Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

MailStore

I don’t know about you, but I’m an email packrat. Steve Gibson, the security genius behind grc.com, recommended mailstore.com and I’ve been really impressed with it so far. It runs locally, sucks in mail basically any source you might have (online mail, local Outlook, Exchange, etc), removes duplicates and then indexes it all for crazy fast searches. I love having everything in this nice clean searchable format across all my various accounts through the years. It’s so much cleaner than my old mess of saved PST files and multiple web mail accounts. This also lets me delete all my old email from GMail and Hotmail. There’s no longer a compelling reason for me to let them see all my old data.

I’m still dusting off some old email archives and finding more lost messages, but right now I have 110,000 messages in this database and it only takes up 3.6GB (and that includes attachments.) Searches return results almost instantly, and if for some reason I don’t want to keep using this program, there are easy options for exporting to a wide variety of locations and formats. The only complaint I have is that it can’t detect duplicates that are loaded from the same source. So if I have a piece of mail that gets loaded from GMail and also from my Outlook cache, it will show up twice.

 

They have a paid corporate version but there is also a version that is free for personal use. There are probably other solutions out there, but I’m loving this one and I give it two thumbs up!

benmartens February 7, 2014 Geek

Football Squares With Power Query

Squares is a popular game when you get a big group of people to watch football. It’s a game of chance where all the money that goes in is redistributed to the attendees. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, you can find lots of websites like this one with the basic rules.

After people pick their squares, the paper ends up getting passed around all over the place as people wonder if they are in line to win some money. What happens if Team A kicks a field goal? Ooo I’ll win if Team B scores a touchdown before the end of the quarter!

This year I’m going to geek it up a bit (surprise surprise) and do this with Power Query. People will put their names into a grid inside Excel and then we’ll randomly assign 0-9 to each row and column. From there, the magic of Power Query takes over. Here are the basics of how the document is set up:

  1. The table where people enter their picks is loaded into the Power Query flow with the “From Table” operation.
  2. The current score is grabbed with “From Web” and looks at one of the many pages will report the current score. That score is then modded to contain only the final digit in the score for each team.
  3. Another query then takes those score digits and looks up the corresponding value in the table of picks. That resulting value is the name of the person who will win if the score doesn’t change.
  4. The current score table also contains some extra columns that calculate the last digit of the score if either team scores a field goal or a touchdown. I turned the query in step 3 into a function and then called that function with each possible scoring combination.

The end result looks like this. Simply hitting the Refresh button in Excel will refresh the green table showing who is current in line for some money and who might win if various things happen in the game.

benmartens January 31, 2014 Geek, Sports

Default To Most Recent Facebook Stories

I’m sure Facebook has some business reason for forcing me to view my news feed in the “Top Stories” order, but it’s really frustrating to me. I don’t care about what they think are the top stories. I just want to see things in the order they happened. Thankfully they change the URL when you change your sort order, so if you want to always view your news feed in “Most Recent” order, change your bookmark to https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr.

benmartens January 14, 2014 Geek

Converting DC To AC

[UPDATE] A couple days after I declared success on this project, the village piece stopped lighting up even when I put batteries back in it. If any of you electrical wizards out there can tell me what I did wrong, I would love to know. Or maybe it’s just some crazy coincidence that both bulbs burned out at the same time mere days after I changed the power source. Occam’s Razor disagrees with that theory. I’ve left the post as it was originally written so you can debug it for me (and laugh at my feeling of success.)

Tyla always sets up our Thomas Kinkaide Christmas village as part of the decorations. Just about every piece has a plug so it all goes into a power strip which, this year, we can control with a remote. But there were two pieces that ran on batteries and thus had separate switches. This year I set out to convert them to use power from the wall just like the rest of the pieces.

The first piece I tried were the street lights. They took two batteries. I purchased an adjustable power adapter, set it to 3V, touched the wires to the right places and POOF. I blew out the lights. I still don’t know what happened because I had tried quite a few things before I realized the lights were broken, but I think I might have hooked up the power while the batteries were also inserted resulting in 6 volts to the lights. Oops. I immediately went online and purchased replacement streetlights. They’re from a different village set but look fine in our set. This new set was sold with a power adapter so I had no problems there.

The second village piece was a little skating rink. Now it should be noted that there’s only one place to buy pieces for this village set (The Bradford Exchange.) They’re extremely annoying to deal with. Anything you order takes at least a month to arrive, most pieces are limited editions, and you often have to sign up for a set of pieces that arrive installments just to get the one you want. The net effect is that if destroyed this village piece, there was pretty much no way to replace it. I was appropriately nervous given the broken streetlights staring at me from the trash can.

I measured the voltage of the adjustable wall wart and even though I had it set to 3V, it said 3.2V. For most projects, I would have just tried that to see if it worked, but I decided to learn something new and build a circuit to knock the voltage down to something more like 2.6 or 2.7V which is what two lightly used AAs would produce.

To that end, I purchased an LM317 adjustable voltage regular and dug out the rest of my electronics parts. After watching some YouTube videos and lots of trial and error, I ended up with a simple circuit that spit out 2.72V. Perfect!

