Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Star Wars

howstarwarsconqueredcoverI recently finished reading How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. The first half of the book talked about how the original trilogy came into being, but I enjoyed the second half more which talked about the cultural impact of the movies and why the prequels were flops. The biggest revelation to me was about why George Lucas keeps changing the movies as he releases them on different mediums: in his mind, the movies are a work in progress. He had to make a bunch of compromises to get them produced and as he has more technology and money available, he’s able to remove some of those compromises. Makes sense to me.

After reading the book, I wanted to rewatch the movies (at least the original trilogy.) I’m kind of a fringe Star Wars fan. I really enjoy the movies and can quote some of the famous lines, but I couldn’t have told you the full story arc. It’s impressive how well those movies hold up. The editing was well-paced and the special effects generally don’t look too bad. The battle maneuvers and tactics are the only thing that really makes me realize their age. People just stand up in the hallways and shoot at each other with some random ducking thrown in. And why can’t anybody use a sight on their rifle? Maybe you wouldn’t miss people at point blank range if you weren’t shooting from the hip!

Thank you to Ken for loaning me the BluRay edition of the movies!

benmartens September 7, 2016 Books

Soggy Fair

We have some pretty good fairs in the area. The Puyallup Fair is one of the biggest in the country with over a million annual visitors. The sheer size is fun to see, but lately Tyla and I have been going to the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe. It’s smaller, but it has everything we need and it’s not so crazy crowded. I generally take a day off so we can go during the week when the crowds are even smaller.

This year I took the Friday off before the long Labor Day weekend. It was a good choice in terms of the four day weekend, but it was a terrible choice in terms of weather. It DUMPED. You know it rains a lot in the fall, winter and spring around here, but you may not know that it rarely rains hard enough to need an umbrella. But Friday we had actual rain storms come through with torrential downpours. Thankfully I had packed a big golf umbrella in the truck and that kept us dry. There were a few breaks between the soaking events so we were still able to have a good time and see lots of things, but it will forever be the day we refer to as, “Remember when we went to the fair in the rain?”

Elijah was finally big enough to go on some of the rides, but he wasn’t big enough to ride them all by himself. That’s how I ended up riding a little kid’s ride all alone with my son in the rain. Plus five daddy points. His favorite activity at the fair is riding the pedal tractors that the antique tractor club always brings. He was there for a solid 20 minutes and we still had to pull him away.

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benmartens September 6, 2016 Family

Chrome

chromelogoThe first web browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator. Sometime around the release of Internet Explorer 4 (1997), I switched over to IE and I’ve used that almost exclusively since then. Coincidentally, I ended up working with one of the guys responsible for the Trident engine which powered IE4 and is credited for giving it such a big market share over Netscape.

I’ve been on board with IE for almost 20 years, but now I’m switching away. It was great for a long time but it has atrophied in recent years. The focus seems to have shifted to the new Edge browser and while that is very fast and standards compliant, it also lacks a plugin model so I can’t use things like Ad Block Plus or LastPass. That’s a non-starter for me.

So goodbye Microsoft browsers and hello Google Chrome. It’s hard to find accurate statistics, but pretty much everyone agrees that a majority of users use Chrome with the remaining users scattered among IE, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and others. Chrome has a huge array of extensions available for it. My favorite are Ad Block Plus, Delicious, and LastPass. Of course if you include too many extensions, you’ll bog the browser down, but generally it’s very snappy and works with almost all websites. (There are still a couple old company intranet sites that require to me to use IE.) You can sign in to the browser and let it sync your favorites and extensions across your various computers.

Switching to a new program after two decades takes a little while to get used to, but I’ve been using Chrome for about a month and I don’t think I’ll be going back for quite a while unless Edge can really bring the fight to Chrome.

benmartens September 5, 2016 Geek

Generator Interlock

generatorinletAs you may remember, we’ve lost power at our house three times in the last 12 months and we’ve lost it quite a bit in the past two. We have used our new generator for the two latest incidents, and it worked great, but I’m a lazy human. Running an extension cord through the house and feeding it around the house to run various things is annoying. It was time for an upgrade.

We had an electrician come by and he installed an interlock kit in our electrical panel. Now we have a 240v male plug on the outside of our house. When the power goes out, I shut off the power from the street, flip over to power from this plug and then plug the generator into the house. We can then choose which circuits to power from the generator. We’ll be able to easily keep the fridges running, power up the furnace, and have hot water from our tankless water heater. And if we have to pick and choose because the generator can’t provide enough power, it’s just a flick of a circuit breaker to choose a different combination of circuits. It will be really nice to have light switches and everything like that working as normal.

After we bought the generator, we joked that it meant the power would never go out again. That wasn’t true. We’ll see how long it takes before we get to really use this new capability. The first big wind storm of the fall is the one that usually knocks us out so we might not have to wait too long…

benmartens September 2, 2016 Home Improvement

Adjustable Watering

opensprinkler_v20s_5-500x500Last year was very dry and, despite my attempts to give the yard the right amount of water, it still died. This year has been pretty dry as well, but the yard is still green. The difference? I’m using the “Zimmerman Method” this year.

Our OpenSprinkler system has a setting that lets you enable a calculation for how much water to apply to the yard. If I had some rain sensors in the yard, those would be handy, but it turns out that you can get a pretty good idea of how much to water based on some variables from weather data. You can read the full explanation on the OpenSprinkler github page, but here’s the basic idea:

Zimmerman uses 3 pieces of data: Mean humidity ( defined as (min+max)/2 ), mean temp, and precipitation.
They are weighted in the following manner:

  • 30 – mean humidity
  • (mean temp – 70)*4
  • Precipitation * 200

Those are all divided by 100 and added together, then 100 is added for a scale, which is then bound to 0 to 200.

