Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

R.I.P. Windows Media Center

windows-media-centerMicrosoft has announced that Windows Media Center will not be present in Windows 10. Some of you know that’s how I run all the TV in my house and were asking what I’m going to do. The answer? Nothing. It’s not a big deal.

Even though Windows Media Center was shipped with Windows 8, the code is exactly the same as it was in Windows 7. If you’re running a Media Center PC, there’s no reason to upgrade it past Windows 7. Mine sits in a closet with a heavily restricted firewall and I turn off automatic updates. It’s an appliance, not a general use computer. Every few months, I carefully back everything up in case of an emergency and then apply all the patches and driver updates that have accumulated.

So while I’m bummed that a great product is officially dying, I knew it was dead years ago. However, my Windows 7 Media Center box will continue to live and work just fine. I’m guessing that this setup will outlast my desire for cable TV. I’m getting closer and closer to cutting that subscription entirely.

benmartens May 5, 2015 Geek

Like Riding A Bike

I’ve written about the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel previously, but it continues to be excellent. I can’t wait until Elijah is old enough to start watching and understanding these with me.

One of the latest videos is an excellent example of the series. What would happen if your bicycle handlebars worked opposite of a normal bike? When you turn left, the bike turns right and vice versa. Easy right? With a little practice you could figure that out. Or could you?

benmartens May 4, 2015 Geek

Drought

reservoirlowEven though the Pacific Northwest had a terrible ski season, we’re not doing too badly on our water supply to get us through the summer because there was just more rain than snow. But whenever drought rears it’s ugly head (like it has been in California for the past few years), you hear lots of talk about taking shorter showers, not filling your swimming pool, not watering your lawn, etc. But does that really make a difference?

This blog post has a lot of interesting charts and data showing how water is used in each of the fifty states. (Also, the charts are really fun to play with, but make sure you use Chrome because they don’t render well in IE.) There’s a ton of great information in there. For example, did you know that Idaho and Utah use way more water per person than any other state? But less than 2% of that water is used for domestic purposes. If you look at total water used, California uses WAY more than any state but most of it goes to irrigating arid land so it can be farmed.

So yes, taking a 3 minute shower will help, but it’s not even a drop in the proverbial bucket.

benmartens April 23, 2015 Geek, Links

Open Sprinkler Review

opensprinkler_v20s_5-500x500When Tim installed my irrigation system, he was kind enough to throw in a free irrigation clock that he had sitting around. It’s a standard Hunter model (probably $75-100) and it worked great, but every time I looked at it, I thought about how simple the device really was and that I should be able to control it from my computer. Standard industry offerings are hundreds or thousands of dollars with monthly fees. They’re mostly intended for commercial use.

After a little searching, I found opensprinkler.com. Somebody else had the same idea and made such a nice package that he is able to sell it. The basic model is Arduino based but there are Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone versions too. I chose the standard model for $155.

Installation was a snap. I labeled all the wires from the existing clock and transferred them over to the Open Sprinkler unit. I also ran an Ethernet cord from the clock in the corner of my garage up into the network closet. (It is SO convenient having the network closet share a wall with the garage!) I turned the unit on and very quickly was turning the sprinklers on and off from my computer. With a little extra configuration I was able to do it from my phone.

Why? Well yes, it’s a toy, but it also makes it very easy to walk around the yard testing zones or turning them on to blow out the line. Also, last summer I’d wake up to hear the rain and realize that my irrigation was scheduled to run in the morning. To avoid wasting water, I had to turn off the house alarm, go out in the garage, turn the program off, come back in, turn the alarm back on, and go back to bed. Now I can just reach for my phone and adjust it… if I even need to (more on that below.)

Aside form the convenience factor, here are some other features that I love:

  • I can completely manage the system from the comfort of my couch instead of standing in the garage.
  • Programs can be set to start based on sunrise or sunset. General recommendations for lawn watering are to do it a little bit before the sun comes up to avoid the hot sun burning off the water but also not let give moss a wet, dark place to thrive. This setting makes that super easy.
  • By checking the weather online, the system can automatically adjust the programs based on the humidity, temperature and precipitation from the previous days. This either means skipping an entire program or just running it for fewer minutes.
  • Programs can be set to run every N days instead of on specific days of the week.
  • You can view a log of when each zone was on. This will be nice when I try to track water usage and also to evaluate how well the Open Sprinkler system is performing.
  • As the software gets updated and perfected, I can update my unit with the click of a button.