The next task was to transfer this off the breadboard and solder the connections. I made everything nice and neat with shrink wrap and a small box to hold the voltage regular and it’s heat sink. (I added a heat sink after taking the picture above.) I used red and black wires to help me remember positive and negative voltage, but it dawned on me later that I should have used white so it was easier to hide under the fake snow. The wire was twisted using a trick I learned from Ben Heck: clamp down the wires on one end and stick the other ends in your power drill. Voila! I also added a plug near the village piece for easy setup, takedown and storage.

The last piece of the puzzle was connecting the wires to the terminals where the batteries would normally go. I could have soldered them on, but I was trying to modify the village piece as little as possible. So instead of anything permanent, I created wooden batteries! I cut 1/2” dowels, drilled pilot holes in each end, and attached screws. The first battery got the positive and negative leads from the plug attached to its ends. The second battery just has a wire running between the two ends to transfer the power. Now I have removable “batteries” and I suppose I could use this same setup to power other 3V battery devices.

It was pretty nerve-wracking the first time I tried it (after measuring the voltage a hundred times), but everything works! I was able to turn the wall wart down to 4.5V and still get 2.7V out of the voltage regulator. The heat sink is doing it’s job and the box has a very tiny bit of extra warmth but nothing anywhere near dangerous. Here’s what the finished product looks like with the light inside the cocoa stand and the large pine tree:

If we get any more battery powered pieces, I should be able to add a couple more leads off of this same voltage regulator, make some more wooden batteries, and be done pretty quickly.

benmartens December 27, 2013 Geek, Projects

Quick Install

It had been a while since I rebuilt my computer so I decided to do it over Thanksgiving break. I was amazed at how quickly it went! Windows 8.1 installed off a USB key in the blink of an eye. I probably could have used the reset functionality built into Windows 8 but I really wanted to do a bare bones completely clean install. Windows 8.1 remembers pretty much every customization I did to the machine and even all of the apps that I had downloaded from the Windows Store. Office and a few other desktop apps required manual install, but Office 2013 is takes literally a couple minutes to install.

I also gave Ninite a try for the first time. It’s free to use and it streamlines the install of some of the most popular apps. Put a check next to whatever you want to install (Chrome, 7-Zip, Skype, Notepad++, ImgBurn, Steam, etc) and it will install them with default settings and tell you when it’s done. It saves so much mindless clicking!

The final thing that made the reinstall so quick and painless is that all of my files are backed up in the cloud. So I didn’t think twice before formatting my hard drive. I knew if I had forgotten some important files, I could quickly restore them from a backup.

I remember when a task like this used to take the whole weekend or more. This time I fired it off before going to bed, clicked a few buttons in the morning, and I was pretty much done!

benmartens December 12, 2013 Geek, Links

Free Apps Retrospective

I have about a dozen Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store apps. They’re all paid apps, mostly because I’m too lazy to mess around with advertising and it’s nice to get a little money, even if it’s just a few bucks, for my hobby. CascadeSkier makes up about 90% of all my downloads, but even that one isn’t huge. I decided to open the kimono a bit and share the results of a recent experiment where I offered both apps for free for three days.

Windows 8 Store
This version has been out since 2012 and as of today I have 1574 downloads. This app offers a free trial for a couple days and then you have to pay $1.99 to continue using it. During the period where the app was free, I got 120 downloads so that’s a pretty good chunk considering I only have 1500 total downloads. The really interesting part is that after the free period ended, I saw another peak of about 20-30 downloads and about a third of those people bought the app. We’re not talking huge money here, but it does appear that some of the people who downloaded the app for free convinced acquaintances to buy it later.

One random stat unrelated to the free trial: over the last 12 months, 1 out of every 7 people who view the app in the store download it. 27% of those people buy the app and 75% of those people buy it without even attempting the trial.

Windows Phone
The Windows Phone app has been out since 2010 and it has 1758 downloads. During the free period I got 200 downloads but there was no follow-on peak of paid downloads.

This was an interesting experiment. In reality I probably should have done this a long time ago and maybe I’ll do it again in the future. The reviews show that pretty much anybody who uses the app loves it. So that implies that the more people that are using the app, the more people will hear about it. The flip side of this argument is that I target a very small customer base. This app only applies to skiers and snowboarders who live in Washington or the Portland area and who use Windows Phone or run apps from the Windows 8 Store. I often wonder how close I am to saturating that market.

benmartens December 6, 2013 Geek

DBAN

So you’re getting rid of some old hard drives, but you’re nervous about just throwing them in the trash. If the idea of creating a USB boot key doesn’t frighten you, then you should know about Darik’s Boot and Nuke. Simply deleting files or formatting the drive doesn’t actually erase the files on the drive. You need to overwrite every sector on the drive multiple times to really be sure.

Reboot the computer with either a CD or USB key inserted and you’ll boot into DBAN. From there you can choose a number of options for wiping the drive that range from writing 0’s one time across the whole drive to doing much deeper scrubs with multiple passes. I generally default to “DoD Short Wipe” which does three passes. That could take you a day or two with today’s larger drives, but it’s nice to know that nobody is going to find my old hard drive and pick any data off it.

