Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Caboose Vacation

Tyla came across a caboose on the southern end of Puget Sound that you could rent as a vacation home. It was available on her birthday weekend, it was in an area that we haven’t visited much, and Elijah loves trains so it seemed like the perfect fit. We headed down there last weekend and had a wonderful time.

The caboose has been nicely remodeled inside. They doubled the width of it so that you actually have a little room to stretch out. The main body of the caboose has the entry area, two sets of bunk beds, and a living room with a TV. The extended area has the kitchen, queen bed and a bathroom. The only interior door is to the bathroom so it’s a cozy setting.

The property overlooks the South Basin of Puget Sound and there are stairs leading down to the water so you can explore the shore and use the provided kayaks. We took advantage of the kayaks for short trips each day. Elijah was able to sit on my lap while I paddled.

I know that tides have been around for a while, but we were still amazed at how much water was moving in and out twice a day. The little cove by the caboose was probably 6-8 feet deep but it completely drained out with each low tide.

These rental properties often include a book where guests can leave a comment. They’re usually pretty generic, but it’s such a great opportunity to leave a funny/awkward message. Here are a couple that I thought about using:

  • Thanks for letting me poop in your house.
  • We came here to celebrate my beautiful wife’s birthday. My ugly wife doesn’t get birthday trips.

This concludes a busy month of vacations and adventures for us. There’s still more fun on the calendar, but I think we’re looking forward to a little time at home too.

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benmartens August 11, 2016 Family, Travel

Road Angles

How steep is that crazy hill by your house? Are they steep enough to ski if covered by snow? Hills look a lot different from a car than they do from foot or on skis.

It turns out that roads aren’t very steep at all. A good ski run is 15-25 degrees of slope with the craziest runs being up near 40 degrees. The steepest you’ll get on most roads is 5 degrees and that is certainly accompanied by warning signs. Most hills on the highway are barely 1 degree.

I know this thanks to a fun display on my new truck. It shows the pitch and roll of the truck as well as the how much the front wheels are turned. I suppose this might be important in certain off road situations, but mostly it’s just something fun to look at.

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benmartens August 10, 2016 Gadgets

Power Over Ethernet

I dare you to try and buy just one security camera. That’s how it started for me. Now I have six. I might need an intervention.

The last one I put up was an “extra” that we had lying around after we upgraded one of the cameras to a newer 1080p. This old one is only 640×480 but hey, why not use it? I decided to stick it on the back corner of the house, but that meant a long cable run from my network closet and there’s also no power nearby. Power over Ethernet (PoE) to the rescue!

In your standard ethernet cable, half of the wires are unused. The PoE specification defines a common way of transmitting power over those extra wires. This means that instead of running a network cable to the camera along with installing a new outlet nearby, I just had to run a network cable.

You also need something to combine the network signal and the power on one end and deconstruct it on the other end. For the injection side, you can either get a standalone plug/ethernet jack combo thing or you can purchase a switch with PoE built in. I chose the latter since I’ll be using this more in the future. My WiFi access points are already PoE so I can get rid of the two injector plugs and switch them over to this unit. And while it’s possible to buy PoE versions of these cameras, I don’t have those yet so I had to buy a splitter for the camera end.

The hardest part was running the wire 40 or 50 feet under my house and even that wasn’t hard, just dirty and cramped. Elijah loves it when I go down there and always asks if he can poke his head in there too.

The end result is a really nice view of either the cul-de-sac or our back yard depending on which way the camera is rotated. It’s not going to do much for security, but it’s fun to see Elijah playing during the day while I’m at work or just get a little extra assurance that everything is ok while we are away.

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P.S. If you are interested in setting up something like this at your house, I have a post detailing my basic setup. You can get more posts by searching my site for “foscam“.

benmartens August 9, 2016 Geek, Home Improvement

Tolt MacDonald Camping

Tyla and I used to go camping once or twice a summer before Elijah came along. Then we got a little gunshy about camping with a munchkin. We have visited Tyla’s family at a campsite multiple times but we’ve never slept at one overnight. It was time to try it out for real.