All in all, I highly recommend this product so far. As long as it actually does the job of controlling the irrigation system without ever crashing, I’ll be very happy!

benmartens April 6, 2015 Gadgets, Geek, Home Improvement

Free OneDrive Storage

onedrivelogoOneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) has been continually improving their offering and they have a pretty impressive service at this point. I regularly use it whenever I want to share a bunch of files with others, but it’s also great just for storing your documents, photos, etc. I’d put it one step behind a dedicated backup tool like CrashPlan.com but it’s a solid option whether or not you have another backup solution because OneDrive allows you to easily access your files from any computer and it also caches the files locally so you don’t have to be connected to the network to use them.

If you ever use OneDrive or you even think there’s a chance that you might use it in the future, be sure to click this link to receive an extra 100GB free for the next two years. That’s on top of the 15GB free you get just for having an account. Go get yours before this freebie is gone!

benmartens February 23, 2015 Geek

Comcast Speed

topgunI do a lot of bandwidth speed tests, and I don’t really know why. I even know that Comcast optimizes for sites like speedtest.net to make sure your report shows you are getting what you paid for (at least on that site.) And yet, I still run the tests.

A while back, I started noticing that I was getting more than the 50Mbps down 10Mbps up that I paid for. In fact, my downstream bandwidth was more than twice that! I figured it was a fluke and it would go back down immediately, but it hasn’t. In fact, I found some news articles saying that Comcast was rolling this out across the country. Yay!

As much as I’m thrilled to be getting about 120/10 service for the same price, there aren’t many occasions where I make use of the extra download speed. I’d rather double my upload speed for doing cloud backups and uploading videos to YouTube, but I’ll take what I can get. The extra speed does come in handy for the video games that I download via Steam or on the Xbox One.

It’s a good thing they did this speed boost because it’s just enough to stay ahead of my Verizon phone. There’s one part of Bellevue where I can get over 90 Mbps down and 10 up on my cell phone. That blows my mind.

speedtest123P.S. Insert old timer quote here about remembering 9600bps modems.

P.P.S. 123Mbps is about 15 megabytes per second, a CD every 46 seconds, a DVD every 5.3 minutes, or eleven 3.5″ floppy disks per second.

P.P.P.S. This post should be good for a chuckle in the future when everything is so fast we don’t even think about it anymore.

benmartens February 18, 2015 Geek

Online TV Queue

onlinetvOne of the longstanding complaints about people who want to get rid of cable is that there isn’t a great way to watch live sports without it. That roadblock is pretty much gone with the announcement of Sling. For $20/month, you get 20 pretty good cable channels and one of them is ESPN. Couple that with an over the air antenna and you can watch a lot of sports. Note there are a couple drawbacks of the Sling service, the biggest of which is that you can’t pause or record most of the channels so it’s live only. And of course, there are many of us for whom a digital antenna just won’t work at all for those local stations.

That being said, I ditched ESPN about a year or so ago and haven’t missed it. We saved $40/month and I think it was well worth it. I’m actually pretty willing to cut the cable TV cord completely, but there’s one thing that has me hooked: I really enjoy having all of my shows in one place. My custom DVR records all the shows I want to watch and I also have it set up to download all of the YouTube channels that I watch. That means pretty much everything I want to watch is available in a single interface and I instantly know when new episodes are available. My cable package is only costing me about $15/month right now and that is well worth the convenience of one stop shopping.

