Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

Facebook Ad Case Study

Facebook sent me a $50 advertising credit so I decided to use it to promote my CascadeSkier applications and see behind the scenes of a Facebook ad.

Creating the ad was very simple. You set up the graphic, the text, where you want the ad to go (website or Facebook page) and then start narrowing down your target audience. I set up two versions of the ad. One was targeted to people in Washington and Oregon who were in one of the following categories: Outdoor fitness activities, extreme sports, traveling, or Windows. That one encompassed 2.7 million users. The second ad was much more targeted to people who were like the ski areas covered by my apps. That targeted 200K users.

Your two options for payment are per view or per click. Per click is obviously much more expensive, though in retrospect, I would have paid about the same with either choice. You can say how much you’re willing to pay and obviously Facebook shows ads for advertisers who are willing to pay more. I ended up paying $0.07 per 1000 views.

After 2.5 weeks, the ad had been shown to 92,163 unique users and each user had seen the ad an average of 4.6 times. That means I paid about $30. Of the 424,000 times my ad popped up on someone’s screen, it was clicked on a grand total of 23 times. That a 0.005% click through rate. Some quick searching revealed this is pretty standard. Unfortunately in my case there’s no way to know for sure if anybody bought anything when they went to cascadeskier.com because transactions are handled through the Windows Phone store, the Windows 8 store, and CafePress. Let’s assume that everyone who clicked there bought the phone app (because that’s where I make the most money per sale right now.) That would be $45.77 in sales minus the 30% cut that the store takes leaves me $32.04. Then if you take about 20% out for taxes I’m left with $25.63. So paying $30 in advertising gained me $25.63 in a very good scenario. It’s more likely that I only got one or two sales from those clicks.

I’ll let the $50 credit run out, but this doesn’t seem to be a net gain for me. Word of mouth has been a lot more successful and it’s free.

benmartens January 1, 2013 Geek

Safeway Coupon Clipping

In addition to regular paper coupons, our grocery store has started a program called “Just For U” where you can clip coupons online. They intend for you to flip through the coupons and add certain ones to your frequent shopper card. Those items show up in the phone app and you are supposed to go buy those specific items. I’ve never been one for clipping coupons, but every once in a while, I go to the site and click Add on every single coupon. We use OneNote to track our shopping lists so their app has no appeal to me. I save a few bucks here and there, but it’s not really worth my time to clip these virtual coupons.

Then one day I had an idea: why am I manually clicking on all these buttons? I’m a geek and geek’s don’t do this sort of repetitive stuff. We write code to do it for us! So with a little ingenuity, I whipped up a very basic piece of javascript that runs over the whole page, finds all the coupon buttons and then clicks them. Within a second or two, I can clip hundreds of coupons. I even made this a button in my browser toolbar so it’s nice and easy to run.

javascript:(async function(){ function sleep(ms) { return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms)); } async function scrollDown(count) { for (var i = 0; i < count; i++) { $(“.load-more”).click(); await sleep(1000); } } await scrollDown(10); $(‘.grid-coupon-btn:not([disabled])’).each(function(index,value){ value.click() });})()

This won’t help me save any more money, but it definitely means I spend less time clicking around on their website!

[11/23/2020] Updated Javascript to match the current website.

benmartens September 4, 2012 Geek

Network Closet

We recently increased the geek level of our house by adding a network closet! Ever since moving in, I’ve thought about how I would get network cable to every room of the house. It was going to be a pretty daunting task so I shopped around for a bit and finally found a great contractor (recommended by the guy who did our church parsonage remodel) with a great price. He gave me a bid and two days later was in the house to do the project. He worked with one other guy from about 8:30 to 4:30 and got it all done. We now have drops in all four bedrooms, the theater room, the family room, two in the living room, and one above the kitchen counter right next to an outlet. That kitchen drop is the planned site of our kitchen computer that will display recipes etc.

