks  (Week 1) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)
benmartens September 19, 2018 Fantasy Sports

Cloud Backup

As I mentioned about a year ago, CrashPlan is closing shop for home users and focusing on the small business market. My contract with them is up in a few months so I did some research to pick a new cloud backup provider. I had about 4TB stored on CrashPlan so a key feature for me was unlimited backup size. I settled on Backblaze. They’ve been around for quite a while and have a feature set that meets my needs and a price that doesn’t break the bank.

So now begins the arduous journey of uploading 4TB of data over my Comcast connection. Comcast limits me to 1TB per month with pretty heavy penalties for going over. I normally use 300-400GB/month so it’s going to take quite a while to upload my data again.

Comcast provides a web page to view your usage, but I wanted something a little easier to monitor. My router keeps track of my usage and it’s roughly the same as what Comcast says so I wrote an app that grabs the usage numbers from my router every hour and stores them in a database. Now I can quickly check my usage, predict where I’m going to end up, etc. That gives me the info I need to turn my backup on and off to use up as much of that 1TB as possible without going over.

I’ve got about 1TB uploaded and I’m happy so far. Their software is ridiculously easy to use and they have a phone app for accessing random files on the go. It’s a good final step in the 3-2-1 backup strategy which means that you should keep 3 copies of your data. 2 are stored locally and 1 is stored remotely.

benmartens September 17, 2018 Geek

Fantasy Football – Week 1

I feel like it’s going to be easier to watch the Seahawks this year. I have no hope of them making the playoffs and I’ll be satisfied if they make it to 8-8. That proved to be a good attitude for week 1 as they bumbled their way through the game with flashes of greatness mixed into a messy game. It was fun to be watching football again though.

The rest of the NFL provided plenty of excitement with the Browns breaking their losing streak (but still not winning), but the craziest game has to go to the Packers. Aaron Rodgers too his enormous new contract out for a test drive and promptly got carted off the field in the second quarter only to come back late in the game an engineer one of the greatest comebacks in history. How’s that for a roller coaster of emotions?

In our league, the top two teams from last year started off with losses this year as Tim (Beer-me), Dad (EndOverEnd), Andy (RAAWWWRRRRR!!!) and Luke (Helmetheads) all started off their season with a win. Every week I’ll update the stat table below. Normally the third column will be the current season but this week I’ll put last season’s numbers in there.

This Week This Season All-Time
Highest Team Score Tim had 157.87 Logan had 188.80 (Week 15) Tim 200.51 (2015)
Lowest Team Score Nick had 93.70 Jim had 60.95 (Week 10) Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout Luke beat Nick by 35.63 Luke beat Jim by 74.22 (Week 3) Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win Dad beat Tyler by 20.61 Dad beat Jim by 1.86 (Week 15) Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player Ryan Fitzpatrick and his beard had 50.28 as a free agent… Tom Brady had 45.72 for Luke. (Week 3) Drew Brees had 60.54 on Tim’s bench (2015)
Longest Active Winning Streak Tim, Dad, Andy and Luke all have 1 game winning streaks Austin has a 6 game winning streak (Week 13) Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak Ben, Tyler, Logan and Nick all have 1 game losing streaks Tim had a 5 game losing streak. (Week 5) Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

 

benmartens September 12, 2018 Fantasy Sports

Crystal Hike

Last year around this time, we tried to go on a hike at Crystal Mountain with Tyla’s family. That was canceled because of some really bad wildfires that got very close to the resort. We decided to give it another shot recently and it went much better.

The day started off cloudy so we just caught glimpses of Rainier off the top of the gondola, but it was nice to not be in direct sunlight for the first part of the hike. We took the Crystal Mountain trail which comes off the top of the gondola, across Lucky Shot and over the top of Bear Pits, under Forest Queen, out past the Queens and Tinkerbell runs into the woods to a couple lakes, and finally past the old mine and under the Gold Hills lift. The trail map claims it’s 4.8 miles but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a tad longer than that.

The hike is all downhill so I figured Elijah would handle it ok, but I forgot that it’s a bit too technical for him. There was a lot of loose gravel at the beginning and then the second half had some big roots. Thankfully he did incredibly well and only started getting tired on the last mile or so. I did have to carry him for a while but I still give him an A for the day.

It wasn’t a super photogenic day due to the clouds at the beginning but here are a few photos from the day. Be sure to look at the upper ridge in the last picture. You can see how far down the slope the fire got last year. It was VERY close to the resort!

benmartens September 10, 2018 Family, Outdoors

Siding, Windows and Paint

Our house was built in 1990 and had the dreaded Louisiana Pacific siding. (Detailed explanation from a home inspector site.) The siding was only warrantied for 25 years and when you throw in the major defects in the design, we had large areas of our house that were really bad. We also needed new paint so it seemed like a good time to bite the bullet. Some of our neighbors have done partial replacements of the bad areas, but we’re hoping to be in this house for quite a while and I don’t like future problems looming over me, so we decided to do it all at once. We ended up going all out and adding full window replacement to the job as well. It really increased the total price, but it’s cheaper to do it at the same time as the siding versus doing it later. The windows were original too and we had a tough time even opening some of them, not to mention dealing with mold from all the moisture that accumulated inside, etc.

