Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I’ve been happily using the Storage Spaces feature of Windows 8 for a while now. It lets me throw in a bunch of drives, tell Windows to treat them all as one big drive, and then tell it to make sure every file is stored on two physical drives. If one drive fails, I can replace it without losing any data.

Up until recently, I had 2 3TB drives and 2 2TB drives. I wanted to replace the 2TB drives with 4TB drives to give me some extra headroom. But how do you remove perfectly healthy drives? One option would be to just pull the plug on one 2TB drive, replace it with a 4TB and let the system repair itself, but emulating a disaster doesn’t seem like a great option.

There’s nothing I could find in the UI that would let me remove one of these drives so I opted for Power Shell instead. Check out the section of this help doc called “How Do I Replace A Physical Drive?” It implies that the UX should have a Remove option but I never saw one. The Power Shell commands worked great though. Repairing the system took hours to finish as it copied lots of data around, but I expected that. It helps to have a spare SATA and power connection to pull this off but you could also do it with a USB enclosure (preferably USB3.)

Now I’m happily running with 14TB of total space. That’s still mirrored so I have 7TB writeable. Oh and by the way, 4TB drives are getting CHEAP. I found these two for $169 each.

My music collection is over 70GB. I’ve spent more time than I care to remember curating it. And now I’m coming to the realization that I should probably delete it. There’s very little point to keeping a local music collection anymore with all the various cloud music services that are available. We subscribe to Xbox Music which means that we get unlimited access to play any of the songs on the service from our phones, computers, or Xbox’s. Why bother monkeying around with local files?

I came to this point quite a while back with movies. When DVDs went out and BluRay came in, I vowed to not end up with shelves full of discs I never used. If I want a movie, I can rent the disc from Netflix or stream it on Netflix or Amazon. That has been a good choice too so I just need to pull the trigger with the music.

The only difference with music is that we’re still holding on to a few music players without internet connections, namely a bunch of Zunes and a cheaper player that I use on my motorcycle. That’s about the only time when we really need to have local files.

Are you still downloading MP3’s or are you just streaming full time from the internet?

I’m not going to debate whether or not it’s good for the NSA to be tapping all of our communications. There are plenty of talking heads screaming at each other already. What I’m here to say is: DUH.

When the news broke about all this wiretapping stuff, I thought, “Don’t we know this already?” I guess not, but it should be assumed. And even if the NSA wasn’t doing it in what they claim is an attempt to protect you, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing it all the time to serve you ads. Forget the NSA, everything you do online is already stored in huge databases whether it’s your ISP, companies following you around the web serving you ads, or the end service that you’re using. Most of your traffic flies around the internet in plain text and is trivial to read/store. It’s not just on the internet either. Stores are tracking you as you walk around based on the signals emanating from your cell phone. And when you’re outside, companies have huge databases full of your location at all times of the day based on which cell phone towers you’re connected to. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff. It’s very simple technology that’s already widely used.

We should make sure all of these companies and organizations are following our current laws, but more importantly we all need to take it upon ourselves to be smart about what we do and how we store our data. If it’s important and it’s not encrypted, then you’re basically screaming it through a megaphone on a busy street corner.

Your data security is your own responsibility. If it’s important, then it’s important enough to encrypt. And if you don’t want to encrypt, don’t send anything over the network that you don’t want the world to read.

I’ve been at Microsoft for over seven years working on various iterations of a common idea. Over the years, our product direction has been tweaked and adjusted quite a few times in big and small ways. I don’t think anybody could have seen this result back then. But that’s part of what makes this milestone so great!

So what did we end up shipping? It’s officially called Microsoft Power Query for Excel and we’re part of the Power BI for Office 365 package. You can find our team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dataexplorer/. There’s plenty of news coverage too.

This product is an add in for Excel, and in a nutshell we make it super easy to connect to data whether it’s data you already know about or data that you need to search for. You can pull data from SQL, Azure, DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Terradata, Oracle, Sharepoint, Hadoop, Active Directory, websites, Facebook and many more. Don’t know where to find your data? Open up the search pane and find it! Once you’ve identified your data source, you can easily transform it, clean it up, and/or merge it with other data even if the data sources are huge. You’re working with a preview of the data and building up a script in the background as you make changes. Once you’re done, you can hit Refresh and we go back out to each of those sources, run the transformations again, and give you the final result with fresh data!

There’s no rest for our team though. Stay tuned for more exciting things! (Assuming you find data exciting… and who doesn’t?!)

You may have heard about a new currency called Bitcoin. Taken on the surface, it’s just another way to transfer money between individuals except that this one isn’t controlled by any government. It’s as secure as cash (or probably more secure since it can’t be counterfeited) and while it’s not quite as anonymous as cash, it’s much more anonymous than credit cards or checks. Like most other currencies, the value is set by what people think it’s worth. One of the most popular Bitcoin Exchanges is called MtGox and it says that right now one Bitcoin is worth $120 USD. Bitcoins are almost infinitely dividable so you just pay for stuff in portions of a Bitcoin. More and more retailers are starting to accept Bitcoin as a direct payment option or you can just use it as an investment strategy and a way to transmit money between like-minded people. You can never actually hold one in your hand. It’s all handled digitally.

From the geeky math side, it is even more interesting. The project was launched in 2009 by someone who still remains anonymous. Bitcoins are found by solving an unpredictable cryptographic problem and the whole system is configured to only dole out a specific number of Bitcoins every year. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins and they get increasingly hard to find. These “miners” who find Bitcoins are also helping to cryptographically validate every Bitcoin transaction.

I haven’t listened to much of what the general media says about Bitcoin but I’ve heard random snippets trying to link it to terrorism, drugs and clubbing baby seals. That’s nonsense. What really scares people in charge is that no one is in charge of Bitcoin. Governments can’t print more of it or directly affect it’s value. There are many other crypto-currencies out there, but this is by far the most popular one.

It’s a remarkable system and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with this post. If you’re interested in learning more, check out Leo Laporte’s interview with Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist at Bitcoin.