The online TV market has grown incredibly in the last year or two, but it lacks the “one spot for everything” feature. It feels like there is a market for some kind of web service that would look at all the shows you watch, figure out where you watch them, and then give you a big queue showing the unwatched episodes. It’s probably technically difficult given all the various sign in requirements on the different sites and this information probably isn’t readily available. If a couple of the major services could get together to do something like this, it would be a fantastic app. I’m not going to hold my breath though.

benmartens February 17, 2015 Geek

Transaction Stats

countmoney I’ve been happily using Mint.com to track my finances for the last three and a half years. One feature they offer is the ability to download all of your transactions. I did that, popped it into Excel, and found some interesting stats. Note that these are for 2012-2014.

  • Our two most popular merchants are Amazon (544 transactions) and Safeway (521.) Home Depot (238) is next on the list. This means that we are spending money at Amazon or Safeway an average of once every two days. By the way, our favorite butcher is #14 on the list!
  • Since one of our grocery stores is #2 on the most popular merchant list, it’s no surprise that the biggest spending category (by count) is groceries with 818. Restaurants (332), home improvement (300) and gas (280) round out the top four.
  • What are our most visited restaurants?
    Chipotle (31), Dairy Queen (25), Whidbey Coffee (17), Five Guys (14), Red Robin (14), Papa Murphy’s (13), Brown Bag Cafe (11), Fiesta Mexicana (10), Factory Donuts (7), Mod Pizza (7), Qdoba (7), Sushi Zone (7), Cafe Veloce (6), Jimmy John’s (6)
    This list is a little bit skewed because sometimes another party will pay and then we’ll give them cash, but it’s a good rough idea of where we like to eat.
  • One third of the money we spent ran through a credit card. We average around 1.5% cash back so that adds up pretty quickly. I recommend the American Express Blue Cash card and the Amazon Visa for places that don’t take American Express. (This only works if you don’t carry a balance on your credit cards.)

If you don’t have an idea what your spending would look like in a similar study, I encourage you to at least sign up for Mint and let it start tracking your spending. Knowing where your money is going is the first step towards making important decisions that could dramatically affect your life.

P.S. It might sound a bit crazy that we go to the grocery store every two days. It turns out that going there is a great activity with Elijah. He enjoys it and we can either walk or drive because it’s less than a mile down the street. It also gets us out of the house so Tyla can have some quiet time to herself.

benmartens January 28, 2015 Geek

New PCs

dudegettingadellOur church is using some ancient computers. It was about 5 years past the time when they should have been update so I volunteered for the project. While the details of the project probably aren’t interesting, if you’re in the market for a new computer, you might be interested in what I picked out.

The main office computer is the most heavily used. It runs our financial software and is the hub for just about anyone who needs a computer at church. It’s also going to act as the network file server. For this computer, I chose a Dell XPS 8700 for $699.99 plus tax. The key specs are a Core i7-4790 processor and 8GB of memory. Dell doesn’t ship them with an SSD (that seems insane to me) so I picked up a Samsung 840 256GB SSD for $216. There are cheaper ones out there but these Samsungs are great. The end result is a nice machine for right around $1000 after tax. This would be good if you’re planning some slightly heavier than normal use of a computer and/or you want it to last an extra year or two before it feels old.

The second computer goes in the school and 99% of the time, it’s just acting as a sign in computer. The teachers will also use it for some basic web browsing every once in a while. For this computer I got a Dell Inspiron 3647 for for 399.99 plus tax. This one came with a Core I3-4150 processor and 4 GB of memory. I left the old fashioned 1TB 7200rpm hard drive in there. It will be good enough. And that’s the key for this machine: it is more than capable of doing basic web browsing, Office documents, etc. If that’s all you need, this is an excellent deal. Note that neither price includes a monitor. I’m just reusing what is already there.

They are two very different machines for very different purposes. If you’re in the market and want some advice, I’m always happy to help. The biggest thing I’ll say is that an SSD is the most important piece of equipment you can get in your new computer. I won’t ever buy another computer without one. Unfortunately they aren’t always included when you buy from a place like Dell. I’m sure that will change soon with rapidly plummeting SSD prices, but never fear, you can generally add your own in later. Just make sure you factor that into the price.

I said I wouldn’t go into the details of the new setup, but there’s one key piece you probably already guessed: all of the computers on the property will be running CrashPlan for offsite backup!

benmartens December 30, 2014 Geek