Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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

Throwback Thursday: Mowing in 1986

This was one of my favorite jobs! Dad and Mom bought this tractor the year I was born and they’re still using it today. The keen observer will notice in the background that the area between our property and the golf course hadn’t been cleared away when this photo was taken. The trees are a lot bigger now too!

benmartens February 6, 2014 Throwback Thursday

New CEO

Microsoft has a new CEO! I’m sure it’s a bit intimidating to be on a list of three CEOs with the other two being Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, but I’m really happy with the choice of Satya. He’s probably not a household name (yet) outside of the company, but internally he has been doing a fantastic job.

I’ve been in his org for quite a while, and I’m particularly happy that they picked someone who is so familiar with our cloud and enterprise offerings. When you hear analysts talking about Microsoft and they only mention Xbox, Windows Phone, Bing, etc, you can mostly dismiss them because they’re missing the biggest moneymakers for the company. Satya’s org was one of the three main pillars of Microsoft’s revenue (Windows, Office and he ran cloud/enterprise offerings.) It might not be a flashy org, but we crank out around $20 BILLION a year. That’s about 25% of the entire company’s revenue and this org has seen double digit year over year growth for more quarters than I can count.

So while it would be fun to have a flashy, public figure as CEO, I’m happy that we have Satya who intimately understands the core businesses of our company. (And it doesn’t hurt that he loves the product I’m working on too!)

benmartens February 5, 2014 Commentary

RC Flight Attempt #2 (And #3)

I waited all week for the weekend to arrive so I could attempt another flight. On Saturday I headed to a bigger park, checked over the plane, connected the battery and took off. My flight couldn’t have lasted longer than a second. Checking over the plane, I discovered that one of the set screws that holds the prop in place was missing. There was no way that I was ever going to find that tiny little screw in the grass so I headed to the hobby store down the road. After admitting my complete newbie status, they were able to point me to a new pack of screws and a couple other spare parts that I’ll probably need too.

The plane repair went quickly and I was ready to take off again. This time it worked! No mistakes! Eventually my heart stopped racing and I was actually able to get it trimmed out and enjoy the flight! I flew through the first battery (about 6 minutes), popped in the second one and flew through that too. The plane doesn’t fly beautifully. It’s only has throttle, elevator and rudder, but it’s still a lot of fun. I can’t wait to get it up in the air again! I might pick up a couple more batteries so that I can fly for a bit longer on each trip.

benmartens February 4, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Super Bowl Champions

I’ve never lived in a city where the hometown team has won any major sporting event. It was so exciting to see the Seahawks not only win, but completely embarrass the Broncos! I don’t usually listen to sports talk, but when I flipped it on for the past two weeks, all I heard was about how smart Peyton Manning was and how the Seattle defense wasn’t going to be able to handle him. Wrong.

We celebrated the win with a house full of friends as we had been doing throughout the playoffs. It’s fun to watch your team win but it’s even more fun to be surrounded by friends when it happens.

The city has gone wild. People on Twitter were reporting a lot of fires and rioting which is unfortunate. Hopefully the police keep that nonsense under control. It’s Seattle. I can’t imagine things will get too out of hand.

Congrats to the Seahawks! It’s fun to cheer for a team with a bunch of previously unheard-of players with very low salaries. They’re in it for the game, not for the money and it showed. They played with a lot of heart. Everyone on the team plays a role, instead of being a one man show. As proof of that point, they scored in every way possible during the Super Bowl: safety, field goal, and touchdowns both by the offense and kick return team. Kudos to you Seahawks!

benmartens February 3, 2014 Sports

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

Scanning Slides

Growing up, my parents usually developed their film into slides. We’d gather around the projector and share memories of our trips. It’s a fun way to experience the photos, but it’s not nearly as convenient as today’s digital format.

Mom decided to protect these memories by scanning them in. That was a monumental task. By the time it was done, she had looked through 4500-5000 slides and scanned in 3320 of them. She estimates that she put about 50 hours of work into the project. It’s not exactly exciting work either! While it’s fun to see the photos, most of your time is spent putting a new slide into the scanner and then waiting for it to scan. This is her pile of slides:

I can’t say thank you enough to Mom for doing this work! Now that they are digital (and because we back up!), these photos will be preserved forever. Imagine how neat it would be to look back at this many photos from your ancestors in the 1800s or even earlier. The family genealogy hobby is going to go through some massive changes in the next century.

To celebrate this new wealth of photos, I’m going to start “Throwback Thursday”. Every Thursday I’ll pick a photo out of the ones she scanned in and tell a little story about it. This first photo comes from my 4th birthday. One thing I remember about my birthdays is that Mom made incredible birthday cakes! As a parent, I look back on that and have no idea how she found the time. This was the first cake that I have memories of. Cake covered with candy? Brilliant!

benmartens January 30, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Maiden Flight

My RC adventure took a big step last weekend. All the pieces came together, and, after hours on the RC simulator, I had my first real flight!

