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Disaster Planning: Passwords

How many times have I written about making sure you have a good backup plan in place? I’m too lazy to look, but it’s a lot. I’ll summarize on the off chance that you don’t remember the plan:

Imagine that at this exact moment, your house explodes in a giant fireball. Nobody is injured but all of your computers are obliterated. Did you lose files? If the answer is yes then you’ve failed. Luckily, the remedy is very easy: sign up for an online backup service and run it on all your computers. I like crashplan.com but there are lots of other options. If you’re running that, no matter what happens to your physical machines, you can still get your files.

I saw two data loss situations happen in December and it reminded me of another thing to think about. Dad, I’ll use you as an example since it has a happy ending.

Dad has a good backup strategy in place. It’s not cloud backup because they’re in a limited bandwidth situation, but he does a good job with a physical offsite backup solution. While I was home at Christmas, his main hard drive died. The first thought is “Whew, at least I don’t have to worry about data loss.” But then when he went to restore from his backup drive, he realized that he didn’t (right away) remember his BitLocker password. The whole drive was encrypted so it was only useful if he had that master password. Thankfully he was able to get it and everything went smoothly from there.

But this is a good opportunity for us evaluate our own backup strategies. If you lose all your computers, can you still access/remember all your passwords? In our house we use lastpass.com, but there are other options. I’ve written about LastPass before. It’s a free tool that securely stores all of your passwords online and then you have one (very strong, very long) password that you use to access those passwords. I won’t go into details here, but it’s impossible to hack your account unless someone is able to guess your password. Tyla and I both know that master password so even if our house blows up and I’m in it, she’ll still be able to get to every password that we have.

Disaster planning can seem like a daunting task but if you just use a couple services (crashplan.com and lastpass.com), you’ll be covered in a huge range of situations.

benmartens January 15, 2016 Geek

Family Sign

I’ve had a couple laser cutter project posts recently, but the real reason I learned how to use it is because Tyla wanted a family sign. She found some on Etsy that she liked but we didn’t like the prices. My first thought was to cut them out on the bandsaw but I quickly realized that would take forever and I wasn’t sure I could cut out the smaller letters.

The laser cutter made quick work of the letters and then it was just a matter of painting them and painting the backing board. It has been really cold and wet around here but I managed to get it all done and assembled.

The dimensions on the sign came out as planned, but it feels pretty big now that it’s in place. It’s growing on me though. The nice thing is that this was made out of scrap wood with only a few hours of work. Most of the time was just doing the painting and letting that dry.

You can’t see it in the photo below, but the letters are made out of 1/8″ wood so they are raised up from the backing board. It’s a nice 3D effect and gives really crisp lines.

benmartens January 14, 2016 Maker, Woodworking

Indiana Trip

Tyla, Elijah and I flew back to Indiana for Christmas this year. Leading up to the trip, we had visions of a relaxing white Christmas with lots of fun activities. It was definitely a memorable trip, but it was not what we had expected!

It was over 60 degrees the first day so there was no snow for Christmas. Soon after we arrived, Elijah started throwing up and that lasted a few days. And on the last days of our trip, we had a freezing rain/sleet/snow storm that knocked out power for 3 hours, snowed us in for an afternoon, and took down three trees on the driveway. We had to saw our way out.

Still, with all that going on, we had a great time. Elijah’s sickness had a pretty big effect on our activities and even going to church as a big group, but there were plenty of smiles to go around. I was very thankful that we were at Mom and Dad’s house for Elijah getting sick like that. I kept imagining how much harder it would have been if that had happened on our trip to San Diego or something like that.

Dad has the new shop all buttoned up on the outside. The doors are in, the siding is up, and while we were there, he parked his Allis Chalmers in the garage for the first time! After 30 years of storing the battery inside and putting a tarp over the tractor every time he was done with it, this is really a game-changer! There’s still a lot of interior shop work to be done, but I’m glad he was able to get the exterior done before winter hit.

We took a lot of video while we were there with the intent of making another Christmas movie. That should be posted soon, but until then you can check out some photos.

benmartens January 13, 2016 Family, Travel

Seahawks Skyline Cutout

There are some pretty cool custom Seahawks signs floating around Etsy and local craft fairs. I decided to try making my own on the laser cutter. I spent a bunch of time in Inkscape modifying/drawing a logo. I don’t take much credit for the design. It’s largely a copy of other ones that I have seen, but I’m really happy with how this one turned out. It can be cut at any scale but this one is a little over 20″ wide.

benmartens January 12, 2016 Maker

Fantasy Football Super Stats

I wrote a tool for our fantasy football league that checks the rosters twice a week and sends out emails if you having anyone starting a game who is injured, on a bye week, or just questionable. That, along with lots of effort from each coach, has made our league pretty good in terms of starting full rosters every week.

