Studio711.com – Ben Martens

#deletefacebook

Facebook stock is down 21% on this news story about how Cambridge Analytica was able to use Facebook data to gather information about 50 million users. As usual, there is a lot of spin related to this story and it finally got confusing enough that I looked into it. I think what pushed me over the edge was hearing that Elon Musk had deleted the Tesla and SpaceX Facebook pages.

The “shady practices” that Cambridge Analytica used to gather it’s data are nothing new. If a user logs into your application, the Facebook Graph API not only lets you collect data on that user, but on all their friends as well. It has been pretty well known by API users and marketers in general. The Verge has a good article that explains that more.

One of the reasons this is getting so much press NOW instead of many years ago is that this specific instance is related to the Trump election. How sweet is a news story where you can combine privacy, BIG DATA, and a reason why dumb people were fooled into voting for Trump? The news outlets can make a lot of money off that combination.

What should normal users do about this?

  1. Go to Facebook, click Settings > Apps. First, delete all the apps that you don’t use regularly. Then click Apps Others Use and uncheck everything. That will stop sharing of your data with companies because your friends logged into something with their Facebook credentials.
  2. Don’t use your Facebook credentials to log into a website or an app. Always create a unique login for that specific application using your email address. And if you can’t create a login with your email address, then it’s probably shady anyway. The main reason all those dumb quizzes exist on Facebook is so that they can access your profile data (and your friend’s profile data.)
  3. Remove personal information from your Facebook profile. e.g. Is it really that important to have your birthday on your profile?
  4. If you want to go further, you can remove and hide some of your old activity. This is a pain, but I’ve documented it before.

 

So in summary, there’s nothing new about this news story that I can see, but people are finally realizing some of what has been going on. Unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg. Big data is here to stay and information about you is more valuable than you realize. A lot of it is really hard to control unless you’re willing to go full-tinfoil-hat, but it’s not too hard to take a few basic steps in that direction.

benmartens March 27, 2018 Geek

Curly Maple Box

I’ve been working with maple for a couple years, but I’ve never used “curly maple” before. The Wood Database describes it as a maple board where “the ripples in the grain pattern create a three dimensional effect that appears as if the grain has ‘curled’ along the length of the board.”

It’s generally expensive to buy since it’s somewhat rare, but Crosscut Hardwoods in Seattle had a stack of ~30inch long boards that had some curl in them. I picked up two of them to play with and I ended up attempt a small box.

You’d think that a small box would be simple, but it seems like the smaller your project is, the tougher it is to get it right. Tiny gaps and imperfections are a lot more noticeable on small projects.

The first thing was deciding what size box to make. Based on the wood I had available, I went with 3″x5″x8″. Fun fact, if you want a box to look “normal”, use the Fibonacci sequence to determine your dimensions. It’s a close approximation for the golden ratio of 1:1.61803399. Fun fact #2, if you follow that rule, your box will have the same ratio between the dimensions as the Parthenon.

Jointing and planing the curly maple was a challenge. Even though I had recently replaced the blades on both machines, that curly grain is extremely subject to tear out. I took very light passes and did a lot of sanding. A drum sander would have come in very handy to make all the pieces a uniform thickness without tear out.

For the box construction, I mitered the four sides at 45 degrees on each end and then created a dado for both the top and the bottom panel. I glued it all together and ended up with a box that had 6 sides and no way to open. Then I moved over to the table saw and sawed it in half, being careful to insert spacers into the kerf that I had just cut so the box wouldn’t pinch the blade and eat me.

There are multiple methods for creating a snug-fitting lid. I chose to line the inside with walnut and leave the sides of the walnut a little taller than the interior of the box. With a little sanding and finessing, the top fits perfectly over that interior lining. I finished the whole thing off with a couple coats of shellac.

I learned a lot making it which is code for “I made a lot of mistakes, some of which I couldn’t recover from”, but I think this one will be good enough to sit on my dresser without annoying me. The grain is beautiful when you hold it up to the light and see how it changes. The pictures don’t do it justice.

benmartens March 20, 2018 Woodworking

Safety Tatoos

I’ve never been a big fan of crowds, and if I have Elijah with me, I’m even more eager to be done with a crowd because I can see it being so easy to lose track of him. With our upcoming trip to Disney, I was reading a guide book and they recommended custom temporary tattoos. You write some emergency contact info on it and slap it on your kid. Then you teach them to show that to a policeman, etc if they get lost. Brilliant!

A quick search will reveal that there are tons of different companies, but I kind of blindly picked safetytat.com. They have two options. One is like a bandaid/sticker that you write on and the other is more of the standard temporary tattoo that is custom printed with your emergency contact info. We went with the latter because Elijah hates having band-aids pulled off.

