Studio711.com – Ben Martens

In the old days if your computer ran slowly and you asked a geek how to make it faster, they would probably say “Add more RAM.” With most computers having 4-8GB of RAM now, memory isn’t generally an issue. There’s still a new answer to that question: Get an SSD.

I had my first taste of a solid state drive years ago when I built my media center PC. I wanted something quiet and lower power. Once I saw first hand how fast it was, I started on a mission to replace the main operating system drive in every computer with an SSD. They were expensive at first but now the costs have come way down, and while they’re still significantly more expensive than the older spindle based hard drives, they’re not cost-prohibitive in most situations.

How much of a difference does it make? I ran benchmark comparisons of the SSD and the old HD in my computer. The average speed of reading data off the disk is 2.5 times faster with the SSD. That’s for reading single big files though. More common is that you’re reading little pieces from a bunch of small files all over the place. For that, an SSD really shines. In random access tests for small files, the SSD was more than 40 times faster! The times when you notice an SSD the most are when booting the computer (or resuming from a sleep state) and when you open programs.

If you’re interested in buying one, you can find them for around $0.40-0.50/GB. Don’t go too much smaller than 120GB for your operating system drive. Windows doesn’t take nearly that much space but by the time you get it installed, do some updates, and install a bunch of programs, it’s not too hard to use that much space. If you don’t want to spend much time shopping around, consider the Samsung 830 it’s not quite the cheapest but it’s a good bang for the buck.

I do a lot of video recording at church. My usual setup involves 2 GoPros, a Canon T2i, a Kodak Z3 and a Sony sound recorder in case the main sound recording flakes out. That’s a lot of gear to lug back and forth. Also, the T2i only shoots 12 minutes of video at a time so it means I have a lot of clips to synchronize in Premiere when I get home. It was time to simplify.

Church now has a Canon VIXIA HF R500 camcorder. It shoots 1080p video and will do that for hours on end. That takes the place of the T2i as the main video source. I still set up a GoPro and the sound recorder for now but those are small and easy to deal with.

The Canon camcorder isn’t as good as the T2i in terms of video quality. Shooting in church is generally a low-light situation and the camcorder just doesn’t have the sensor in it to handle that super well. The result is acceptable though and given how much simpler it makes my life, I’ll go with it.

I’ll probably still lug all the gear with me every once in a while, but generally I think I’ll be using this camcorder.

The other day I was marveling at how quickly my desktop computer at home was plowing through a video encoding task and realized that I built the computer almost 2 years ago! I think this is the best that a computer has ever withstood the test of time. I don’t even know what I’d really do to upgrade it at this point. I’m very happy with it. The only thing I added to it after the build was a mid-range graphics card.

I’m less happy with the computer I built 4 years ago, but that’s mostly goes back to my frustration with buying a cheap case and a few mistakes that I made because it was my first build. But in fairness, that one is still doing a great job too. It runs 24/7 in my network closet and acts as our file server, media server, cloud backup machine and VM host for an instance of Windows Home Server to manage daily PC backups of every computer in the house.

It’s nice (and odd) to feel so content with a computer after two years.

One of the great features of the newer Kindles is that they tell you how much time is left in your chapter and in the book. It calculates this based on how fast you are reading. It’s one of the great features you can add when you’re reading digitally instead of with dead trees.

Unfortunately, for some reason the calculated time remaining isn’t always accurate. If you find that it’s not quite right, you can tell the Kindle to re-sample your reading speed and make a new calculation. To do this, click Search while you’re in the book and then search for “;ReadingTimeReset” (without the quotes.) Voila!

Every time we move offices at work, people set things outside their offices as last-chance giveaways before throwing them in the trash. The last time this happened, I was surprised to see a Wacom tablet! For those who don’t know, Wacom makes high quality drawing devices that hook up to your computer. In the days of modern tablets and touch screens, this is less important, but they are still used by artists as the primary way of doing art on the computer. I’m no artist, but I’ve always wanted to play with one. I double checked that it was really a freebie and then brought it home.

I don’t know how often this will get used but it has already come in handy to mark up a proposal from a tree-removal guy for our yard project.

