We had a family company picnic at a local park. Elijah had a blast and loved the merry go round on the playground. When he sat in the middle and spun, it reminded me of one of those “choose your character” screens from a video game so I made it into an animated gif and chuckled:
My parents have been building a fantastic new garage at their house. I thought it would look good with a new sign in it. I found some inspiration online, drew it in Inkscape and then took it to the laser cutter at work. The sign is made out of two sheets of 1/4″ MDF. The bottom is just a circle and the top has all the shapes cut out of it. I also cut the white portions out of 1/8″ plywood and put that under each of the white pieces. That gave it a raised look which I really like. After I got it all done, I realized I probably should have put “Martens Garage” instead of just my Dad’s name because Mom uses it for her project too but, oh well. Maybe I’ll have to come up with something else that has Mom’s name on it.
I use Adobe Premiere Elements for all my video editing and it does a great job. I rarely run into any feature limitations. However, it does cost $90. If you’re looking for something a little better than the default editor that came with your operating system but you don’t want to spend any money, check out Davinci Resolve. They have a very powerful version of their video editor available completely for free! I have not used it myself, but I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about it. They’ve been in the video editing market for quite a while and their video editor has really impressive features including color correction. I’m considering switching over just to get some of those features.
These blog posts were a great idea. Now I’m not just getting lost in YouTube videos, I’m researching content for this site!
First up is the ultimate Nerf gun. What it lacks in maneuverability, it makes up for in power and wow factor. There are a lot of other great videos on this guy’s channel too.
Hungry? How about a burger wrapped in bacon and filled with mac and cheese?
And finally, Colin Furze is at it again. This time he has the most outrageous doorbell you’ve ever seen. Spoiler alert: it involves an Uzi.
I bought a router table a while back but I’ve never had a good place to use it. I kept it along the wall in the garage and when I wanted to use it, I had to drag it out and either use it on the floor or put it on a folding table. It was worth it for big projects but for small things I often skipped it. Now that I have more space in the shop area, I decided to build a cart to give the router a more permanent home and give me some additional storage space. It’s just a simple cabinet on wheels with two drawers but I’m excited to have it completed, and it was wonderful to just drive to Home Depot and throw a couple sheets of plywood in the truck!
The city of Redmond puts on a parade/carnival called Derby Days in July every year. Tyla and Elijah have gone in the past but this was my first year. We went there mainly for the parade and Elijah loved it. In true Redmond style, it was full of politicians and special interest groups, but that all went over Elijah’s head and he had fun watching everything go by. His favorite were the fire trucks at the beginning and the street sweeper at the end. A local Mexican restaurant, Ixtapa, had a fantastic showing with lots of dancers, a mariachi band and 20 horses.
After the parade we walked past Ooba’s Mexican restaurant. They have an outdoor restaurant and Elijah said “That looks delicious!” It was almost lunch time and Tyla and I love that place too so we stopped in. Elijah ate more food than I think I’ve ever seen him eat in one sitting. It was great to see because he was very sick for almost a week before that. He’s obviously rebuilding a lot of the mass that he lost.
We headed back to the car after the parade without checking out too much of the carnival, but it was a nice morning and we avoided the rain that came later in the day.
I finally got around to watching The LEGO Movie. It’s… awesome! Everything is awesome! The cast reads like a list of my favorite actors: Will Arnett, Alison Brie, Charlie Day, Will Ferrell, Will Forte, Morgan Freeman, and Nick Offerman and Chris Pratt. The kid in me loved the story and the geek in me loved the awesome computer graphics.
Long time followers of my nerd adventures may remember that I’ve made a few movies of my own. I finally uploaded them to YouTube for your amusement.
Up first is a stop motion video made with cousins Tim, Mark and Ryan. It was probably during Christmas and I’d guess it was around 1987 or 88. We did it in Tim’s basement with his VHS camcorder. There was a feature that would record a few frames with the press of a button. When we had the idea, I remember talking about who was going to build each piece. Before Mark went back to his house to build everything, we typed in a bunch of reminders on his awesome Casio calculator watch. The video took forever and we had a “script” change at the end. As a Lego man was moving across the crosswalk, he fell down perfectly in the middle of one of the recording clips. We went with it (what else can you do?) and turned it into a medical emergency. It’s a riveting story. I sped up the video below so that you can get your boredom in a shorter amount of time.
I thought this project was incredibly cool so a couple years later, I decided to try it again on my own. I borrowed our neighbor’s VHS-C camcorder (so “tiny”!) and set up a table in our basement. The city I built was much simpler than the first one and the story was non-existant.