Don’t feel a need to order from that specific company, but I think it’s one of those things that’s useful to have in your mental bag of tricks as a parent.

benmartens March 13, 2018 Family

Disneyland

Tyla and I decided that this year would be a big vacation for us. (Well, big for us anyway.) We tossed around a number of options but finally decided that we’d give Disneyland a shot. I went to Disney World when I was five, and Tyla and Elijah have never been there so this will be a pretty new experience for all of us.

I’m a planner so I wanted to suck in some information before making plans, but whew, that’s like trying to take a sip from a firehose. As part of my research, I checked out “The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland 2018” ebook from our library. I liked it so much that I ended up buying a physical copy of the book to take with us for quick reference.

I won’t know if it’s any good until I’ve been through a trip using their info, but I like their approach. They are basically a bunch of data scientist nerds who love Disneyland. They collect tons of data and model out crowd flows so that you can optimize your route through the various attractions that are interesting to you. And of course in addition to all the data (available in an app for your phone), you also get detailed descriptions of all the rides, restaurants and hotels. Should you stay in the park, withinin walking distance or drive to the park? Is the MaxPass add-on worth it? Will my four year old be scared on ride X? I had tons of questions and this book had a lot of the answers. Hopefully the answers were correct.

So now we’ve booked the flight, transportation to the hotel, the hotel, and our park tickets. We’re working on dinner reservations (for bigger things like character dinners) too. While I don’t like to build a strict itinerary before a trip, I do like to get the majority of the spending decisions out of the way ahead of time.

Our plan is visit Disneyland one day, spend a day resting at the hotel and hanging out in the pool, and then do California adventure on the third day. I don’t really know what to expect with a four year old in tow, but hopefully we’ll leave wanting just a little bit more as opposed to thinking we’ve overdone it.

Look out Mickey! Here we come!

benmartens March 8, 2018 Travel

Credit Freeze

Tyla and I have been part of numerous security breaches over the past couple years. I’m confident that all of our private data is floating around out on websites to be easily purchased for a surprisingly small amount of money. (Seriously, you can buy tens of thousands of credit card numbers for less than the cost of going out to dinner.) A couple months ago, I put a fraud alert on our credit reports. It’s free and it basically adds a note that says that you have to be called before any new credit is opened. That’s a good step, but it only lasts for 90 days and it’s not bulletproof.

I recently took it a step further and put a full credit freeze on our account. Nobody can see our credit report while it is frozen which is an even bigger red flag for creditors to see before they extend a new line of credit. There are plenty of downsides to it though. If we ever need have our credit reports checked (buying a car, signing up for a new cell phone, etc), we have to go through some extra steps to unfreeze the report. And oh yeah there are three credit agencies and oh yeah, two of them charge $10 to toggle the freeze flag.

Before you do anything like this, you should understand all the ramifications by reading the FTC page. Herb Weisbaum, the Consumer Man, has a good article that also talks about some of the other services that the credit agencies are offering that are more convenient (and cheaper) than the full freeze. But read the fine print and understand that you’re probably saving money because they are selling a bunch of your data. That was a deal breaker for me.

If you decide to go through with the full freeze, grab your credit card (remember it will cost you about $21 to do this) and head to these three sites:

Experian: https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
TransUnion: https://freeze.transunion.com/
Equifax: https://www.freeze.equifax.com

Each one will give you a pin which you need to keep in a safe place so you can unlock your credit report at some point down the road.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s nice to know that I’m much less likely to have surprise credit cards opened up in my name.

benmartens March 6, 2018 Commentary

Robot Art

Frank Howarth got involved in an auction at his kids school again this year and made an incredible neighborhood art project. He started by cutting up a bunch of scraps and having he kids put them together to form pictures of their houses. Then he combined all the houses into a single neighborhood on a piece of wood.

As I was out in the garage with Elijah a couple weekends ago, I thought he might like giving something like that a try. I cut up various pieces from some nice scraps and asked him to make a house. That proved to be a little challenging so we switched to robots. He was immediately on top of that and made two of them almost completely by himself. At that point we ran out of the scraps that I had cut and he ran out of patience so we called it quits.

Later, I took a picture of what he had made and then transferred it onto a square piece of cherry plywood. I made a simple frame out of some walnut scraps and voila! I’m excited to get this finished and hung on his wall. I’m waiting for the weather to warm up a bit so that I can put some finish on it.

benmartens March 1, 2018 Woodworking

Indiana Jones

Tyla and I recently finished watching the Indiana Jones trilogy. It was her first time seeing any of them and she at least enjoyed them enough to watch all three. Honestly I’m not sure that I ever saw the entire second movie. I remember watching it on TV as a kid and always shutting it off at the eyeball soup part. The third one is my favorite by far. Sean Connery is an excellent addition to the cast and there are so many memorable scenes.

