Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Links

Calendar For Couples

Early in our relationship, Tyla and I set up a joint calendar. There’s so much going on that without it, we’d be constantly confused about our upcoming schedule. It’s so useful that it seemed worth sharing. There are many calendar apps you could use, but we use http://calendar.live.com. I created the calendar on my account and then shared it with her. Not only can we access it through a browser, but it shows up on our phones and even in my Outlook calendar at work. Tyla is really good about keeping it updated so whenever we need to schedule something, we know that if we check the calendar, we can grab any open slot. If you have trouble planning with your friends or family members, give this a shot!

Featured Photo

There is a relatively new (at least to me) website called dailyhiker.com that I’ve been following. The guys who run it are local to the Pacific Northwest but the blog covers hiking around the world. They ran a contest recently for the best lake photo so I submitted my photo of MattM skipping rocks into the Puget Sound (technically not a lake I guess) on last summer’s camping trip. I didn’t win but I did make it into the top 13. Interestingly it’s the only photo in that group that has a person in it. This photo was taken with our little point and shoot. I’m really looking forward to hiking around with the T2i this summer.

http://www.dailyhiker.com/news/best-lake-photos-from-readers/

What’s Our Vector Victor?

During my brief stint with Lockheed in Minneapolis, I contributed a bit of code to an after-hours UAV project. Unfortunately I didn't get involved until almost the end of my time up there, but I was enthralled with the project. Since then I've always had an idea in the back of my mind to buy an off-the-shelf RC plane and add an autopilot to it.

The project either boils down to a ton of time or a ton of money. That might be changing though. Some clever individual has created a simple autopilot with pieces from the Lego Mindstorms kit. The kit now includes a gyro sensor and that is the piece that enabled this project. Currently the autopilot will maintain level flight and control the rudder to return the plane to the launch area.

If you see a tiny plane flying overhead taking pictures of you, look for the Studio711 logo on it. I'd love to create my own version of this project.

[source via slashdot]

A Few of My Favorite Things

Xbox, Microsoft, and motorcycles. Oh my! Looks like the good people of the Xbox team are doing a motorcycle ride for charity. I wonder how long it would take me to ride to Redmond to join up with them. I was thinking we should start up something like this at Lockheed. I know a lot of people ride, and I bet we could get a fairly good sized group together.

Speaking of motorcycles, I had the first warm ride of the spring yesterday and I'm looking forward to a lot more of it today and tomorrow. I own an extra helmet now so if any of you lovely ladies would like a ride, just let me know.