Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The Day The Music Died

I signed up to play some preservice music on the piano at church before the service on Sunday. Whenever I play in church, I always remember a story that I just realized isn’t on my blog. Time to share it with the world…

When I lived in Jersey, my church in King of Prussia had a very consistent organist named Eunice. She was there every Sunday and she was good. But then… she went on vacation. For two weeks! Somehow the search for a replacement organist came around to me. They were really scraping the bottom of the barrel because I only played the piano and had barely ever sat at an organ. I did write about this briefly before. Here’s a quote from that post:

I definitely offered my own rendition of a couple hymns. As one guy put it, “I leaned over to my wife and said, ‘Wow Eunice is really having a bad day.’ Then my wife told me that Eunice was on vacation.”

That post must have been after the first week. The second week was even worse. Pastor wanted to use a special settings on the organ for one verse of a hymn. He got it all set up and said “Just press this button to switch to the special setting in between verses.” Easy enough? I bumbled my way through the hymn, pressed the button in between verses, pressed the keys and …. NOTHING. There was no sound coming out of the organ and I had no clue why. The congregation awkwardly started singing a cappella. I rebooted the organ to try and reset it to the default settings. That worked but it made big clunking sounds as it turned off an back on.

Strangely enough, after those two weeks of mistakes, they never asked me again. In retrospect, I either should have declined the request, or I should have just sucked up my pride and played one finger. Playing an organ is a LOT different than a piano even if you ignore the pedals because there is no sustain pedal. That difference is no ingrained in my brain.

benmartens March 23, 2017 Commentary

Martens Woodworks On Instagram

I’ve been using Instagram a lot more than Facebook. I get more interaction with random people who are interested in the same things as me, and it generally feels like a happier place.

I want to use Instagram even more to connect with the woodworking community, but I also don’t want to bombard friends and family who don’t care about that stuff. So I’m segmenting my posts under two accounts. The @benwmartens account will still be normal day-to-day, family-life pictures. The new @martenswoodworks account will have lots of pictures all related to woodworking and will show day to day progress along with the finished project.

If you like it all, it’s easy enough to just follow both, but I won’t be offended if you don’t like seeing lots of progress pictures for my projects.

Some day I dream of supplementing my income with woodworking and maybe this is the first step down that path. For now, it’s still totally a hobby but maybe I can start building a brand.

benmartens March 22, 2017 Site News, Woodworking

WiFi Channels

If you could see inside my house when I’m trying to fix network troubles, you’d see me walking around staring at my phone running an app like WiFi Analyzer. It shows all the different WiFi signals and their strengths. A quick glance at that app around my house quickly shows a lot of neighbors with improperly configured routers.

Here’s a tip: Your router probably lets you choose from 11 different channels for the 2.4Ghz radio. You should never use any channel other than 1, 6 or 11. Each channel bleeds over into it’s neighbors and that overlap causes interference for people on the other channels. So if you use channel 3, you’re messing up the spectrum for twice as many people as you need to. This chart shows how the channels overlap:

In most cases, you can randomly pick 1, 6 or 11 and be ok. If you want to go the extra mile, use an app to analyze your wireless spectrum and then pick one of those three that have the least amount of usage.

 

benmartens March 21, 2017 Geek

WiFi

My love for UniFi WiFi points from Ubiquiti is a bit of a rollercoaster ride. I installed it at church and at our house. The church system is rock solid. The one at our house has caused me a lot of pain and I was pretty convinced one of the two access points had hardware problems so I unplugged it and put it on the shelf.

Recently, Tyla has been having WiFi troubles on her laptop. My first reaction was that the other access point was probably going bad so I started looking into the new distributed wireless (or mesh wireless) network devices like Eero, Orbi and Google WiFi. Those systems aim to simplify the deployment of multiple access points around your house.

I realized that they aren’t generally targeted at me. They lack some of the advanced features that I like and they generally use a wireless connection to sync up the access points. I have my house wired with CAT6 ethernet and want to have everything wired, if possible, including my access points. WiFi has been around since the turn of the century and it has been causing me pain ever since. If a device in my house doesn’t move, it gets a hardwired network connection. Wireless is reserved for laptops, phones and Internet of Things devices that don’t have a wired option. So that’s my long way of saying that I don’t want to have access points that connect to the mothership via wireless.

Before plunking down more money on some replacement hardware, I decided to give the UniFi system one more try. After a fresh look, I realized I should check the network cable that runs downstairs into the living room where I had the “broken” access point hooked up. Sure enough, one of the 8 wires is not connected! Duh. I used a different jack on the other side of the room and it worked fine. I’ll have to go back and figure out why that one jack doesn’t work, but for now, I’m up and running.

