Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Safeway Monopoly

Monopoly is back at Safeway (and related grocery stores.) I know it’s a ridiculous game and the odds of winning anything are astronomically low, but for some reason I still find it fun. And last year I did win a reasonable amount of small stuff so why not go for it again.

During the “off season”, I had spent a little time futzing around with a phone application that would read playing pieces and keep track of how you were doing along your futile journey to win prizes. I even thought you could get into a group with friends and digitally pool your playing pieces for a little better chance at winning something. I’m glad I didn’t spend too much time on that because they have improved the app that comes with the game. Not only can you scan the bar codes for the second chance prizes like last year, but now you can also scan a 2D barcode on the back of the playing pieces. It figures out what all four pieces are and keeps track of your progress in the app. You still need to keep the physical playing pieces to redeem your prize, but this automates away a lot of the time consuming part.

I’ll do another post in a couple months and let you know how it turned out this year. If you aren’t playing and want to fuel this silliness, feel free to pass your tokens along to me.

benmartens February 13, 2018 Commentary

Best of YouTube

I hope you got a chance to watch the Falcon Heavy test launch by SpaceX earlier this week either live or afterwards. If you didn’t, grab your popcorn and fire up this video. I watched it live at work and it was quite a thrill to watch the biggest rocket since the Saturn project lift off and then see the two boosters land simultaneously back on earth. Unfortunately the main booster didn’t land successfully back on the floating platform (not in the video), but two out of three isn’t bad. Since this was a simple test flight, Elon loaded his personal Tesla Roadster into the rocket for weight (generally companies just use heavy chunks of metal, etc) and there was a subsequent live stream of the car floating through the solar system.

I love the videos about the science behind games at the fair, but Mark Rober’s video was the first time I’d seen the same formula applied to an arcade. it taught me something about the rainbow circle game that will change my life forever.

And everyone’s favorite woodworking geek, Matthias Wandel, posted a video showing how you can use a free app on your phone or tablet to measure the RPM of your shop tools.

 

benmartens February 8, 2018 Links

Barbacoa Beef

I enjoy a Chipotle burrito every now and then, and I always get their barbacoa beef. For the Super Bowl party, I finally got around to attempting to make something like it myself. I picked up 6.5 pounds of chuck roast from the butcher and plopped it in the slow cooker for about 8 hours. It was so good! This one is going into our regular rotation. Below you’ll find the recipe that I used from Genius Kitchen, modified just a little bit:

Ingredients

  • 1⁄3 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 4 teaspoons minced garlic cloves
  • 4 teaspoons cumin
  • 2 teaspoons oregano
  • 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3 tablespoons lime juice
  • 3 dried chipotle chiles
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 3⁄4 cup chicken broth
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 4 -5 lbs chuck roast

Directions

  1. To make the adobo sauce combine vinegar, lime juice, chipotles, garlic, cumin, oregano, black pepper and salt in a blender or processor on high speed until smooth.
  2. Remove most of the fat from the roast and then cut into large chunks.
  3. Pour oil into a frying pan and sear all sides of roast on medium-high heat until browned.
  4. Place meat into slow cooker and pour adobo sauce over meat.
  5. Pour in the chicken broth and add bay leaves.
  6. Cook on high heat 6 hours or on low all day.
  7. While still in the Crockpot, shred the meat with two forks and turn the heat to warm. Serve with hard or soft tortilla shells when ready.

 

 

benmartens February 5, 2018 Food

Telemarketing Experiment

For the past few months, I’ve been getting multiple telemarketing calls per day. Some are legit-ish (the police fundraising, NRA, etc) and others are just blatant violations of the do not call registry from randomized phone numbers. The Truecaller app does help, but it’s not perfect and it’s not as good as having them not call at all. It’s time to try something new.

Lifehacker published an article written by a telemarketer about how to get him to stop calling. Ignoring the calls or hanging up after you realize what it is won’t actually help. The best way to get off the call lists is to be polite and a complete dud of a sale. This article goes into more detail, but the summary is to say “No thank you” to every question and don’t engage in any conversation.

I’m going to give this a shot and see what happens. If it backfires and my phone rings all day, you can laugh when I make another post saying that I’m changing my phone number.

benmartens January 31, 2018 Commentary

Crystal Mountain Skiing

On Saturday I did something I haven’t done in almost two full years: I went skiing! Thank to Tyla for letting me take a Saturday to head down to Crystal. It had been snowing all week and a storm was predicted for Friday night so I thought I picked a good day. I did… but so did everyone else. I forgot what time I usually left so I decided to go for 6:30. That was a mistake. There was a ton of traffic and it took an extra 45 minutes to make the 1 hour and 45 minute drive. I changed my thinking from “find some good fresh snow” to “enjoy whatever turns you get because it’s going to be wildly crowded.”

It turns out that getting older and not skiing for two years makes it a little difficult to get going again. Go figure. The skiing itself came back pretty quickly but man, I tired out quickly! I toured all over the mountain, skiing through some of my favorites and then headed out around 1:30 or so.

