Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I grew up with an antenna on top of our house. We could get some channels from Chicago in addition to the local channels so we had a pretty good selection. But I still remember going to college and having CABLE TV. I was in awe of ESPN. I’ve had cable ever since then, but since Elijah was born our TV watching has gone way down and most of it is via Netflix or Amazon Prime. So last week I took the plunge and totally canceled my TV service.

It wasn’t quite that simple though because we host football parties at our house so I need some way to watch local broadcast stations. I went to antennaweb.org and picked up one of the antennas that they recommended for my location. I mounted it up in the rafters of my garage pointing the direction recommended on the site. The picture looks beautiful! Unfortunately, some of the channels have small glitches every few minutes. But I’m still going for it.

Our cable TV plus 150Mbps internet was $82/month. When the annual contract ended, it jumped up to $98. I really didn’t want to sign another contract that included TV since I’ve been thinking about canceling for so long, but I don’t mind signing a contract for internet since there aren’t many other options around here. I did drop our speed down to 60Mbps to save even more money. I signed a contract that locks in the price at $45/month including fees, etc for 2 years. So even if we go back to cable TV in four or five months, I’ll still come out ahead with the hardware that I purchased for the antenna solution.

And here’s a breakdown of that hardware…

• Channel Master Antenna
• Channel Master Splitter and Amplifier
• SiliconDust HDHomerun ATSC Tuner

That tuner purchase was a surprise. I forgot that the InfiniTV card in my Media Center PC doesn’t have an ATSC tuner built in (that’s the over-the-air signal format.) Thankfully I was able to find the older model of the HD Homerun for a pretty cheap price. It hooked up just fine to the Media Center PC. I also played around with the DVR/Live TV features of Plex but I was frustrated that I couldn’t watch a show while it was recording. I’m sure that will come along eventually though. Once it does, then I can ditch the separate PC I have just for running Media Center.

So what happens if we’re having a football party and the signal is too glitchy? Thankfully, there are plenty of online cable providers that I can flip on in just a few minutes. In my area, most of the Seahawks games are on FOX and only DirectTV Now and Comcast Instant TV currently have my local FOX affiliate. So I can sign up with them and be back in the action very easily. The Comcast offering is interesting because it’s only $18/month and includes all the local channels that I’m interested in. The Cloud DVR from the Comcast service was a mess to figure out, but I finally realized that you can only schedule recordings from the Roku app. I think that’s due to a patent war that they lost with Tivo which made them remove any kind of browser or phone DVR scheduling. I get why it is like that, but they are definitely not forthcoming about that limitation.

Yada yada yada, now I’m saving ~$50/month and it feels great!

Whenever I hear about dash cams, I think about people in eastern Europe or Russia recording meteors and crazy crashes (the audio of some of those videos is probably NSFW.) But then I was at a party for one of Elijah’s classmates and a King County detective was talking about how he was installing dash cams in his car and his wife’s car. Huh? It turns out that there are groups of people who travel around the country basically putting you in a situation where you have no choice but to rear end them. With no evidence, the person in the rear is generally at fault because hey, you should have stopped. He said that Seattle is swamped with this stuff right now.

It’s highly unlikely that will ever happen to me, but you know how much I already enjoy doing timelapse video, especially on road trips so having a camera mounted nicely in the car was appealing. The fact that it might come in handy some day for insurance purposes was enough to push me over the edge.

I started with my truck and was lucky enough to find a video showing the camera I wanted being installed in a truck very similar to mine. It was super handy to see where the fuse box was, how to get the various pieces of molding off, etc. Here’s what I ordered:

• Rexing V1 1080p dash cam
• 12v Add-a-circuit fuse holder
• 10 foot hardwire kit for mini usb jack
• 64 GB micro SD card

While Dad was visiting, we got it all installed in my 2016 F150 without too much hassle and it has been working well. You can check the Amazon page to see samples of the video quality, but it’s plenty good for what I want. The camera itself works nicely and is low profile, especially compared to some of the other big suction cup versions. The wire exits the camera and is hidden all the way down to the fuse box so there isn’t anything dangling down or plugged into my cigarette lighter.

It went well so I decided to install the same setup in our 2013 Escape. The only difference was that the Escape used mini fuses instead of the micro fuses that the truck uses. Installation there was a little more tricky because of the goofy shape of the plastic around the rear view mirror, but I found a good spot for it and was able to run the wire down to the fuse box under the glove box. I can get free access to the Chilton’s website via our library and that came in handy for figuring out how to remove a couple pieces of trim. I also stumbled across a YouTube channel devoted to the 2013 Escape which will come in handy in the future.