I picked Tolt MacDonald park as a location that wasn’t too far away but one that still has some interesting stuff for us to explore. It’s the same park where we had our family photos taken. I know there are lots of you who would have been happy to come along, but we wanted to do this first trip by ourselves to make some family memories and then be ready for bigger trips with more people.

We had great weather for the trip and Elijah loved it! We all went to bed together at night around the time the sun set and he was zonked so he fell asleep quickly. We spent Saturday down by the river playing the sand and we also drove over to Snoqualmie Falls. I haven’t been there since they redid the lower viewing area. They have it completely blocked off so that it’s impossible to get down to the rocks below the falls. I’m glad we had opportunities to explore there years ago before access was shut off.

Elijah got to roast his first marshmallows over a real campfire and eat meals outside. He loved it all and didn’t want to go home at the end. The only misstep we had was that he woke up at 6am on the last day and couldn’t get back to sleep. He hasn’t figured out how to keep quiet for very long so we went on a 2 mile hike through the woods to avoid waking up everyone else. All in all, the trip was a success though.

Personally, I was thrilled to go camping with the truck. It was so easy to toss everything in the back. And this was the first time we had fully set up our new tent. That tent is going to last us forever. It’s built really well and worked great. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for my air mattress. I vaguely remember a leak from the last time I used it years ago but for some reason it didn’t get thrown away. So I spent the second half of both nights laying on the ground. I remembered to toss it in the trash this time.

It was a really nice weekend and I’m excited that we can start adding these trips back into our summer schedules again.

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benmartens August 5, 2016 Family, Outdoors

Wheel of Time Recap

wheeloftimeOn August 15, 2014, I started reading the Wheel of Time book series. I had heard that it was good and decided to give the first book a try. After I finished it and was hooked, I realized that there are 14 books in the series and it’s pretty much a single story. The series seem almost arbitrarily divided into individual books. If you include the prequel (which I’m reading now), it’s 11,916 pages long, but it so totally worth the effort and time. The story starts off so simple and small and ends up enormous and complex in a glorious way. If you enjoy fantasy, I recommend that you check it out. It’s a big commitment and the writing isn’t always perfect, but it’s extremely good.

The writing actually gets better towards the end. Robert Jordan created the series and wrote the first 11 books in the series but he died before he could finish it. One of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson, was asked to finish it. He picked up Robert Jordan’s notes and did a wonderful job with the end of the story. He kept the style much the same but got rid of a few annoyances I had with Jordan’s writing.

I’m a bit surprised that this hasn’t turned into a Game of Thrones-style TV series. The Wikipedia page for the book series indicates that some TV deals are supposedly in the works but that doesn’t mean much. Hopefully something will eventually come out… and hopefully it does the books justice.

Now it’s time to pick a new book. It has been so long since I’ve read anything other than this series that it’s going to feel really weird to switch gears. Thank you all for the various recommendations that you’ve given me. My general algorithm for picking a new book is to look at my Good Reads “to read” list, sort by average rating, and then find the highest rated one that my library has in ebook format. Looking at that list, I think I might cleanse my pallet with a little non-fiction and check out “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe“.

benmartens August 4, 2016 Books

Facebook Data Retention

Many of us end up dumping a lot of information into Facebook. You might want to download that to have a local copy/backup. It turns out this is pretty easy to do. The Facebook help docs have these instructions:

  1. Click at the top right of any Facebook page and select Settings
  2. Click Download a copy of your Facebook data below your General Account Settings
  3. Click Start My Archive

It takes a while to generate your archive. You’ll receive an email when it’s done. Click the link in the email and save that file to your computer.

Now that you’ve got it all backed up, are you sure you want to leave it sitting on the Facebook site? I don’t. Deleting your data from Facebook is a lot harder than backing it up. They don’t provide an easy way to selectively delete data. Thankfully there are some tools to help you out. I like the Facebook Post Manager extension for Chrome. It’s not super fancy or easy to use, but it did the job for me. I wiped out most of my posts, shares and some of the photos from before 2016.