It was so nice to be relaxing up in the mountains with a gorgeous view all around!

benmartens January 29, 2018 Skiing

Movies From My Youth

I married Tyla despite the fact that she had never seen Star Wars, Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings. I know, right? She did eventually watch Lord of the Rings with me, and now that Indiana Jones is on Amazon Prime Video, we’ve started watching that trilogy. (Despite what you may have heard, there are only three videos in the series. The fourth one is a myth.) She liked the first one well enough that I think we’ll watch the next two which is good because The Last Crusade” is my favorite.

Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark got me thinking about a bunch of my favorite movies from the 80s. Here is a list of some favorites in no particular order:

  • Ernest Goes To Camp. This is my standard answer whenever someone asks for my favorite movie.
  • Short Circuit
  • Iron Eagle
  • Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade
  • The Princess Bride
  • The Three Amigos
  • Top Gun
  • Caddyshack
  • A Christmas Story
  • National Lampoons: Christmas Vacation
  • Back to the Future (all of them)
  • E.T.
  • Field of Dreams

What did I miss?

benmartens January 25, 2018 Commentary

Making Time

Bob Clagett is one of my favorite YouTubers and podcasters. Last December, he released his first book called “Making Time“. The book is a collection of thoughts about how he made the transition from 9-5 employee to full time maker while being a husband and dad. As the name implies, the book largely centers around making good use of time and fitting everything into his schedule. It’s a quick read and it has a lot of good insights about how to be a more efficient and effective human.

Along those same lines, I recently read a quote in a book that has really stuck with me: “How you spend your day is how you spend your life.” (It’s not a unique quote to that book but it’s the first time I think I’ve heard it.) This could be interpreted a few ways but it always pops into mind when I’m wasting time on my cell phone or sitting on the couch in the evening instead of creating something in the garage or on the computer. It’s easy to dream big for the future and have lots of great ideas, but if you’re not working on those dreams every day, you’re not going to get there.

On the Making It podcast, Bob said that this year he was going to try to stop wasting time. It’s so simple to say and so hard to do, but I bet we could all find an extra 15 minutes a day to spend in a more valuable way. Those little chunks of time can really add up to some impressive accomplishments!

benmartens January 23, 2018 Commentary

Wedge Shaped Side Table

Up in the man cave, there is a couch with a recliner beside it and the recliner is at an angle to the couch. We have a set of cheapo folding food table things that sits in the gap between the chairs but it doesn’t look very nice. Almost exactly one year ago, David Picciuto made a table to fit a similar spot in his house and I finally got around to making my own version.

Most of this project will be hidden between the sofa and the recliner so I spent all of the funds for this project on the top. I bought a big chunk of 6/4 walnut and glued three pieces of it together to get a slab that was wide enough for the table. I carefully cut the appropriate wedge shape out of the slab and then built a simple plywood box for the base. The top is just held in place by gravity and a few cleats on the bottom so that it doesn’t slide around. You can lift off the top and get to some storage and the other feature of the base is that it has a built-in outlet and dual 2 amp USB chargers built into the back.

The base got painted black and the top was finished with teax oil and then covered in Briwax. Needless to say, this looks MUCH nicer than what we had there before! The downside is that now I feel the need to use a coaster. Hmm… Anyway, this went well so I’m going to make a similar table for spot between the couch and the wall. This one will just be a simple rectangle top though so that should make things a little simpler.

benmartens January 16, 2018 Woodworking

Lunch In Kingston

As we’ve done a few times before, we hopped on the ferry in Edmonds and floated across Puget Sound to have lunch in Kingston. When we’ve done it previously, I’ve thought that it would be kind of neat to have a timelapse of the trip so this time I packed my Go Pro. I had a flexible tripod that I kind of wrapped around the railing and then held it in place with alternating freezing hands. I didn’t do anything too fancy to stabilize or straighten the video, but there’s a lot of fun stuff to see!

benmartens January 15, 2018 Timelapse

Christmas in Indiana

This year we headed back to Indiana for Christmas. The weather forecast looked cool but pretty dry. The weather forecast was wrong.

The trip out was relatively smooth until we hit carnage at Midway. My parents had kindly made the ~2 hour drive (each way!) to pick us up and the traffic was so bad it took them 30-45 minutes to get from the cell phone lot to us. Thankfully we had them pick us up at Arrivals instead of Departures and that saved the wait from being even longer.

We awoke Christmas Eve morning to snow. A white Christmas was in order, but not just a white Christmas, but we had fresh snow every single day until we left! They also set a record for the coldest two weeks in history. Temps were in the single digits during the day. It was frigid but we still had fun playing in the snow and it never kept us completely snowed in.

Given the weather and the temps, we mostly hung around the house, but we got outside for sledding, exploring in the woods, a tour of the South Bend Chocolate Factory tour and church services among other things. It was very nice to relax and watch Elijah interact with Mom, Dad, Luke, Rachel and David.

Our trip to the airport for the flight back was interesting as well. Bad snow was predicted around the time we’d normally be driving to the airport, so instead, we got to the airport 5 hours early so that Dad and Mom could drive back before it got dark. It turned out to be a very good move because, while the trip there was easy, the trip back for them was quite treacherous. Thankfully they made it safely.

A huge thanks goes out to my parents for hosting us again and for all the driving!

benmartens January 11, 2018 Family, Travel