I’ve also been known to physically take drives apart and smash the platters with a hammer (wear safety glasses!) That’s messy and technically it’s still possible to read data if the pieces are big enough, but it’s good enough if I’m in a hurry.

P.S. If you find yourself doing stuff like this often, consider picking up a hard drive dock. It’s a lot easier to swap drives in a dock then to physically open your computer. This is the one I’ve had for a while, but you might want to consider a USB3.0 model too.

benmartens December 3, 2013 Geek

Email

I’ve been using GMail for about 10 years. Yes, it looks like you send mail to @studio711.com and receive a reply from there, but in the background, it’s getting sent to GMail. That’s not a huge deal but I’ve always felt a little guilty for not using my own company’s offerings. Plus, with the updates over the last few years, Outlook.com is at least on par with GMail, if not a little ahead.

So why didn’t I switch? It’s nerdy, but here you go. My old email DNS records were hosted by GoDaddy and all they did was forward email from all of my domains to GMail. I’d set up my mail clients to receive email from GMail and send through GoDaddy. Sending through the GoDaddy SMTP servers meant that I could send mail from my Studio711 domain. I was unable to replicate that in Hotmail because I couldn’t figure out how to set up an account that receives from Hotmail (which uses Exchange Active Sync) but send through a custom SMTP server. However, I recently discovered that in addition to EAS, you can access Hotmail through POP or IMAP. So I was able to forward all my email to Hotmail and then use a similar setup in Outlook except I point to the Hotmail IMAP servers instead of GMail.

Microsoft also offers to take over all mail handling for your domain. This lets you sign in to Outlook.com with [email protected]. You can send and receive just as you would expect without any extra hassle. Ideally I’d just have them handle all the Studio711 email and then I wouldn’t need such a complicated setup. The stopper is that the domain solution does not allow catch-all email accounts. Right now you can email anything @studio711.com and I’ll get it. I rely on that heavily. Whenever I sign up for a new website, I give them a custom email address so I know if they sell it to anyone. It also makes it really easy to filter out junk mail that just won’t stop. So if I let Microsoft manage my mail records, I’d have to manually create an account every time I hand out a new email address. Since I already have hundreds or thousands in the while, this was a non-starter.

Are you asleep yet? I imagine there are maybe two people who actually followed all that. If you didn’t, don’t worry. The bottom line is that I’m now running all my email through Microsoft servers instead of Google servers. I’m obviously biased, but I trust Microsoft more with that information than I trust Google.

benmartens November 19, 2013 Geek

Here Come The Drones

I’ve been thinking about building my own UAV. Prices are coming down and it’s getting to be a pretty straightforward process. I’m planning to start with a multicopter. Do any of you have RC or UAV experience? Here’s my plan and you can let me know if you have a better recommendation.

The initial purchase (probably next spring after I save my pennies) will involve:

  • A 3DR Y6 kit 
  • Some kind of radio… maybe the Futaba 7-Channel model? I’d love some advice here. I don’t mind spending money to get a good one that will last me, but I also don’t need the top of the line model.
  • At least one battery and a charger

Hopefully that’s enough to get me flying. After that I’d add in an Ardupilot board, GPS and maybe a live telemetry link. I also want to add some kind of gimble to mount a GoPro.

So that’s the plan/dream. Advice is welcome! There are so many options that it gets overwhelming pretty quickly. I’ve found diydrones.com to be really helpful but I’m sure there are other good sites?

benmartens November 14, 2013 Geek

Dipping A Toe

Up until this summer, I followed 75-100 websites via RSS on Google Reader. If you don’t know what RSS is, don’t worry about it. The important takeaway is that it basically gave me an inbox style view of all the new posts on each website. It allowed me to make sure that I didn’t miss any post on any of the websites that I follow. Google Reader was killed off this summer so I was left with a change to the system I had been using for many years to get my news.

What I’ve landed on now is dramatically different but I’m enjoying it more. I finally gave up on the inbox-style news gathering and decided that for most blogs, it was ok to not see every post. Instead, I created a river of information from these websites and I would dip my toe in as I had free time and see what was happening. I use Weave News Reader on Windows Phone for that, but there are many apps that will help you read news in this fashion.

For the very few low-traffic websites where I want to make sure I see EVERY post (xkcd, friend’s blogs, etc), I still subscribe via RSS. After trying theoldreader.com for a while, I ended up using feedly.com as my RSS reader. And actually, I don’t use the website very often. On Windows 8 I use the Nextgen Reader app and on the phone I use Phonly to consume RSS from Feedly. They all sync together so no matter what platform I’m on, I can keep up with the trickle of information that I’ve deemed extra-important.

It took a while for my OCD to let go of reading EVERY post on all these sites, but now I’m loving the feeling of freedom knowing that it’s ok to let posts go by on these sites. In reality, I never got to them all anyway and there was always this sense of unfinished business when I’d look at my RSS list. I’m still alerted to important information because it gets repeated often in the stream or I see it in various social media sites. All in all, it seems like a good solution.

benmartens November 8, 2013 Geek