But Ben, what about wireless? I’ll just say flat out that I hate wireless networking. I long ago gave up on trying to make it work reliably so any piece of equipment that doesn’t move gets hardwired in to my network. Additionally, with the Media Center PC, all the TV in our house gets distributed over the network so if the room doesn’t have a network drop, there’s no chance of putting a TV in there. Since I don’t know exactly what we’ll be using each room for over the next 10-20 years, I just put a drop in every room. I also had him run CAT6 instead of CAT5 or CAT5e. This should take me through gigabit and beyond with no problem.

As you can see from the photo, this was a very low budget “network closet.” Instead of a fancy patch panel, I just had him add wall plates. And they aren’t even all on the same wall because of the layout of the house. He added a power outlet in that room too. It’s clearly not being used very much right now, but soon I’ll get to work moving all of our network gear, the home server, and maybe even our Media Center PC into that room. It can be as loud as it wants and it won’t bother anyone.

Right now we leave the door open to that closet, but if we ever want to start closing it, the back wall of the closet is the garage wall, so I could easily rig up an exhaust vent to blow hot air from the computers out into the garage.

All in all I’m extremely happy with this project. The price was right, and I know this would have taken me multiple weekends to complete. He and his co-worker did it all in a day and they didn’t even have to cut any extra holes in the drywall to get through the fire blocks on the tall walls.

If you need any electrical work done, call Greg’s Electrical Services (425) 957-4630. I have my eye on a whole house surge protector and power conditioner. I’ll be calling Greg!

benmartens March 26, 2012 Geek, Home Improvement

CascadeSkier for Windows Phone 7

I’ve spent way too much time working on my most popular Windows Phone app this winter. Version 3.0 hit the marketplace in November and I just released version 3.5. There have been numerous updates for various things but biggest changes were support for multiple live tiles and live tiles that flip over to reveal a one day weather forecast. The updates have been very well received and it’s very rewarding to see the positive reviews fly in. Right now this is the #10 paid app in the sports category. I realize that’s not saying a LOT, but I’m still proud of it.

A few years back you may remember that I tried to start a website called cascadeskier.com. That was where the gadget first started and then the Windows Phone app came later. The site was supposed to be devoted to the Pacific Northwest skier. I cancelled it after a few months because it was way too much work for one person to handle and I wasn’t getting the kind of traffic numbers that I was hoping for. I was fed up with the whole thing and I let the domain name lapse. Big mistake. I regretted it pretty quickly, but a squatter had purchased the domain. I patiently waited for two years until they gave up on the domain and then I bought it again.

So now if you head to cascadeskier.com, you’ll see a simple page showing off the Windows Phone app and the Windows 7/Vista gadget. There’s also a demo video showing off the current version of the app.

The astute among you will notice a hint at a Windows 8 version on the site. I’ve played around with it a little, but I really need to devote some major time to that. I think I’m going to slow down on the Windows Phone app updates for a while and focus on Windows 8.

benmartens January 23, 2012 Geek, Projects

CascadeSkier v3 for WP7

Around the end of last spring, I was contacted by a guy who wanted to do new graphics for my app. I was actually kind of proud of my old logo, but I decided to write him back. He offered to do it all for free as long as he could use it for his portfolio. Deal! When he sent over the first few samples, I knew the app was in for a big upgrade.

In addition to a complete graphics overhaul which you can see in the video below, I added some new features. Before the app would pull in specific details for each resort as you flipped from page to page. Now the whole thing is cached on my server and when the app loads, it pulls it all down at once. That makes it a lot faster to flip from resort to resort. You can also filter and sort the resorts which is a feature that people have been asking for since I launched. There are more features coming, but I launched a couple weeks ago to get this into people’s hands.

Want to learn more about Jeremy, the graphic designer? Go check out his website at sanfoj.com. And while you’re at it, go check out the medal design contest for the Winter X-Games. Both he and his girlfriend (JoEllen) had their designs make it to the final round of 16! Voting ends today so vote now!

If you have a Windows Phone, go check it out! And if you don’t have one, sorry, but it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll do this for Android and extremely unlikely that I’ll buy a Mac just to put it on the iPhone.

benmartens November 18, 2011 Geek, Skiing

Cost of a Light Bulb

Back in 2007 I wrote about the cost of running various things from a Christmas tree to an Xbox360. Maybe I’m a cheap skate, but I’m always amazed at the cost of the simple light bulb. Now that we have a bigger house, I’ve been looking for bulbs to replace to save money. It can make a big difference!

