Studio711.com – Ben Martens

AMA Supercross In Seattle

I imagine that there will be lots of times that I disappoint my son. Saturday was a huge one.

Some years, the AMA Supercross tour comes through Seattle and I’ve always wanted to go see a race. They convert Century Link field into a big dirt track and go nuts. Three years old seemed like a bit of a stretch, but I figured that Elijah and I would give it a shot. Practice started at 1pm so the plan was to buy the cheapest seats we could get, go early, and leave before the crowd got huge and raucous.

I hyped this with Elijah for weeks leading up to it. We were both incredibly excited about our planned day together while Tyla got a day to herself. On Saturday morning, I told Elijah that our day was going to be even MORE fun because we were going to ride a bus to get to the stadium. That might have trumped the motorcycles in his book. I thought I was so clever with this plan.

So we parked the truck at the Mercer Island Park and Ride. I bought my bus ticket on my phone app and we waited for the bus. It showed up and we hopped on. “Umm sir, that’s a Metro ticket.” “Yeah?” “This is Sound Transit. Different ticket.” …. I only had twenties in my wallet and the machine didn’t give change. “Oh. I’ll get off.” No problem though, right? I’ll download the Sound Transit app and buy a ticket. We’ll just get on the next bus in 15 minutes. But oops, Sound Transit doesn’t HAVE an app. There are a few bus stops with kiosks where you can buy a ticket. I was fed up with the fact that we have TWO bus systems and that I couldn’t buy a ticket for the one I wanted to ride, so we gave up on that and drove to the stadium. Elijah was disappointed but we talked about making the best of the situation.

It was a short drive to the stadium but whoa, parking was $50! Private lots a little bit farther down the road were $40. I kept driving. The normal area where we park for Mariners games had a $20 option. Ok. Fine. Whatever. We paid our money and I hoisted Elijah up on my shoulders for the one mile walk (seriously, I measured it and Google maps said 5279ft.) to the stadium. Elijah was getting pretty antsy by this time, but hey, we’re here. Time for the big payoff.

Wait… why is the stadium so empty? Why is there still earth moving equipment on the track? Shouldn’t they be practicing by now? I asked one of the stadium workers and … too much rain. Everything has been delayed until 4pm. It was 12:30pm.

Elijah had no clue and was still grinning and excited. So we walked over to the outside edge of the stadium while we watched the trains go by and I thought about what to do. In the end, I decided to just call it quits. There’s no way we could sit around for 3.5 hours with nothing to do in the cold and misty rain. I knelt down and told Elijah that the motorcycles weren’t running today.

Elijah has a few different cries. There’s the “I don’t feel good” cry and the “I’m not getting my way cry.” But the one that gets to me is the “This is really sad” cry. His lower lip starts to quiver and tears well up. It’s such a pure, innocent emotion. That’s the one I got.

Ouch.

We wiped off his tears and took a picture by the track before heading back to the truck and leaving. Disappointing Elijah so badly (twice in the span of an hour) hurt way more than the pile of money we wasted on the tickets and parking.

On the long walk back, I decided I would try to salvage the day by doing something else that might be a little special. I gave him three choices: go to an arcade, go to the McDonald’s play place, or go to church and mow the lawn. He chose… go to church and mow the lawn. That kid loves tractors! On the way there, we stopped at Dairy Queen for some ice cream and then he happily sat on my lap for over two hours while we bounced around the church yard.

I definitely feel burned by the whole experience. When I got home, I tried to figure out how I could have known about this before leaving the house. The best I came up with was that Century Link tweeted out a new schedule for the day about 30 minutes after we left the house. Not great, but it would have saved us a lot of grief.

Maybe in another year the sting will have worn off and I’ll be willing to try this adventure again with a four year old.

benmartens April 11, 2017 Family

Gift From Bob Claggett

Bob Claggett runs I Like To Make Stuff. He has weekly posts with great projects that are achievable for the common man. Those projects span woodworking, electronics, 3D printing, model making, and much more. It’s one of my favorite YouTube channels.