The plane looks really basic and that’s because it is. It’s the FT Flyer from the Flite Test 3-pack swappable kit. They have a series of planes that all use the same power pod (speed control, motor, batter, receiver, etc) and this kit included three different planes. All the pieces of foam are precut and you just follow their build videos to put it all together. Even with all that help, I had plenty of mistakes in my first build, but hey, it flew! Sort of.

On Sunday afternoon as the sun was setting, Tyla, Elijah and I headed down the street to the school and carried the plane out to the soccer field. I powered it up and took off. Success! After a few uneasy loops, I brought it in for an ungraceful landing. It doesn’t look very nice but nothing was damaged. When I picked it up, the rubber band snapped the landing gear back into place and I was ready for my next flight. The second flight was longer and I decided to try to trim it out. I had balanced the plane but it really wanted to dive to the ground. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the plane so I reached down to my transmitter to hit the elevator trim button and hit the power button instead! The motor went to full throttle and the plane dove straight into the ground. Oops! The plane was almost completely undamaged except that the prop was broken. I had plenty of spares but they were all back home and given the lack of remaining daylight, we called it a day.

Later that evening I got it fixed up and eagerly await my next opportunity to snag some daylight and fly again! I’m planning to get more comfortable with this plane, build another one or two from the kit and then hopefully buy something a little nicer. I want to get a lot better with fixed wing flight before moving on to multirotors.

This hobby combines a lot of smaller hobbies like model building, electronics, and video games. I could definitely see this becoming addicting. If any of you local friends are interested in getting a peak at the hobby, please let me know! It would be awesome to have some of you doing it too.

benmartens January 29, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Getting Started With LiPo

Rechargeable batteries have changed a lot since I was a kid. They used to be big and bulky and not hold much of a charge. As I’m learning about RC planes, I’m learning that the new battery technology is pretty impressive. They’re very small, pack a lot of punch and use computerized chargers to make sure they charge correctly. They are, however, a bit more dangerous (or else I underestimated old rechargeables.)

Modern rechargeables use lithium polymer technology (LiPo). These are some of the safety tips I’ve gathered in my research:

  • These things are prone to catching fire in many different circumstances (overcharging, drawing too much current, puncturing or damaging the battery, etc.) They should always be stored in a cool dry place inside a fireproof bag.
  • Never leave the batteries unattended while charging and preferably do it on a concrete surface with a smoke detector overhead.
  • LiPo batteries have both a positive and negative power plug as well as a plug that provides individual access to each cell in the battery. The latter is useful for charging and balancing the cells.
  • LiPos are made up of various numbers of cells. Never charge a cell over 4.2V or let it discharge past 3.0V.
  • For best results, only discharge 80% of the capacity.
  • LiPo batteries should be stored at around 3.7V per cell.
  • Modern chargers are computer controlled and will help keep each cell in your battery balanced, avoid charging too fast, and help you keep within the recommended voltage limits.
  • If you’re going to cut the connector off a battery to place it with a different type, don’t snip both wires at the same time. You’ll short out the battery! (Seems obvious in hindsight but I’m pretty sure I would have done it without thinking if I hadn’t seen a warning.)

These little technological wonders can crank out a huge number of amps for longer than seems possible, but you need to treat them with a lot of respect. FliteTest has a good video and accompanying article about batteries in their beginner series.

benmartens January 28, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Finding A Sirius Station With Power Query

We got a 6 month trial of Sirius with our Ford Escape and then extended it for another six months once we finally got a good offer from Sirius. Listening to music without commercials is addicting and they have a lot of good stations to choose from. The one thing they are missing is a feature on their website that lets me tell them the artists I like and then gives me the stations that play those artists the most. But hey, it’s just data right? I should be able to figure this out. I do, after all, work on the team that is producing the premiere (I hope) data experience for Excel: Microsoft Power Query (part of the Office Power BI suite).

The first step was finding a playlist history for all the Sirius stations. A quick Bing search revealed http://www.dogstarradio.com/search_playlist.php. It has a bunch of search parameters and best of all, they are dumped right into the URL so you can easily build your own searches just by modifying the URL.

Next I built a function inside of Power Query that takes an artist name and returns one page of results. I wrote a function on top of that which calls the first function multiple times to collect each page of data. (Unfortunately there’s no way on the website to view the entire result list at once.) The last step was feeding in a list of artists I’m interested in. I grouped the data by radio station and the count of the songs that were played. Voila. I should be listening to channel 31 “The Coffee House” which features singer-songwriters, or as I call it “guy with guitar.”

I wish Sirius offered this feature directly on their website, but it’s really cool that I was able to answer it myself with Power Query in a few minutes between meetings at work.

benmartens January 27, 2014 Uncategorized