Take for example, your basic 60W old-school incandescent light bulb. If you left that on 24 hours a day, every day for a year, that would cost $52! That’s just ONE bulb. I had 100W equivalent exterior CFL bulbs that go on with my fancy timer every night, and I figured out that if I replaced them with 60W equivalent bulbs, I’d save about $20/year and it was plenty bright enough.

Or let’s say you have a living room with 3 100W incandescent bulbs that you use an average of 3 hours per day. If you replace them with 3 100W equivalent CFL bulbs, you’ll save $25/year.

I know it’s not really that much money, but you do that here and there a couple times and you’ve just paid for a Netflix subscription.

Generally you can run about 4 CFL bulbs for the cost of one incandescent bulbs. In a few years, the cost of LED bulbs will come down enough that we’ll all be buying those instead of CFL. You can run about 10 LED bulbs for the coast of one incandescent bulb, and LED bulbs don’t have the warm up time that CFL bulbs do. They’re still pricey but they last longer. You’ll want to do your math before you switch to LED.

By the way, if you’re at all interested in this stuff, you should pick up a Kill-a-Watt. I still find myself plugging various things into it and seeing how much power they use.

benmartens November 4, 2011 Geek, Home Improvement

Windows Media Center LCD Arduino Project

JimM got me interested in Arduinos. They are simple electronics boards that contain almost everything you need to get started with your project. When it arrived in the mail, I connected it to the computer via USB, opened up the development environment, uploaded a small program to the board and boom, I had a blinking light. Simple, yes, but the time to results was extremely low.

My overall plan was to build a display for the Media Center PC in our living room. I wanted to be able to easily see when it was recording something or when one of the tuners was being used by one of the extenders. There are some premade solutions that would have probably worked, but this seemed like a great starter Arduino project and I would end up with something that was completely customizable.

In addition to the Arduino, I got a 20×4 character LCD screen and some small supplies like resistors, wire, buttons, and a potentiometer. This is the point where I should show a schematic for the whole thing, but honestly I never drew one. I built little portions of it as I went and ended up with something that works and hasn’t burned down the house yet.

Basically, the Arduino Uno sends power to the LCD and a 10K potentiometer controls the contrast of the screen. The board also sends the text for the screen through four wires along with a couple extra wires for enabling the screen, etc. The board powers the backlight for the LCD but I hooked up a resistor there to dim the backlight a bit. I had originally planned to have the backlight be controllable from software but I gave up after a couple failures trying to get a transistor hooked into the circuit. There is also a simple button hooked in, but I haven’t needed to use that in the software yet.

Once I got it all soldered together, I stuck it into a plastic hobby box from Radio Shack. I had to cut out a rectangular hole in the front for the LCD. That was done freehand with a Dremel and looks pretty bad when you get up close. Luckily it hides in the shadows and you can’t really tell. I have ideas to do that better next time.

The box now sits by the Media Center and is connected to the PC via USB. That cable provides power and communications. A C# application gathers status from the Ceton InfiniTV tuner and sets the display for the LCD in the box. (For the curious, there is a JSON interface to get to the InfiniTV status.) When a tuner is in use, the box displays the channel call sign and the name of the show that is being recorded. I get that info by mapping the channel number from the tuner to a call sign and then looking for the corresponding file in the Recorded TV folder. That file has the show name. When a tuner isn’t in use, it shows the temperature of that tuner. I’ll probably come up with something better for unused tuners in the future.

This was my first real electronics project so I learned quite a few things that are probably obvious to other people:

  • Use a bread board. Soldering everything to see if it worked was a pain.
  • Use header pins so you don’t have to solder directly to the LCD screen.
  • This whole thing could have been done in a couple minutes by buying a pre-made LCD shield that plugs in on top of the Arduino. I’m glad I did it manually the first time, but next time I’ll probably go for the shield.
  • Buy an introductory electronics book.
  • Take more pictures along the way! I was so excited to get this working that it somehow slipped my mind.