And last, but certainly not least, I fell down a rabbit hole in college. My Junior and Senior year and then part of the year after graduation were spent doing a Lego movie on the computer. This was about 2000-2002 so there were none of the fancy Lego CAD programs available. Instead, I painstakingly built up a library of Lego pieces in a program called POVRay. It was a free tool that did raytracing but the modeling was all done in text. So to build a piece, I’d start with a rectangle, add some height and draw the nubs on top. I even had versions of the pieces with the word LEGO writen on top of each nub. Something like a Lego person is a huge amount of code. I had posted it to the web a while back and found it on archive.org. This link shows you what it takes to draw a single Lego character. Before I got too deep into the project, I built a short little sample video based on the old Budweiser Wazabi commercial.
The pieces were incredibly detailed and it literally took years to build it all. I also wrote a bunch of crazy math functions to animate the camera movement through the virtual world and also to animate things like walking characters. Rememember that since it is all text based input, “walking” means manually adjusting the rotation of various geometric shapes while translating the whole object forward. It was crazy complicated, but obviously I really enjoyed it for whatever reason. It was kind of relaxing to sit down for a while every night and “build” more pieces from scratch and at a time when I had very little money, it was fun to have limitless amounts of Legos to play with.
After spending eons on the graphics, I put about 30 seconds of thought into the story and here’s the result:
It’s not too far-fetched to say that this project got me my job at Microsoft. It took about 11 minutes to render a single frame of the movie (on my P2 350Mhz computer) and there were 2538 frames. That comes out to about 20 days of non-stop computing power. But oh yeah, don’t forget that I screw up a lot so I had to redo a bunch of it. To get it all done more quickly and to enter a programming contest at Purdue, I wrote a distributed rendering program. POVRay could be controlled via the command line so you would install POVRay and my client app on your computer. A central server would hand out individual frames for all the clients to render and then the client would send back the final image. (Archive.org has a copy of the design document for this project.) It actually worked and saved me a bunch of time. Not only that, I won the programming contest which netted me an original XBox and an HP Jornada PocketPC. But better yet, the guy who ran that comptetition went on to work at Microsoft. When I was looking for a job, JimM helped me reconnect with him and I ended up working in his team for the next six years!
So yes, this Lego project was ridiculously complex and within a few months of me releasing that video, there were bigger and better Lego rendering tools available. But I do think that finding fun projects like this area great way to stretch your abilities and feed your passion. This single project helped me in a lot of interviews when I was exiting college and it taught me a lot about programming.
My truck came with big “FX4” stickers on the panels behind the rear tires. They signify that my truck is four wheel drive and has the offroad package. They don’t look bad, but I really like the look of a clean truck, so I set about removing them.
I had some experience with this type of thing before. When we bought the Escape, Ford of Kirkland put their stupid little star decal on the back. That really frustrated me and was actually one of the reasons I didn’t even call them when I was looking for somebody to sell me a truck. Don’t put your stupid $0.50 advertising sticker on my big purchase! Anyway, the first thing I did when I brought it home was use a hair dryer to heat up that sticker and then I carefully removed it. A little Goo Gone cleaned up the remaining residue.
So having that knowledge in hand and knowing that lots of other people have successfully removed the decals from their trucks, I gave it a shot. I used a heat gun on low temperature to just raise the temp a little and then picked at the decal with my fingernail. It peeled right off. I saw plenty of people online say that the heat gun isn’t necessary if the decal is pretty new. I put some Goo Gone over the area and there was no sign it had ever been there.
I also removed the EcoBoost badges from under the side mirrors. That was a little trickier because they had some bulk to them. I used a piece of floss in a sawing motion to loosen it up and then the badges fell off. They left behind a sticky pad which peeled off in one piece. Again, Goo Gone helped clean it up completely and voila. Done!
The other badges on the truck have holes through the body so if I can’t remove them without a lot of extra work.
Below is a photo of what the truck looks like now, and here is a link to a photo of it before in case you need a reminder.
Good news, my bicycle now has an EcoBoost engine in it.
Two of Elijah’s favorite TV shows are Thomas the Train and Bob the Builder. As we were watching Bob the Builder one night, I had an idea for a video mashup…
Plasti Dip Badges
Tim turned me on to Plasti Dip. It’s kind of like a spray on rubber coating. I’ve toyed around with it a bit in the past, but I really liked what he did on his truck by covering the emblems with it. So I decided to copy him.
One of the great parts about Plasti Dip is that you can just peel it off whenever you decide you don’t want it anymore so there’s not a lot of concern with applying it incorrectly. The consensus on YouTube seems to be that you mask off the area around the emblem but leave a buffer around the emblem. You spray four or five coats onto the unmasked area and then carefully peel off everything but the emblem. Here’s a link to one of the videos that I found most helpful.
I did excatly that and it worked remarkably well. There were no problems geting it to break right at the ege of the emblem. I love the way it turned out and now I want to do the rest of the badges on the truck. The two F150 emblems by the side mirrors should be similar but I’m still deciding about the Ford emblems. I think it would look neat to only Plasti Dip the blue part of the emblem but that’s a bit tricky.