Bob also hosts a weekly live stream on Twitch where he works on a project and chats with people watching. It’s a fun way to interact and see what he’s working on outside of his videos. On Twitch, there is a way to send the content producer some money. It’s basically like a tip jar. On Bob’s channel, whoever puts in the most tip money during each stream gets a custom badge cut out on his laser cutter. A couple weeks ago, I was the winner. If you start watching around the 1 hour 58 minute mark, you’ll see my donation and short battle with another user who was trying to win too.

Watch live video from ILikeToMakeStuff on www.twitch.tv

And then the video concludes with him cutting out my custom badge. It arrived a few days later with some extra swag thrown in. Thanks Bob!

For the curious, that donation only amounts to $20. I figure if I was in the Atlanta area, I’d be happy to buy him a 12 pack of beer for all the knowledge he’s given me so I just did it virtually.

benmartens April 10, 2017 Maker

SimpliSafe Review

(This post will probably make more sense if you read part 1 from yesterday.)

Before I start talking about our new system, let me back up and explain what I want out of our home security system in order from most important to least important.

  1. If there’s a fire, get the fire department there as soon as possible whether I’m home or not.
  2. If someone tries to get in while we are home, I want to know immediately to have a little extra time to react and get the police headed in our direction. (In my dreams, the police pull up just as I’m throwing the bad guy onto the lawn and holding him there with a shotgun to the back of the head.)
  3. If someone breaks in while we are gone, at least we’ll know about it. This is probably the most common reason people buy a system, and while I like the feature, it’s not a huge selling point for me. Frankly, we live in a very undesirable theft target. If you’re crazy/smart enough to break into our house, you’re going to do whatever you want regardless of whether I have an alarm system installed.

Ok so back to my quest to dump my landline ($55/month) and replace my landline monitoring ($10/month) with cellular monitoring…

I chose SimpliSafe. They’ve target my exact scenario and they’ve been around for long enough that I trust them to provide me with a good product.

The setup process is extremely simple:

  1. Create your system by figuring out how many of each type of sensor you want. I recommend that you start small because it’s really easy to add more later and the only additional cost is that you pay shipping each time you make an order.
  2. SimpliSafe will configure your new base station for the sensors you ordered and ship you a box.
  3. They say that setup takes 30 minutes and they’re right (depending on how many sensors you bought.) Setup is SOOOOO easy compared to what I went through before! Basically, you plug the base station into the wall, activate your account online and stick your keypad on the wall. For each sensor, remove the tag to connect the included battery and stick it on the wall.

You’re done!

Unfortunately, my case wasn’t quite that simple. My base station came with a T-Mobile SIM card in it and the T-Mobile signal was so bad that I could only rarely get a connection from a single point in my house. After a lot of trial and error, SimpliSafe agreed to send me a replacement board for the base station that uses Verizon’s network instead of T-Mobile. That worked a lot better.

Our monitoring is now $15/month but we dropped $55/month for the home phone and $10/month for our old monitoring company. So we are saving $50/month! We’ll recoup the ~$400 hardware cost in 8 months.

I love these projects that cut out huge monthly bills! It’s much more fun to spend money when you know that you’re going to save that much in a short amount of time.

I also feel good using an alarm system that is easy to expand and modify whenever I want. I suppose there’s a chance that it’s less secure than my old system, but remember my priority list. I’m ok with that. I also don’t have any evidence that it IS less secure. My old system had plenty of wireless sensors and the landline was very easy to cut. A determined and intelligent burgler is going to know how to get through most consumer grade alarm systems anyway. The trick is to just be a more uninviting target than other people in your neighborhood. It’s kind of like hiking in bear country with somebody that runs more slowly than you.

benmartens April 7, 2017 Home Improvement

Custom Alarm System

There is one major home improvement project that I’ve written very little about. Soon after we moved in, I went down a month long rabbit hole of learning about DIY alarm systems. The idea is basically to install the same level of hardware that a company like ADT would install, but skip the middleman. You install the hardware and you connect it to a monitoring company. We paid about $500 for the hardware and then $10/month for the monitoring. I wasn’t comfortable sharing the details of it in the beginning because I wasn’t sure how secure it was. That concern was probably unwarranted.