What’s next? I have quite a few project ideas but I think the one I’ll tackle next is making a tilt/pan mount for my camera that is controlled by an Arduino and will automatically take big panorama pictures. I’m also going to build an intervalometer into it for time lapse. This project will involve more buttons, motor control, and power from a battery.

benmartens March 11, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

My Windows Phone Applications

I now have seven applications in the Windows Phone marketplace so I thought I’d give you a quick rundown. You’ll see that it’s not quite as impressive as it sounds since some are sort of duplicates.

 

Cascade Skier
This is my most successful app, and by successful I mean that I have about 500 downloads. That’s not a lot, but I’m pretty happy. If you ski in the Pacific Northwest, you need this app. I have a whole page devoted to it’s features and it includes a YouTube demo. The short story is that you get hourly weather updates for all the local resorts and webcam images. It also makes use of the live tile feature of the Windows Phone platform to show current stats and the webcam in your live tile for your favorite resort. The webcam as part of the live tile is a recent addition and isn’t shown in this screenshot yet. http://cascadeskier.studio711.com/
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5] [Screenshot 6]
View in Marketplace
DiamondStats
The first app that I sent to the marketplace was DiamondStats. I didn’t really think anybody would buy it but I’ve sold about 15 copies. When I play rec league softball, I like to keep my stats, but I don’t like trying to remember them during the game because it takes my mind off what I should be doing. With this app, you come back into the dugout, easily mark what happened and you’re done. It keeps track of your total stats over various games. It’s nothing fancy but it was a good learning experience and something that I’ll use.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2]
View in Marketplace
Puzzle Toolkit
The idea for this one came from a couple guys at work who are very involved in PuzzleHunt. This app is one stop shopping for puzzle clue solving. It provides a variety of tools to help you solve clues related to braille, zodiac, Chinese zodiac, maritime signal flags, binary/hex/decimal/octal/roman numerals, ciphers (Vigenere, RotN, substitution, Atbash), resistor codes, semaphore flags, morse code (including ambiguous morse code with dictionary checking), and ascii conversion. While all the other apps are $0.99, this one is priced at $3.99. I split out individual parts of this toolkit and they’re available for $0.99 each as separate apps. There is a separate page for this application with a little more information and a YouTube demo video.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5]
View in Marketplace
Ambiguous Morse
This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. You can type in a serious of dots and dashes without spaces and the app will figure out all the possible translations of that series. Since that can get big quickly, you can filter just by words that are in the dictionary. a reference page helps you go from letters to morse.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4]
Ambiguous Morse
Braille Translator
This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. As you start filling in the dots, it tells you what the current dot pattern represents and also tells you what other letters could be formed if you added more letters. A reference page helps you go from letters to Braille.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3]
View in Marketplace
Ciphers
This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. It will help you encode and decode Vigenere, RotN/Caesar, substitution, and Atbash ciphers.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5]
View in Marketplace
Semaphore Flags
This is part of the Puzzle Toolkit. Set two arm positions and see what letter it represents. Set a single arm and you’ll see what letters can be formed with that position set. A reference page helps you go from letter to flags.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4]
View in Marketplace

Live Tile Web Cam
Take any web cam image and make it your live tile! If you know the URL to the image, this app will get it set up as your live tile and will automatically refresh it for your every hour or every day.

Note: The Windows Phone operating system will only support images that are JPG and PNG files that are less than 80KB in size.
[Screenshot 1]

View in Marketplace

Live Tile Web Cam 2
Take any web cam image and make it your live tile! If you know the URL to the image, this app will get it set up as your live tile and will automatically refresh it for your every hour or every day.

Note: The Windows Phone operating system will only support images that are JPG and PNG files that are less than 80KB in size.
[Screenshot 1]

View in Marketplace

Timelapse Calculator
Calculate how long it will take to capture your timelapse photos and the length of the resulting video.
[Screenshot 1]

View in Marketplace

Exposure Calculator
Quickly calculate the correct aperture or shutter speed based on the film speed (ISO) and lighting conditions.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2]

View in Marketplace

Your downloads and reviews are greatly appreciated! Feel free to contact me if you have bugs, comments, feature requests, or even app requests.

benmartens January 20, 2011 Geek, Projects

Ceton InfiniTV Media Center Demo

About a month ago, I wrote a post about the guts of my Media Center PC. But what does it really do? Why did I build it? Since you can’t all stop by and check it out in person, I’ve put together a demo video.