I flashed the firmware on both access points to the latest version, adjusted the placement of both access points to provide optimum coverage around our house, and now I wait to see if there are any more wireless networking reports from Tyla.

benmartens March 20, 2017 Geek

Last.fm

Spotify is some of the best money that we spend every month. It’s awesome to have easy access to “all” the music. A while back, I clicked the button in the app to keep a history of all the songs that I listen to on my Last.fm account.

Now that i’ve been using this for a couple months, it’s fun to see my listening trends. You can actually view my profile too, but here are some of the stats I picked up.

Top artists:

  1. Ben Folds
  2. Jonathan Coulton
  3. Amos Less
  4. The Senat
  5. John Mayer

 

Top albums:

  1. The Senate – Live at Solstice
  2. Ben Folds – The Best Imitation of Myself
  3. Jonathan Coulton – Best. Concert. Ever.
  4. fun. – Some Nights
  5. Howard Shore – The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring

 

Top Tracks:

  1. The Shins – Caring is Creepy
  2. Matt Nathanson – Come On Get Higher
  3. Tyrone Wells – Use Sombody
  4. The Barr Brothers – Even the Darkness Has Arms
  5. Matt Hires – Honey, Let Me Sing You A Song

 

I don’t quite understand how they do these calculations. For example, if I’ve listened to the “Live at Solstice” album 40+ times, why aren’t those tracks in my “top tracks” list? But regardless, I can wholeheartedly recommend all of that music. It’s a pretty good cross section of what I listen to at work. I don’t have that feature enabled when I play music at home or on my phone since then I would be flooded with Elijah’s music.

benmartens March 17, 2017 Music

Coldest Winter

We have only been in our current house for 5 winters, but this is by far the most we’ve ever paid to heat it during the winter. One month was 40% higher than our previous max and we’ve even had the thermostat turned down lower than it was in previous years.

Cliff Mass has a post up showing that this is the coldest Seattle winter in 32 years! It hasn’t been hard to notice the extended periods of colder than average weather. I hope that it breaks soon and we can start getting some spring weather, but there’s no end in sight.

This cold wet weather has made for a pretty spectacular ski season, or so I’ve heard. I think I’ll be finishing up the year with 0 ski days.

benmartens March 16, 2017 Weather

Shop Vac Cart

I’ve really enjoyed having dust collection in my workshop, even if it’s just a simple shop vac with a cyclone. I kept it under my workbench, but the mess of wires and hoses basically meant that it stayed there. It was a pain to dig it out to vacuum out the car or anything like that.

I finally made a version of Jay Bates’s shop vac cart. The cyclone hangs above the shop vac so it uses less floor space and gives me a space to collect all the various attachments. It’s also very easy to move around.

The project was pretty simple but I’m always amazed at my ability to mess up the easiest things. The end result is good enough though and I think it will be helpful. One negative that I didn’t forsee is that the hose connection is now ~5 feet off the ground and most of my dust collection parts are near the ground. That just means I need a little bit longer hose but maybe that will be offset by being able to move the cart closer to the machine I’m using.

benmartens March 15, 2017 Woodworking

Kingdom Builder Strategy Guide

Logan got Kingdom Builder for Christmas and a few days later I discovered it was available on my phone. I’ve been playing it since then. A lot.

Whenever we head to Wil Wheaton’s Table Top Games videos on YouTube to see a video of them playing it. They have an episode for Kingdom Builder and it’s a good way to understand what the game is about. It’s a deep strategy game with very simple rules. There’s some luck based on what type of resource you draw each turn, but the game is mostly skill.

I couldn’t find a nice strategy guide for the game so I thought I’d make an attempt. I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve played through a few hundred matches so I figure I can at least get one started.