Our GE Concord 4 system worked flawlessly, but it was one of the hardest projects I’ve done. The hardware itself is relatively simple. All the sensors have two wires and they are either normally open or normally closed. The wireless sensors are easier to setup and just need to be paired with the base station. The catch is that the main circuit boards for these units are 1980s-90s technology. Forget connecting your computer to it and configure it. Instead you have to type incredibly long series of numbers into the keypad to change settings. For example, if you want to change a setting, you press 8, your four digit master system code, 0, 0, and the four digit code to select the right program setting. Then you actually get to make the setting which is usually a one digit number (on/off, number of seconds, etc.) The installation manual is 113 pages long. It’s intense.

But you know what? I’m still glad I did it, partially because I learned something that was really complex and because it saved us a LOT of money both on the initial hardware purchase and on the monthly monitoring. We have easily saved thousands of dollars compared to using a standard consumer alarm system.

But.

I’m getting tired of having a landline just for the alarm system. It wasn’t so bad when we moved in because our cell phones would regularly drop calls. Coverage and phones have improved and that’s no longer a problem. So the phone line really is just for the alarm. And no, you can’t use a VOIP line (like Comcast phone service) for an alarm. It has to be the old-fashioned POTS phone line.

Well the good news is that since I custom installed my own hardware, I’m free to switch over to cellular monitoring and switch to a different monitoring company if I want to. The problem is that I REALLY don’t want to go down that rabbit hole again. I started looking into it and it’s pretty complex and the technology is frustratingly ancient. I’m sure it would work, but I don’t have the patience.

Thankfully, a number of companies have stepped up to offer DIY home security products. You get the benefits of cutting out the middleman without the headache. This post is getting long so I’ll keep you in suspense until tomorrow about what we’re using now and how we like it.

benmartens April 6, 2017 Home Improvement

Stop Renting Cable Modems

When you get internet service from Comcast, they rent you a cable modem. This costs around $10/month. The nice thing is that if you ever have trouble with the modem, you just replace it at no additional cost. But if you’re willing to put in a little extra effort, you can ditch that monthly fee.

Start at the official Comcast help page. They walk you through the steps of figuring out what kind of modem you should get. There are a lot of options and your specific choice depends on whether you have your telephone through Comcast too or whether you want to have your modem and router all in one device or in two separate devices.

When I buy a modem, I try to get one with the latest tech so that I don’t need to upgrade it very soon to get faster service. Currently, the top of the line units have DOCSIS 3.1. That supports some pretty crazy speeds, but as long as you get DOCSIS 3.0 you should be fine. Being a huge nerd, I like to have a separate modem and a separate router. I don’t have Comcast telephone service. I bought our current modem back in 2012 for $89.99 from Newegg and it is a Linksys DPC3008-CC R. It looks like it’s only $37 now.

I don’t remember the details of how you actually do the replacement once you have the new unit in hand. I think you just plug in the new model and then call Comcast support. They’ll ask you for the “MAC Address” of your new unit which is printed on the device somewhere. After that you can ask them how to return your old modem.

In my case, I broke even on the cost of the modem in 9 months and ever since then I’ve been saving $10/month. If you’re willing to get a little nerdy, it’s an easy way to save some money.

benmartens April 5, 2017 Geek

Stop Spam Calls

Lately my cell phone has been getting two or three spam calls a day. Even when it’s not that bad I’m still getting one every day or two. Technology to the rescue!

There’s a free app (Android, iOS and Windows Phone) called Truecaller. It replaces your phone app. When you get a call, it looks up the number to determine if other users have marked it as spam. You can even tell it to block the call completely if it’s really sure that it is spam.

This app has been a big help for me. Previously I’ve answered pretty much every call because I don’t know if it’s a call from our alarm monitoring company or not. (Those calls come from a variety of different call centers.)