Logan asked me how well the movies held up. There are definitely some cheesy special effects and some laughable plot moments, but overall, they still seemed good. I’m no movie critic, but there wasn’t much of the incredibly slow pacing that you sometimes find with movies that are a couple decades old.

A fifth Indiana Jones is slated for the summer of 2019. The bar is set very low after the train wreck of a fourth movie. Disney wasn’t in charge for that movie, but they are for this new one so hopefully they do a better job.

benmartens February 27, 2018 Commentary

Polytopia

Thanks to NickS for pointing me to The Battle of Polytopia. It’s a turn based strategy game similar to Civilization but MUCH simpler. It’s available for free for both iOS and Android, but there are optional in game purchases if you want to get more tribes and support the author.

You can either play to get the highest score in 30 turns or to conquer every other civilization on the map. After choosing your tribe, you’ll get one person in your tiny little village and then you set off exploring the land, gathering resources to expand your city and investing in technology. Along the way you’ll probably encounter other tribes to battle and conquer.

The game walks the perfect line of complex strategy and easy to understand game mechanics. The technology tree is pretty diverse but it’s simple enough that you can easily memorize it. It’s also the same for every civilization which helps dramatically. The differences between civilizations are their starting technologies and the type of terrain that they normally start on.

A multiplayer feature was recently added so you can play against your friends. It’s fun but it takes a lot longer than playing against the computer.

If you’re at all interested in strategy games, this one is worth a look! It has totally sucked me in. My high score in points mode is 63,730 and in domination mode, I’ve gotten 3 stars with 6 of the tribes so far. Can you beat those marks? (Judging by the high score tables, lots of people can.) If you want to join me in a multiplayer game, send me a note! So far I’ve gotten Logan hooked but the more the merrier.

benmartens February 22, 2018 Gaming

RetroPie

I’ve played around with classic gaming system emulators in the past. There was the time I bought an old Asteroids machine and stuffed a computer inside, and I also modified an original Xbox to run old Nintendo games. Classic games are still fun for me and I thought the simpler games might be a way to introduce Elijah to video games as a super rainy weekend special activity kind of thing. Or at least that was my excuse.

It’s a lot easier to get a system up and running now. Here’s a shopping list:

Things you might have already:

Now you’re ready to follow the instructions (Lifehacker has a good guide too) and get gaming!

That only took me a couple hours to put together. I wasn’t thrilled with all the cables and pieces laying around so I decided to build a nice box for it. I have done some bandsaw boxes but I don’t recall doing any nice small wooden boxes with a lid. This seemed like a good excuse. I started with some walnut scraps from the side table build.
 For the top, I found part of the wood with nice grain and tried a bookmatch. That just means that you use the bandsaw to cut down the middle of the board (the thin way) and lay it open like a book. The grain ends up as (almost) a mirror image. I was really happy with how it looked though in the final product I did goof it up a bit. I think I flipped one of the boards end for end.Because I was using scraps, I couldn’t quite get a continuous grain all the way around the box, but I did pay a little attention to it and some of the corners look pretty cool. I put in some small maple splines to reinforce the corners. The box walls were thin so the splines are pretty tiny. I finished it off with a couple coats of shellac.

I’m happy with it for a first attempt. Everything fits inside so that’s a win and the grain is pretty to look at. I want to try another box soon to use what i learned. Crosscut Hardwoods is selling small pieces of curly maple and I picked up some of that to try on the next box.

benmartens February 20, 2018 Geek, Woodworking

Tool Sharpening

I got a set of cheap chisels and a block plane from Home Depot a few years ago. There are times when they come in super handy, but how do I sharpen them? If you search online, there are a bazillion different options and each one is a bit of an investment. I wanted something that I couldn’t screw up and was quick to use without much cleanup. I ended up buying the Work Sharp WS3000.

The basic kit comes with two glass plates and four different abrasive levels. The abrasive sheets adhere to the glass so you can pick the right one and flip it to the correct side. My chisels were in rough shape but in less than half an hour, I had flatted the backs, and established both a bevel and a micro bevel. Brilliant! I’m so excited to finally start using my hand tools more.

Fear of sharpening was a major reason why I haven’t invested in a bigger plane yet. Maybe a jack plane will find it’s way into my shop.

benmartens February 15, 2018 Woodworking