Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

Ski Geek

Somehow, every activity I participate in is turned into a geek project. Skiing is no different. This season, I have been carrying around the Garmin GPS that I purchased earlier in the year. It keeps a signal inside my coat and dutifully tracks my position every few seconds.

I can load this into my National Geographic topographical map program and get an interesting view, but I wanted more. I want to know my top speed, how much time I spent in the lift lines, how fast the lift was moving, which lifts I rode the most, etc.

To that end, I’ve started writing a program to analyze the GPS data. The raw statistics are fairly simple and I was able to get a display churned out pretty quickly. Lately I’ve been stuck on trying to automatically figure out when I was on a lift. On the surface, it seems easy: you’re on a lift when you’re going up. That’s not always true. Runs have rises in them and lifts have dips in them. So then I tried to say that any time I’m heading in the same direction for X miles and Y vertical feet then I’m on a lift. Even that has problems. What happens when you get off a lift and keep skiing straight down the backside of the hill? What happens when you get a couple errant GPS points that aren’t in line with the lift? There is enough drift in the data to make it very complicated. If I can’t get the automatic solution figure out, I’m going to have the user tell me where the lifts are the first time and then I’ll save that data. I want to move on to getting either a 2D or 3D map working next. After that I’ll work out a good way to display all the statistics about the day and each individual run.

If you’re interested in seeing the code and/or helping out, it’s all available on codeplex.

The picture below shows the track from my last ski day at Crystal Mt in the National Geographic software. My software will end up looking something like this but with more data and information on the screen.

benmartens January 28, 2009 Gadgets, Geek, Projects, Skiing

Office Decoration

When I moved into the new office, I came up with an interesting way to decorate the back wall. I used the National Geographic Topographic maps software to create a bunch of 8.5×11 PDFs. I printed everything off at Kinko's and then painstakingly placed each sheet on the wall with thumbtacks.

The whole process took forever. If I had it to do over again, I would pay extra to have it done on a plotter or some other large format. This would have saved a lot of time and also I think it would have looked better because some of the sheets didn't quite line up when I tried to place them on the wall.

That being said, I still think it looks pretty good. I get a lot of comments from people as they walk by my office. The map goes from Seattle in the lower left corner, east to Stevens Pass, and then north up to almost the north end of Whidbey Island. The smaller map on the side wall shows Mt. Rainier. As I go on various trips, I print off a small picture and stick it on the map.

I don't think I'll do it again (at least in this manner), but I'm happy with the way it came out.

benmartens June 18, 2008 Geek, Outdoors

Geohashing

Rachel and I have been chatting about trying to do a little geocaching instead of regular hiking. Today's XKCD comic presents an idea called geohashing. There is a formula to figure out a geohash location. The inputs to the formula are the date, that date's (or most recent) Dow opening, and the integer lat/lon of your current location. The formula includes an MD5 hash and is pictured below. There is an app already written to calculate each meeting spot and there is a wiki with more info.

I'm not going to bother to explain what all that means, but if you need more help, you can click on the links for extra learnin'.

benmartens May 21, 2008 Geek, Outdoors

Tivo Hack

Last night, I hacked the Tivo and lived to tell about it. The Tivo HD comes with a 160GB drive which is good for 20 hours of high def recording (184 standard def hours.) That's quite a bit, but on busy sports weekends, 20 hours fills up pretty quickly. Plus, this is supposed to be a pretty easy hack and I wanted to give it a shot.

I ordered a 500GB Western Digital hard drive from NewEgg along with an external SATA USB drive enclosure. Once I had the material, it was pretty straightforward. I opened up the Tivo and took out the hard drive (make sure you have a Torx wrenches!) I connected the 500GB drive to my system via the USB enclosure and connected the Tivo drive to a SATA connection inside my computer. I fired up WinMFS and ran mfscopy. I goofed a little and forgot to delete all the old TV shows from the Tivo so the mfscopy command took the time to copy over all those recorded shows. It took about an hour, but it would have gone much faster if I had remembered to delete the shows first.