I’m excited to go on a road trip and use this instead of the hacky/messy/annoying GoPro setup that I used to use. With the 64GB card, I could record 11 hours of 1080p video or even more than that if I use the timelapse mode in the camera.

In other countries, insurance companies offer discounts for dash cams, but that hasn’t been popularized here yet. Even without the discount, I do wonder if/when car manufacturers are going to build these in. It’s not a big stretch to imagine this as part of your rear view mirror mount or maybe even using some of the parking cameras that are already installed.

I enjoy using my shop time to catch up on podcasts, YouTube and Netflix. But obviously when I’m running loud equipment, I have hearing protection in and I can’t hear the show. I finally splurged and got the IsoTunes Pro bluetooth earplug headphones. They connect wireless to either my phone or a bluetooth transmitter hooked to my TV.

They do a good job of canceling out shop noise and I can easily hear whatever audio source I have selected. The downside is that I’ve been spoiled with the custom ear plugs I got back when Tyla worked at the hearing clinic. They just slide right into my ear and I don’t have to mess with squishing foam and getting it fit into my ears. That’s not a huge drawback though and I still use the IsoTunes a lot.

My first experience with virtual reality was probably playing with a Nintendo Virtual Boy in a store in the 90s. It has progressed a wee bit since then and now the phone that you carry in your pocket can provide a pretty impressive virtual reality experience.

Thanks to Don and Megan for getting me a Samsung Gear VR for my birthday! I had a Google Cardboard set up from last year and that was enough to convince me that it could be really cool but not good enough to really scratch the itch. The Gear VR is a very nice experience.

Setup was pretty easy but required a lot of app installs on my phone. But once that was done, I plugged the phone into the goggles, adjusted the straps, and entered the world of virtual reality. I’m still learning my way around, but so far the coolest thing I’ve done is take a flight with the Blue Angels. 2D videos are great, but being able to move your head around while watching the video really takes it to another level. It’s an awesome experience!

I can’t see using this for long periods of time on a regular basis, but it’s really neat to see how far the technology has come. It makes me want to experience a full-blown setup with dedicated goggles driven by a beefy computer (but not nearly enough to pay for all that myself!) I feel like we’re getting closer and closer to my dream video game: Forza Motorsport VR Edition. It has to be coming some day. RIght? Pleeeeeeeeease?

I first learned about OBDII back in 2003. It’s the on board diagnostics system in your car that lets you get all kinds of live data while your car is running. I bought all the electronics to make my own reader and then… nothing. Eventually in 2008 I realized that I was never going to build it and bought a ScanGauge. I happily used that little device in my Subaru and later in my F150. It worked flawlessly, but now it’s sitting in the garage because I got an upgrade.

For my birthday, Tyla and Elijah gave me an Automatic. It’s an OBDII reader with a built in GPS and 3g modem. While you drive, it automatically records a bunch of you car data along with your current position and it uploads it all to their cloud service. You can also connect to the device via Bluetooth to get live data displayed on your phone. Setup was a breeze and so far it has worked flawlessly.

I think the target audience for the device is someone who drives for business and needs an easy way to track their business trips. You can easily flag a drive and it gets added to a report. Personally I’m more interested in downloading my data and doing my own analysis on it. There are some nifty apps that work right out of the box as well. For example, one app shows you your min, max and average commute times to and from work. Another builds a heat map of the places you have visited. Another one draws one of those maps where every county that you have visited is colored in.

Do I need this? Nope! But I love having gadgets that collect data about random stuff in my life so this fits right in. Time to crack open their API and see how to pull my data out of their cloud.

I bought my first film SLR a few years before digital cameras were a big thing. It didn’t take long for that to feel obsolete and I sold it. My digital SLR has gotten a LOT more use (over 30K photos taken so far), but I’m at the point where I’m finding fewer and fewer uses for it. The camera on my Galaxy S7 is incredible.

Camera phones have slowly been replacing our big camera for a long time, largely because of the huge convenience factor. Some of the previous phones have had reasonable cameras, but this S7 camera is quite a big step up. Many camera phones do well in bright light, but this one even does a great job in low light situations. A prime example is this shot that I took long after sunset when we were camping.


The camera app on the Galaxy S7 even has full manual controls. I can control ISO, shutter speed, aperture, white balance and more while storing the image in a full RAW format. That opens up a huge range of shooting options.

The dSLR is still my choice for action shots, zoom shots or when I really want to make sure I nail the picture, but when I forget the big camera, I don’t feel that sense of dread that I used to. How much longer before it starts collecting dust on the shelf?