I started playing around more with the Yahoo API and realized that I could download stats for every game. Not just that, I could download stats for all nine seasons that we’ve had this league! Give a data scientist a fun data set like this and see what happens. None of the stuff I did is very complicated in terms of real “data science”, but it sure was fun!

First of all, I have some corrections to make to the table of records. One of these is due to a stat correction from Yahoo and the other is because Yahoo’s online interface didn’t let me go back far enough to see the old record. Here is the updated table with changes in bold. It turns out that Tim didn’t break the record for highest score in a game or the highest player score in a game.

	This Week	Season	All-Time
Highest Team Score	Ben had 151.18	Tim 200.51 (Week 3)	Tim had 206.94 in 2008
Lowest Team Score	Andy had 75.31	Andy had 41.29 (Week 14)	Andy had 41.29 (2015)
Biggest Blowout	Luke beat Andy by 42.02	Ben beat Dad by 111.43 (Week 8)	Luke beat Andy by 113.02 (2010)
Closest Win	Austin beat Logan by 16.44	Ben beat Andy by 2.46 (Week 7)	Jim beat Ben by 0.12 (2012)
Highest Scoring Player	Kirk Cousins had 40.20 as a free agent.	Drew Brees had 58.30 on Tim’s bench (Week 8)	Peyton Manning had 60.28 for Andy (2013)
Longest Active Winning Streak	Austin has a 4 game winning streak.	Ben had an 8 game winning streak (Week 8)	Micah (2011) and Ben (2015) had an 8 game winning streak
Longest Active Losing Streak	Jim has a 4 game losing streak.	Andy had a 8 game losing streak (Week 14)	Kyle had a 14 game losing streak (2011)

Ok, but that’s pretty boring. What else can we answer? How about who had the most points on their bench? Instead of just counting the total, let’s look at the percentage of the total team’s points that sat on the bench. This stat is mostly just a curiosity. You could have a lot of points on the bench because you started the wrong people or because your team was really strong.

Tim Scherschel	36.0%
Dallon Martens	32.4%
Ben Martens	32.3%
Logan Brandt	32.1%
League Total	31.7%
Luke	31.2%
Jim	30.9%
Austin	30.0%
Andy Daniels	27.6%

Which positions produce the most average points in a game?

QB	22.3
WR	13.2
RB	11.4
DEF	10.7
TE	10.1
K	8.3

I broke the all time record for most points in a season. But how does it compare to everyone else over the past seasons?

How does the average number of points per team vary by year? Does it all average out or is there more scoring in some years?

Which players have generated the most points since 2007 in our league?

Drew Brees	3089.66
Tom Brady	2940.34
Aaron Rodgers	2825.2
Peyton Manning	2602.78
Philip Rivers	2300.68
Tony Romo	2106.5
Ben Roethlisberger	2061.72
Adrian Peterson	2026.62
Eli Manning	1969.96
Matt Ryan	1900.98

Who were the top 3 players at each position in our league this year?

Tom Brady	Ben Martens	QB	410.94
Russell Wilson	Luke	QB	377.18
Cam Newton	Austin	QB	376.46
Antonio Brown	Austin	WR	296.93
Julio Jones	Logan Brandt	WR	287.70
Odell Beckham Jr.	Ben Martens	WR	264.00
Adrian Peterson	Jim	RB	232.40
Devonta Freeman	Ben Martens	RB	205.60
Doug Martin	Dallon Martens	RB	201.50
Rob Gronkowski	Austin	TE	216.94
Greg Olsen	Tim Scherschel	TE	186.30
Tyler Eifert	Logan Brandt	TE	152.40
Stephen Gostkowski	Dallon Martens	K	167.00
Steven Hauschka	Tim Scherschel	K	127.00
Mason Crosby	Logan Brandt	K	116.00
Arizona	Dallon Martens	DEF	200.86
Denver	Ben Martens	DEF	196.94
Seattle	Tim Scherschel	DEF	180.70

Who has had the easiest schedule for the history of our league?
Tim. Dad has had the hardest schedule. But really, they are all very similar. Nobody deviated more than 2% from the mean.

Who had the most close wins in the last four years? This is a count of the number of times that each person won by less than 10 points.

Jim	8
Andy Daniels	8
Logan Brandt	7
Tim Scherschel	7
Dallon Martens	7
Austin	5
Ben Martens	5
Luke	5

There are so many more questions on my list to answer, but frankly I’ve been spending a lot of late nights digging through this. Hopefully if I get this post out, I’ll stop for a while and go to sleep!

If you’re interested in this dataset, let me know. I can either ship it to you in Excel or I can give you access to the SQL database and you can run your own queries. I hope to keep it running next year as the season progresses. I think I’ll also be able to use it to generate the Weekly Awards table each week which will make my blog posts easier.

Thanks to everyone for a great season! Go Seahawks!

benmartens January 11, 2016 Fantasy Sports, Geek

Custom Mario Coins

One of the first projects I attempted on the laser cutter was making some acryllic coins for my nephew. He loves Mario and I thought that it would be a good learning opportunity for me and something fun to maybe spark his interesting in making things.