It takes a little while, but I think it’s worthwhile to not have that all sitting around. I’ve been doing the same thing with my email with MailStore for the past couple years. Did you know that until some time in the last year or so, no warrant was needed to read email that you left on the email server for more than six months?

In the big scheme of things, this probably makes no difference. There’s so much data about us out there already, that deleting my old Facebook posts doesn’t matter, but oh well, it makes me feel a little better. Facebook probably still keeps them around on their server but now random internet people can’t view them all.

benmartens August 3, 2016 Geek

Comcast Deals

comcast-hold-timeIt has been a year since I got my last Comcast deal. That deal only lasted for 12 months. I noticed my bill went up again so it was time to call back. I spent 35 minutes on hold and had to hang up for a meeting. I called back again and spent another 30 minutes on hold. I started thinking that nobody was ever going to answer. That call was happening on my desk phone at work so I called in parallel on my cell phone but this time I chose a different path through the phone menu. I also made a change by choosing not to receive the survey. I got an instant human answer. Coincidence? Dunno.

After some questions and some typing, I got my $90 bill lowered to $59. Previously it was $55 so $59 is pretty good. The deal lasts for 12 months. It’s their Internet Plus plan with 75Mbps down. We do lose some cable channels but we watch so little TV I don’t care. We basically just get the local channels now and somehow that package also includes HBO which I’ve never had in my life. It’s good enough for a couple sitcoms and football. I think we could save $10/month if we dropped TV completely, but for now, that’s a reasonable deal. If I could find a way to reliably watch football games for a similar price, I’d probably drop the TV part of our package.

The last two times I’ve called Comcast like this, I’ve basically gotten the “new subscriber” price with no contract. It will be helpful to know this going in so I can figure out what package/price I want to end up with.

benmartens August 2, 2016 Commentary

Allie The Alligator

Growing up, Allie the Alligator was one of our favorite pool toys. It was a giant blow up alligator. It was a treat to get it out since it was so hard to blow up. I pulled it out on this latest trip so Elijah and cousin David could see it. It’s a lot easier to blow up now that Dad has an air compressor! Here’s a shot of the boys on it and another one of me, ChrisH, Rachel and AngieH on it in 1988.

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benmartens August 1, 2016 Commentary

Tractors Galore

Elijah is a farm boy born in a subdivision. He LOVES tractors. He’s in heaven when we go back to Indiana because Dad and Mom have three tractors at their house. They have two John Deere lawn mowers and one Alis Chalmers WD 45 which Elijah has named Otis.

Elijah was already enjoying riding those around the property and even driving one of the John Deere tractors by himself. Then we met up with my high school buddy Scott. When I was in high school, his family owned a Deere dealership. Since then they sold it but they still own/manage the dealership and they have a bigger/newer shop. They sell everything from lawnmowers and blowers to top of the line combines, tractors, seeders and sprayers. Scott is the resident expert on their GPS equipment which is fun because that’s what I did in my internship at John Deere. It has changed a LOT since then.

We chatted with Scott and his dad for a while and then headed outside. Scott tossed me the key and told me to take Elijah for a drive in anything he wanted! Our first pick was a fairly new 8245R. Back in high school I used to help Scott’s family on the farm a little bit but it has been a very long time since I’ve driven anything like that. Thankfully he gave me a quick tutorial on all the buttons and switches and we were off on a quick tour of the parking lot. After that we climbed around in a combine (complete with refrigerator) and then took a 5000 series tractor with a bucket out for a longer drive. Elijah loves the smaller tractors with a bucket and no cab. Scott asked if there was anything else we wanted to drive and for some reason, Elijah wasn’t interested in any of the other huge equipment they had (bummer!) but he loves Gators. Scott found one of their brand new, high end models and let me take Elijah and Tyla for a ride. Those things FLY! He said a guy in their shop had it up over 50 but I kept it under 40 with a three year old sitting on my lap.

It was a fantastic outing. At the end of the day I asked Elijah for his favorite part of the day. He said, “Mr. Scott is so nice! He let us drive TRACTORS!” Thanks Scott and Ken! We loved it!

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benmartens July 29, 2016 Family, Travel