  1. Before you put down any pieces, come up with a strategy for your game.
    1. What kinds of scoring cards are out? Which ones will give you the most points? Some cards like Knights are worth a lot of points and others like Citizens are worth less. If, for example, there aren’t any high scoring cards out, then you might want to focus more on building next to castles. If the game involves Farmers, you need to figure out how to get your pieces into all four quadrants.
    2. What special tiles are in play? If there is a Hermit card turned up and you don’t play on the Horse tile, you’re probably not going to win. There are other good matches too. If Merchants are in play, try to grab the Boat tile if it is available. The Watchtower tile is a great one if you’re using either Discoverer or Knight cards.
    3. Usually it’s hard to focus on all three scoring cards at once, so pick the two highest value ones and focus on those first. Get points with the third card when you’re stuck with the first two toward the end of the game.
  2. Be careful where you place your tile. That sounds obvious, but those first two or three turns can make or break your game. For example, let’s say that you have a Farmers card and you need to get a piece in all four quadrants. If your first place touches all of the different land types, then it’s going to be very hard to get to all four quadrants. But if you can play those first pieces, get a tile, and only touch one resource type, you have a good chance of being able to play somewhere else on your next turn. On the flip side, if you’re trying to get points with Lords or Citizens, then you might want to spread out and touch lots of different resources so that you can keep growing those settlements.
  3. The special location tiles come in two main categories. A winning game will probably make use of some from each category.
    1. Relocation: These let you move pieces to other locations after they have been played. This is useful for breaking up settlements in a Hermits game but has other value too.
    2. Additional pieces: These let you play more than 3 pieces in a game. It’s really hard to win a game if you still have 10 pieces left when someone else goes out.
  4. The value of the Horse tile cannot be understated. You can make up for a lot of mistakes with this tile and also grab a lot of extra points. If you have both tiles it’s pretty easy to travel around the board and get most/all of the castle points. The horse tile is a great first play too because if you happen to be touching the next resource card, you could play your horse tile first and hop away leaving you free to play elsewhere on the board.
  5. With every play, think about how many points you’re getting. Sometimes you can get 4 or 5 points with a single piece (play next to a castle next to water and/or mountains with Fisherman and/or MIners in play.) The total points in a game will vary widely by the type of cards in play (I’ve seen winning scores below 40 and above 115), but in general, you need to get at least one point for every piece. If you have to put down a piece with 0 points (or even 0.5 points), think about how you can move it somewhere else on the board with one of your relocation tiles.
  6. Get your own house in order first, but as you’re playing out your strategy, consider opportunities to block your opponents. For example, if they don’t have a Horse and they’re building a long row for Knights, a single piece in their way might keep them away from a lot of points. Also, in a game of Hermits, don’t leave an isolated single resource open. That’s a surefire point for someone else who draws that resource card.
  7. The randomness in the game stems from having to draw a terrain card at the start of every turn. You can decrease the risk by know what you’ll do with every different terrain card. They might not all be equally awesome, but hopefully you can do something with every card to get you some points.

This is one of my favorite board games. You can explain the rules to a new player in a couple minutes but it will take a lifetime to master it.

benmartens March 14, 2017 Gaming

Survival Rations

We recently had another bi-annual Survival Sunday. I feel compelled to do less checking for the spring one than the fall one since we generally lose power in the fall, but we did do a few key things like changing out our stored gas and removing food items that were near expiration.

We’re slowly refining the types of foods that we keep in the survival rations box. Here are a few of the considerations:

  1. Canned items generally last longer. I don’t like to buy things unless they’re good for another 1-1.5 years. Otherwise we just keep replacing them over and over again.
  2. Don’t go overboard. In all but the most extreme cases, you’ll still be able to access the normal food that’s in your house and I bet you can coast a long time just on that even if the power is out.
  3. Stock up on water. A family of three will use ~1.5 gallons a day just for drinking. Our goal is to have enough on hand for 3-5 days. Our emergency rations are largely made up of water jugs!
  4. Buy food that you’re willing to eat in a normal situation. We don’t like to toss the food so if it’s not going to last until the next Survival Sunday, we put it in the pantry and eat it.

Everybody has their own comfort level with this stuff so find your own and plan accordingly. I feel good about the extra level of backup we get from a few hours of work per year, but I also know that we are almost certainly never going to dig into these supplies for a real emergency.

benmartens March 13, 2017 Commentary

Best of YouTube

Colin Furze is blowing up YouTube. Almost literally. I recommend that you watch almost all of his videos, but here’s his most recent one. He made a giant fire tornado with fireworks on top to celebrate hitting 4 million subscribers to his channel. Tim, I expect something like this at your next Fourth of July party.

Matt Cremona is an accomplished woodworker, but he’s been spend the past months building a giant bandsaw mill in his back yard. This is a big step up from the chainsaw mill he used before. After cutting some “smaller” logs, he was finally able to load test it with a 53″ cut. The saw didn’t even bog down. If I still lived in Minneapolis I’d be excited to visit Matt and buy some wood from him. It’s probably not economical to drive from Seattle though.

As part of Elijah’s bedtime routine, he gets to watch a few minutes of YouTube. Originally it was usually something like a music video from Caspar Babypants but now he just asks for something and we pull it up. For the past few weeks he has been asking exclusively for Lego videos. That’s how we stumbled across a YouTube user called JANGBRiCKS. He’s a full time YouTuber and he spends his time working on his enormous Lego layout and reviewing new sets that come out. Most of the videos are too long for Elijah’s bedtime, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t continued watching them after finishing putting Elijah to sleep.

benmartens March 10, 2017 Links