After mfscopy finished, I made a backup of the original Tivo drive (something I should have done at the beginning.) I'll keep the Tivo drive untouched for a while to make sure the new one is ok, but if it works then I'll wipe the old Tivo drive and use it for regular storage. Theoretically I can restore that backup at any time.

The mfscopy is supposed to copy over all the Season Passes, Cable Card settings, etc. It's a bit for bit copy of the whole drive. I really didn't want to go through the Cable Card pairing again so I was hoping that it really did work. I put the 500GB drive into the Tivo and fired it up. It worked perfectly! My Tivo now says that I have 64 hours of HD space and 607 hours of standard def space. It's going to be hard to fill that up unless I leave the house for a month.

There are some firmware changes you can make to hard drives to make them run slower and be a bit quieter. I didn't do any of those and it turned out ok. I do hear the hard drive a little, but that doesn't bother me. If you're really concerned about the noise, find that tool and/or pay a little extra for one of the Seagate DB35 drives. TivoCommunity.com has all the info you need.

All in all this was a very simple "hack." After Tim saw how it worked he said, "That's not even a hack." He's right. It's really simple as long as you're willing to void your warranty and risk destroying your investment. Beyond that you only have to click a few buttons and wait. Go for it!

benmartens January 22, 2008 Geek, Projects

Web Cam Time Lapse

I've done a couple time lapse videos recently, and I think I'm becoming a bit of a time lapse fan. This latest app combines time lapse photography with the skiing web cams that I watch every day (via my Vista gadget!)

The app watches a list of web cams which you provide and saves a copy of the image at intervals which you specify. My plan is to let a bunch of these run for the next few months and then stitch them together into some type of movie. Maybe none of them will turn out well, but it was an interesting little application to write nonetheless.

The program writes out a file called usersettings.xml and that contains all the information that you provided when you set up the web cams via the Add button. If you need to edit any of the information you provided, you'll have to close the program, edit the xml, and then restart. New threads are spawned to download all the images. There are a lot of potential holes in the program, but it has been running fine on my machine for a few days.

If you've been looking for something similar, feel free to check it out. The source code and binaries are posted on Codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/webcamtimelapse.

benmartens December 21, 2007 Geek, Projects

OnDemand

I was flipping through the OnDemand section of our digital cable subscription and was surprised at some of the content they have on there. You can get a lot of the new movies that are out on DVD as well as some of the more popular TV shows, but of course you have to pay for all that. The free selections aren't too bad. For example, what happens when the karaoke bar changes their karaoke night? Just head on home and flip on the cable box. There are karaoke songs out there! And what happens when you get tired of hearing your friends belt out barely recognizable tunes and you want some authentic NJ lovin'? Flip on over to the section full of Bon Jovi music videos! They have music lessons for guitar and piano as well as a couple movies that I've actually heard of (including Warren Miller and Monty Python.) Comcast has a website that lets you search through all the content which is a lot easier than using the on screen guide. There's a lot of junk out there but there are a few gems worth finding. Now if only I could get OnDemand HD content.

benmartens January 17, 2006 Geek, Motorcycle

iPod Update

I finished off the iPod project last night. When you sit down in my car you just see one small white cable that pops up from the floor near the cup holder. Plug that into the dock port on the iPod and voila! 30GB of tunes at your fingertips. I'm really happy with the way the project went. It could have been a nightmare but it was pretty simple. Check out the photos here.

benmartens April 14, 2005 Geek, Projects

Another Geek Project

I've gotten a lot of questions lately about what my “next project“ is now that the movie is done. You may have already noticed the new link to the right there called iPod Car Stereo. I'll be chronicalling the potentially disastrous results of my attempt to install an iPod in my car.

Also, it looks like the battle over Terri is over. 14 days is about the longest you can live without food and water and that's how long Terri lasted. It makes me think that she was pretty healthy physically, but you can make your own judgements from that. Keep up the good discussion in the comments on the last post.

benmartens March 31, 2005 Commentary, Geek, Projects