Last year I picked up new skis with the money from our health plan. This year I don’t have a big purchase like that in mind, but there are a couple smaller things that I’d like to buy. I made the first purchase the day after New Years: a Fitbit One.

Fitbits have been around for a few years and they come in a variety of form factors, but basically they are fancy pedometers. The Fitbit One tracks steps, stairs, and your restlessness while sleeping. It syncs wireless whenever I’m near my computer and uploads all the data to a website. There is also an app for the phone that I use to access the data and enter my weight. (Some day I might pick up the scale that works with Fitbit and automatically records my weight.)

The device is great. It runs for over a week on a single charge. The software is well done too. You can add friends and see how many steps they’ve taken. It builds up a sense of competition and encourages you to get out and walk some more.

The downside is that I feel like I’m going to lose it before too long because it’s super tiny. You know that tiny little pocket inside the right pocket of your jeans? I don’t know what it’s for, but now it’s a Fitbit holder. That seems to work fairly well.

I like the idea of logging data about myself in a variety of ways and this adds to the mix. For now it’s a novelty, but the OCD streak in me will probably want to carry this every day for a long time. It would be kind of interesting to know how many steps I take in a year.

We’ve had a Foscam FI8910W around the house for a while and I’ve enjoyed being able to look in on Tyla and Elijah while I’m at work. It has worked so well that we decided to expand our collection a bit. We now have a camera watching our front door and another in the garage. It’s a really easy way to watch for packages, make sure we shut the garage doors, and keep track of people who come up to the front door.

To manage all three cameras, I picked up a copy of Blue Iris. It has an incredible array of options including the ability to tweak the motion detection to your heart’s content and then set up alerts that will send you emails, text messages, and much more. Any motion gets recorded to our main file server and backed up into the cloud. There’s an app for all the phone platforms that lets me view live feeds from all the cameras and see recent alerts.

I’m really impressed with the system. These cameras are only $60 each now. It makes me want to pick up a few more.

When we ditched a bunch of our cable stations, I picked up a Chromecast to help simplify streaming. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, it’s a little device a little bigger than a USB stick. It plugs directly into an HDMI port on your TV. You then install a plugin for the Chrome browser (or on your Android phone) and you can use your laptop or phone as a remote control to choose videos on YouTube, Netflix, and some other streaming sites. The reason it made such a splash is that after you pick your video, you don’t have to stay on that page with your laptop. You can keep browsing around while the Chromecast streams the video. And oh, yeah, it’s only $30.

We don’t have Android phones so that immediately decreases some of its value for us, but I did install the plugin for Chrome. I think I can easily say that if you want to watch YouTube on your TV, there is no better way to do it than with a Chromecast. The other apps work equally well.

The only place where it falls down is if you want to display an entire Chrome browser tab on your TV. That is acceptable for text browsing, but if you’re streaming a flash video, it’s unwatchable on the TV.

After I played with it for a while, the device went back in the box for future use. Our TV doesn’t have any spare HDMI ports in the back so it would have to stick out the side. I don’t need it often enough to have it sticking out like that.

Back in 2005, I wrote a post about a radio station in Philly called Ben FM (95.7.) I joked that it was nice to have my own radio station and actually got a few gullible random Philly residents who wrote in with their comments on the station. Unfortunately those comments have been lost to time.

But now that joke is a bit closer to reality. If you come to my house and tune your radio to 91.9, you’ll here my very own radio station. Why? Well Tyla and I generally listen to country and the two country stations around here are terrible. 94.1 plays the same dozen songs over and over again and 100.7 has one of those stereotypical overdone morning show radio guys who is painful to listen to. Nevermind that if you have the radio on while taking a shower, you are lucky to hear two songs in the whole 10-15 minutes you’re in the bathroom.

I’m too cheap to cover the house in Sonos equipment, so instead I purchased 0.5 watt FM transmitter from Amazon. I hooked it up to the server in our house which is always on anyway. The server is currently playing music from a Christmas playlist that I put together on Xbox Music, but in the future I could see paying for a Pandora subscription and letting that run.

So far it’s working out really well. Every radio in our house easily gets a clean signal and now we have a station playing exactly the music we like with no commercials.