It’s hard to even get a contractor to call you back, but I got two bids and chose the lower priced one because multiple neighbors had a good experience with him. The job was supposed to start the first week of April and finish mid-May. The actual job started in early May and finished in … August. Ouch. We had a dumpster and port-a-potty in our driveway for a very long time. They say a job has three levers: quality, schedule and price. You get to pick two. Price and quality were our top concerns and that’s what we got. I’m very thankful to the contractor for not cutting corners when our job took way longer than expected.

If you drive past, you probably don’t notice much different about the siding (except that it’s clean!) However, I smile now as I walk around the house because I don’t see swollen, rotting siding. And it’s wonderful having windows that open with just a finger or two. But possibly my favorite thing is knowing that we don’t have this huge bill looming in our future. It was something that had to be done before we sold the house (or take a big hit on the sale price).

Now that the contractors are gone, I have a huge work list to complete to rehab the yard, but I’m excited to dig into that (pun intended). Much of it has been going well and I’m surprised at how quickly the trampled grass and bushes have been recovering.

benmartens September 5, 2018 Home Improvement

The Arcadian Wild – Hers

If you were in church on Sunday, you heard me play the video in the link below. It’s from a band called “The Arcadian Wild” and I’ve had their album on repeat for the past month or so. I was thrilled to see that they have sheet music available for sale for the instrumental track on their album. I bought it to support them and then realized that the piece was pretty far over my head.

I wish I had a recording of my first attempt. It probably took me 10 minutes to get through the whole thing and the result was almost unrecognizable. I played probably played this 200-300 times over the course of a month, and it was really fun to be along for the ride as my muscles would develop the required memory and different parts would start to click. That happens with every piece I learn, but I really noticed it with this one. I, of course, didn’t get a perfect version on video, but every once in a while I make it through without errors.

Anyway, here’s my recording of the piece, but you can find it on Spotify and other music services if you want to hear the real version.

Update: A few years later, I revisited this and memorized it. Below is a new recording that has better audio since I was recording digitally instead of with cheap microphones.

benmartens September 3, 2018 Music

Air Quality

The smoke that I wrote about last week has thankfully mostly cleared out. When it was really bad, I spent quite a bit of time checking around various websites to see how bad the smoke was, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t get a quick answer easily from my phone. I was also interested in getting some long term trend charts. So, being a geek, I wrote a program that pulls down the data from the closest air quality sensor (between Kenmore and Lynnwood) and stores it. I also made a simple web page that’s optimized for cell phone displays. Pin it to your home screen and you have a quick and easy way to check the air quality (assuming you live near me.) http://localairquality.azurewebsites.net

The reading is usually 2-3 hours behind the current time, but the levels don’t usually change too much in a couple hours.

I also discovered a fantastic blog that writes about the current smoke situation and the smoke forecast. Bookmark this one too: http://wasmoke.blogspot.com

benmartens August 29, 2018 Geek

Independence and Coal Lakes

In 2010, Tyla and I attempted to drive up a forestry road off of the Mountain Loop Highway but got turned around by snow. This past weekend, I finally got to attempt it again. Logan, Tyla, Elijah and I headed up there to hike to Coal and Independence Lakes.

The drive up the forest road is one of the highlights of the trip for me. It’s not for the faint of heart (or the low of ground clearance.) Much of the road is a single lane with no space for two cars to pass unless one is willing to plunge many hundred feet down the mountain. I was happy to have plenty of ground clearance though we never needed four wheel drive.

We parked at the first parking lot, walked up the trail and immediately found Coal Lake. There wasn’t much to see because the whole mountain was enshrouded in a cloud. That’s when I looked at the map and realized that we hadn’t actually hit the end of the road where the Independence Lake trailhead is, so we hopped back in the truck and drove a couple more minutes to the end of the road. 

It’s only about a mile to the lake, but it took us ~40 minutes because Elijah had a tough time climbing up and over all the big rocks and roots that were in the trail. On the way back, I carried his hiking pole and we made it back in just about half the time. I think he gets distracted by where to place the pole sometimes.

Independence Lake was disappointing as we couldn’t see anything due to the fog/clouds. The trail goes on to North Lake but that’s not something Elijah would be able to handle so we had a little snack and turned around.

I don’t think Elijah was all too thrilled but I enjoyed it. I loved being on a hike that wasn’t crowded with people in flip flops carrying tiny dogs. I want to go back again on a clearer day and hopefully make it to North Lake as well.

A few pictures are included below along with our dashcam video of the drive up the road.

benmartens August 27, 2018 Family, Outdoors