That gives you a percentage and your normal schedule is adjusted by that percentage. So for example, today it is cloudy, cooler and kind of humid. The watering schedule is only 32% of normal.

This setting has worked remarkably well. At the end of the year I’ll do a full comparison of the water used between the two summers, but the data is already looking pretty good. We’re using more water at the times we need it and saving money other times.

This sprinkler controller is basically someone’s grown up hobby project, but it sure is handy. It has definitely paid for itself already.

benmartens September 1, 2016 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Fantasy Football Pre Season

fantasyfootballIt’s almost time to start up the weekly fantasy football posts again! We had our draft on Friday so the teams are set. Yahoos super accurate, never incorrect stat predictions say that I’ll score the most points this season based on the people we drafted.

As a quick reminder, Austin won last year. Here were the full standings:

Austin
Logan
Ben
Dad
Luke
Andy
Tim
Jim

The first game of the season is September 8. Good luck everyone!

benmartens August 31, 2016 Fantasy Sports

Survival Sunday

incaseofzombiesLast year we stocked up to prepare for a 3-4 day emergency so we’d still have food, water, etc. Those kits rapidly expire so we needed a way to stay on top of it. Today was the First Bi-Annual Survival Sunday. Here’s our current list of activities for these Survival Sundays:

  • Pour stored gas into vehicles and buy new. Add fuel stabilizer to gas cans.
  • Fill propane
  • Check food stores. Eat anything that’s going bad in the next 12 months. Replace.
  • Check water rations. Replace as needed.
  • Go through survival kit checking expiration dates on medicine, charges on batteries, etc.
  • Start up the generator and test it.
  • Check ammo supplies
  • Check expiration date on fire alarms and test alarm system
  • Check car first aid kits for expiration dates
  • Check fire extinguishers

Aside form getting a little too rambunctious with the smoke for the alarm test (our alarm kept going off), the day was a success. It’s probably totally unnecessary, but who knows, maybe we’ll be glad we did it some day. Given how often we’ve lost power in the last 12 months, some of this will probably come in handy. Bundling all this work into a single afternoon makes it a little less daunting than spreading it out over the year and forgetting everything.

benmartens August 30, 2016 Home Improvement

Spreading Gravel

The driveway/parking lot at church is part gravel and part blacktop. Our friendly neighborhood rapscallions enjoy flying around the gravel circle and throwing gravel everywhere. Over time that has led to some big ruts and potholes that collect puddles and make mud. With wet weather on the horizon, it was time to do some repairs.

I ordered 12 yards of 5/8″ minus from Pacific Topsoil and had that delivered on Friday. On Saturday, Logan and I rented a small loader backhoe tractor to spread it around. It was the first time I’ve towed anything with my truck and it was awesome! The rental website claims that this was a 6000 pound trailer and tractor combo.

Neither Logan nor I knew the best way to spread the gravel around but we figured it out as we went. By the end we had a good method going. Hopefully the parts we did at the beginning hold up ok too.

Tyla brought Elijah to church near the end of the project and he loved moving the gravel and driving the tractor. He also thought it was pretty cool that the truck was towing a trailer. He had to ride with me to pull the tractor back to Home Depot.

Being a trustee at church is a lot of extra time and work, but days like today are fun!

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benmartens August 29, 2016 Home Improvement

Best Of YouTube

Jimmy Diresta starts off this week’s collection with a demonstration of a cool new CNC tool. It’s a standard router on a small handheld platform. You move it in the general direction that it needs to go and then it uses a camera to know where it is and make small adjustments to perfectly cut the design you loaded into it. This device has been in the works for quite a while and it looks like they are making a press push this week so there are lots of other videos available from other makers if you want more info.

The crazy Colin Furze is at it again. He built an ENORMOUS 360 degree swing in his back yard. The axle is the same height as his gutters. I hope his life insurance company doesn’t watch this. If you like this video, check out the two videos right before it on his channel where he shows you how he designed and made it.

And finally we’ll end with some mind bending physics talk. How can time be faster and slower at the same time depending on your observation point?

benmartens August 26, 2016 Commentary

Tree Removal

We had two small cherry trees along our very short driveway. The blossoms looked beautiful in the spring but the trees were ugly the rest of the year. They were pruned very oddly and were starting to die off. The one closer to the house had a crazy root structure with a number of very large roots partially above the surface. It was time for them to go before they died more and started dropping branches.

Logan was kind enough to help me out with the whole process. We made quick work of them with a chainsaw and manual branch cutters. As we cut them up, I was amazed at how many of the branches were totally dead. Taking it down was a good decision. We each took a load of the branches to Pacific Topsoil and we were done with that part.

Then there were the stumps. Oh yeah. When I was planning this project, I figured we would just dig them out and maybe use the truck to help pull them out. A little digging revealed that would be a huge project and i was also nervous about the water, gas, communication and irrigation lines that run up that strip of property. Brute force didn’t seem like a good approach so we rented a stump grinder instead.

The first stump was very quick but the second one took us about two and a half hours because of the big network of large roots near the surface. We made a mountain of wood chips but we got it all done. Now I just have to feed those chips into my yard waste bin over the next week or two if I can’t find a use for them.

This fall we will be planting at least one new tree in that spot and then next spring I think we’ll make some planter boxes to start a small garden. It will be tiny compared to our neighbors beautiful garden, but it will still be delicious.

Logan, thanks for helping so much with this project!

stumpgrinding

benmartens August 25, 2016 Home Improvement