The design is pretty simple. It’s just the Mario logo on one side and his name on the other side. I etched a circle around the outside of the coin on both sides. When I etched the first side, I also cut out the coin. Then I carefully flipped the coin over without moving the rest of the piece and cut the back. They weren’t perfect because there’s a little slop in that flip but they came out pretty well.

benmartens January 8, 2016 Maker

Push Sticks

My table saw stand is full of different push sticks for safely guiding wood through the blade. One of my favorites is the MicroJig that Tyla picked up for my birthday. It is easily configurable to handle a lot of different situations and it really protects my hand.

If you don’t want to shell out the money, the other one that I grab often is probably something you can build for free out of scrap wood. It holds the piece down well and has a replaceable stub of wood on the back to help guide the wood through. And it doesn’t matter if the blade cuts into your push stick. It’s just scrap wood so you can easily build another one at some point. Jay Bates has a good video about how to build one: http://jayscustomcreations.com/2014/03/the-best-push-stick-ever-invented/

benmartens January 7, 2016 Woodworking

The Future Of TV

This one is easy. The future of TV is no TV. Or rather, the TV is a display device for content that doesn’t come from traditional sources like NBC or HBO. Don’t believe me? Go into your local high school and take a poll about what kids are watching. There you will learn that most of them are watching more YouTube than anything else.

Next, fire up this video. It’s a highlight of the top YouTube stars from 2015. Recognize any of them? If you’re over 20, congratulations if you get more than one or two.

Put those two things together and you can see that the kids growing up today don’t care about the sitcoms or reality shows on TV. They don’t care about traditional television studios and actors. They are gobbling up content from YouTube stars.

At 35, I’m an old fart in this discussion and my opinion is hardly relevant, but I’ll tell you how my viewing habits have changed. I used to consume a LOT of TV. My scheduled recording list was 40-50 shows long (granted not all of them were actively producing episodes at the same time.) Now it’s down to about half a dozen. On the other side, my YouTube subscription count has gone from 2 or 3 to 39. I love YouTube content because there is a video for every niche. For a while I was watching a bunch of RC plane channels and now I’m watching a lot of woodworking channels. The people in these videos are more “reality” than any reality show on TV. I’ve interacted on social media and even snail mail with a bunch of them. It’s way more engaging than drooling on a couch chuckling at a joke written to appease the lowest common denominator.

So no, TV isn’t dead today or even in five years. If I knew how old-fashioned television studios were going to survive this, I’d probably be a wealthy man. But just keep this in mind the next time you hear about some kid watching YouTube. It’s not just a bunch of people getting kicked in the balls anymore. There are billions of hours of legitimate content out there and all those eyeballs are creating some impressive business opportunities.

benmartens January 6, 2016 Commentary

Roku 2 Review

Tyla and I cut way back on our TV viewing when Elijah was born, but now we are starting to use the TV a little more with him. I’m trying to avoid buying discs and instead I’m relying on the wealth of content that available for streaming online. We have an Xbox360 hooked up to that TV because that’s how we connect to our Windows Media Center. It has most of the apps that we need, but it takes quite a while to boot it up, cancel out of Media Center, find the right app and then boot it. That minute or two might not sound bad but you’re not imagining the bouncing two year old at your side.

I decided it was time to pick up a Roku device and I went for the Roku 2. I do like the 3 and 4 but I wanted to stick with an infrared remote so that we could use our existing Harmony remote. I really like having only one remote to control everything.

We also have a WD TV Live (don’t buy one), and an Amazon Fire TV (awesome!) in the house. I bought the Roku instead of another Fire TV mostly because I wanted to try it out and this seemed like a good excuse.

The UI of the Roku is a little more primitive than the Fire TV, but it has a great selection of apps and it’s very simple to use. We quickly loaded up Amazon Instant Video and PBS Kids. Those two apps alone will keep Elijah entertained for much longer than we will let him watch TV.

I’d happily recommend either a Fire TV or a Roku to anyone looking for a new device. If you’re a big Amazon Video user than the Fire TV probably gets the edge. Otherwise you can’t really go wrong with either device.

benmartens January 5, 2016 Gadgets

Woodinville Christmas Lights

For quite a while, I’ve been hearing people talk about a home on the east side of town that has an incredible lighting display. It’s just a guy who decided he wanted a light display and it kind of got out of hand.

We finally went over this year to check it out and wow, it did not disappoint. There are just under 125,000 lights, 3.5 miles of extension cords, 13 miles of wiring and a computer to control it all in sync with the music. You can see it all at their website: http://www.woodinvillewonderland.com

It’s worth the trip if you have some time next year.

benmartens January 4, 2016 Links

Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Just trying to get through life without looking stupid, so far it's not going very well.