It’s dorky, I know. The various cameras aren’t calibrated the same and my shirt sleeve kept flipping up. But by the time I noticed all these things, I was too far in to start over. So enjoy this (amateur) video showing just a few of the reasons why I love my Windows Media Center PC.

If you’re running just about any version of Windows 7 or Vista, you have the Media Center app. You won’t be able to do the live TV portion, but everything else is available to you for free.

benmartens January 6, 2011 Gadgets, Geek, Projects

CascadeSkier Windows Phone 7 App

Three years ago, I wrote a mildly successful Windows sidebar gadget (~6000 users) that shows local temperatures, 24 hour snowfall and total snowfall for all the local resorts. There are other data sources like that, but what sets this apart is that the data is updated hourly thanks to live feeds from the Northwest Avalanche Center. (Thanks again to the NWAC for letting me use their data!) While displaying all that data, the gadget cycles through web cam feeds from each resort. At the bottom of the gadget is a quick news line to keep people informed of local snow news. Version 4.0 just hit the Windows Live gallery yesterday so feel free to download it for free and try it out. If you want more details, check out gadget.studio711.com.

Many of the users asked if I had plans to make a Windows Phone 7 version of that gadget. I said no at first, but with time and a lot of requests, I changed my mind and decided to give it a shot. Microsoft also really encouraged employees to develop their own applications. I’m sure that’s a large part of why employees are all getting new phones (that and because we’ll make good marketers.) Anyway, I’m proud to say that if you go to the Zune Marketplace and flip through the Sports genre, search for “cascadeskier”, or click this link (with the Zune software installed), you’ll see my app!

The development process was interesting:

  • It costs $99/year to be a developer. Microsoft keeps 30% of the generated revenue. This all covers the cost of identity verification and unlimited application submissions.
  • A very nice suite of development tools is available in a single package. It includes Visual Studio 2010 Express, Expression Blend, and a WP7 emulator.
  • Code is written in Silverlight/WPF. It was my first foray into that world but I’m happy with the end result. Data binding was the most painful part, but after I learned some debugging tricks, that got simpler.
  • The application submission process is very nice. Fill out the form, click upload, wait for them to test it and then it shows up in the marketplace. If you fail the tests, you get a document back detailing exactly what tests you fail. If you clean that up and don’t break anything else, you’ll be in the marketplace. Your app will never be declined without an answer. It sounds simple but it’s a huge plus for developers and a big win over the Apple platform.
  • Updates are super simple. The developer uploads a new binary and the Windows Phone software takes care of the rest. It notifies the user that there is a new version available and points them to the download.

  

I have actually submitted two apps already, but I think the second one will be much less popular. I wrote it mostly for myself. It’s called DiamondStats. It’s a simple app that helps you keep track of your baseball or softball stats. It sound silly but I’m a numbers guy and I’m always thinking about stats while I’m playing rec league softball. (Yes, I know that’s bad. I didn’t do it when I was playing competitively in high school.) Having the app is nice because I can just walk back into the dugout, pop in the numbers and then forget about it. I wrote this for my old phone and then rewrote it for the new platform.

I plan to continue to release updates for the CascadeSkier application. Suggestions are already coming in and some of them have been pretty good. I think the first think I want to do is get rid of the start page where you select from a list of resorts. You should jump automatically to your favorite resort and be able to filter out the ones you don’t care about.

At some point I might port it over to Android, but that’s not real high on my list right now. It will very likely never be on iPhone since I won’t be buying a Mac just to write an app for that phone.

If you download it, please send me your feedback!

[UPDATE] You can view the most up to date information about this app at http://cascadeskier.studio711.com

benmartens November 19, 2010 Gadgets, Geek, Skiing