It still annoys me that we haven’t been able to solve the problem of spam calls, but at least this helps me reduce the amount of time that they suck out of my day.

benmartens April 4, 2017 Gadgets

Cool Weather

The Pacific Northwest is breaking all kinds of rain records this winter. For example, looking at the period between Oct 1 and Sept 30, we have already received more than the average rain for that entire period. But it’s not just the rain that has been unique this year. We’re also having much cooler temps.

March is over and by now we have usually enjoyed a few 60 degree (or even 70 degree) days mixed in with the standard “low 50s and rainy” weather. But not this year. KOMO posted an article a while back showing the history of the longest wait to reach 60 degrees. The record was April 11 back in 1954. We are rapidly climbing up the list! Tuesday and Wednesday are both forecast to be right around 60 so we’ll see how far we climb before we get a day at 60 or above.

  1. April 11: 1954
  2. April 8: 1957
  3. April 7: 1959
  4. April 4: 1950
  5. April 4: 1971
  6. April 3: 2002
  7. April 2: 1967
  8. March 31: 2000
  9. March 30: 1976
  10. March 29: 2003

In my head I hear the yodeling song from Cliffhanger on the Price Is Right.

[UPDATE] SeaTac had a high of 60 on April 4 so we tied for #4 on the list.

benmartens April 3, 2017 Weather

Sushi Go

“Ben, you’re a nerd. All these board games you’ve been writing about are too confusing and weird.” Never fear! I have a game for you too: Sushi Go.

The rules of Sushi Go can be explained in one minute. All the players are dealt cards. You look at your cards, play one card and then everyone passes their cards to the player next to them. You’re trying to build sets and matches but so is everyone else.

The game goes extremely quickly, but it’s a good introduction to “hand passing” games. This one is great for large groups that contain people who don’t play a lot of these games and/or include younger players. We often use this one as a filler when we only have a few minutes to play a game.

benmartens March 31, 2017 Gaming

Pandemic

If you look at a game of Pandemic, it feels a bit like Risk. There’s a map of the world and a bunch of little pieces on it. In Pandemic, however, all the players are working together to stop the outbreak of four different diseases. You can do a little bit of disease cleanup by visiting the various cities, but you’ll rapidly fall behind. To cure the disease, you need to collect cards that match the colors of the various diseases.

Each player has different skills that are represented by cards dealt at the beginning of the game. You might have special abilities to heal infected cities, cure diseases with fewer cards, or move players around the board. That mix of skills changes with each game.

This game is one of the hardest ones I’ve played. It’s a team game and it requires everyone to be playing with the same strategy. You can talk freely but still, it’s hard to keep it all in your head. I love it though! There’s a version for Android where you get to play all the characters and using that, I’ve been able to win a few times on the easy settings.

benmartens March 30, 2017 Gaming

Munchkin

Monday and Tuesday started with board game posts so let’s just go for a whole week of board games. Up today is “Munchkin“. This game starts off easy and gets more complicated as you play. Everyone starts off at Level 1 and is trying to become a Level 10 munchkin. You gain levels by defeating monsters that you encounter, and you defeat monsters by using items you have acquired and deals made with other players.

Every card you play has the ability to dramatically change the game and even change the rules of the game to some extent. The game is intentionally comical and open to definition. You’ll run into situations where the various rules conflict or are vague and you just get to argue it out. The instructions make this very clear from the start by explaining how to start the game. It says: “Decide who goes first by rolling the dice and arguing about the results and the meaning of this sentence and whether the fact that a word seems to be missing any effect.”

During the game you might find yourself as an elf carrying a flask of glue wearing pantyhose of giant strength, but if that all helps you defeat a maul rat then you just gained a level. Let’s just hope someone doesn’t curse you with a sex change.

There’s plenty of strategy and it takes a lot of concentration to figure out how to apply all the wild cards in your hand to win the game. I love this game but it’s on the complicated side and can take a while. If you somehow get bored of the base game, there are endless numbers of expansion packs available.

benmartens March 29, 2017 Gaming