Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Ike Kinswa State Park Camping

For many years, we have gone on a summer camping trip with Tyla’s family and the tradition continued this year. I don’t think most of us had heard of Ike Kinswa State Park before but we decided to give it a shot. It’s located northwest of Mt. St. Helens and southwest of Mt. Rainier.

We arrived on a Saturday and left on a Tuesday to try to avoid some traffic, and the traffic part worked well but it made booking difficult. State parks book up extremely quickly so you need to jump online right at 7am, 9 months in advance of the first day of your trip. Since our trip started Saturday, that meant that all the Thursday and Friday campers got first dibs. Thankfully we still found a couple pretty nice sites close together.

The park itself was nice. It sits on a reservoir behind one of two dams on the Cowlitz River. We spent Sunday driving around to explore the dams and play disc golf. On Monday we went up to Paradise Visitor Center on the south side of Rainer. Some of us took a short (but steep) hike up to Alta Vista. The trail almost had too much snow for us to make it but we did get to the top of the crest. The weather was perfectly clear and it was fun to point out the hikers going up to Camp Muir. I would love to do that hike with Elijah sometime.

All in all, it was a great trip. I dont’ know that we’ve had many trips with nicer weather. It was in the low to mid 80s during the day and cool enough at night to sleep easily. Thanks to Don and crew for getting the camper ready for this one trip each year and then putting it away again! It makes it a lot easier to do all the cooking and cleaning from the trailer.

Now we have a couple months before it’s time to figure out where to go next year…

benmartens July 24, 2025 Family, Outdoors, Travel

EGO Equipment Review

When we bought this house, I purchased a simple push mower and a multi-head motor with string trimmer, edger, and blower attachments. That setup has served me well for 14 years and while they were showing their age, I didn’t have a strong reason to upgrade, and yet, here I am with new electric tools.

It all started when a friend who sells this stuff helped me get started with the EGO multi-head system. I ended up with the string trimmer, edger, and hedge trimmer attachments as well as a blower and an extra 5Ah battery to go with the 2.5 Ah battery that came with the multi-head unit. The gas mower remains for now, but I will eventually replace it with an EGO push mower.

The switchover to battery had been imminent anyway. My old motor was leaking more gas than it consumed and I knew I wouldn’t put the time into fixing it when I wanted to switch to battery powered tools anyway. As an added bonus, the blower is now easy enough for Elijah to use and he thinks it is fun so things stay much cleaner! I admit that these tools are also more fun for me to use too so I’m doing a better job of keeping up with all the edging and trimming around our yard.

It took a little thinking about where I was going to fit these tools in my limited shed space since they hang a bit differently than my previous tools. I was happy to find a robust 3D printing community around the EGO tools so I was able to print a holder for the main unit along with holders for the batteries and blower.

These tools still aren’t cheap but it’s helpful that the major investment of the battery can be shared among all the tools. I’m also excited by the inverters that they sell, especially the 3000w model. I hope that some day they will come out with a 240v inverter which I could use instead of our gas generator to power our house for short bursts of time and then save the gas generator for multi-day outages.

benmartens July 17, 2025 Home Improvement

Best of YouTube

It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post! I haven’t done one of these in about 9 months but I do keep notes that whole time on the ones that I think might be worthy. These are the three that have bubbled to the top.

Donut Media started the list last time and this time we start with the heart and soul of Donut (Jeremiah and Zach) who left to start the Big Time channel. They have an amazing deep dive into what it takes to become a MotoGP racer. If you like F1, you might love MotoGP. The tech level and story lines are just as strong, but the racing is even closer and higher stakes. This video gives you a good idea of the incredible lifelong dedication that it takes to race at the highest level.

I love trying different craft beers and I recently logged my 1500th distinct beer on Untappd. The How to Make Everything channel has a long series of videos walking through history and learning how things were made. This video dives into four types of beer and why they are historically important. I feel like I know a lot about beer but there was still a lot of great content in this video.

It’s hard to communicate what it feels like to be a software engineer, especially in my role where I’m reviewing other people’s designs and providing feedback about what might go wrong or how a different solution might be better. People call it “thinking outside the box” but it’s more like starting with “why does the box have to exist?” Mark Rober published a video on his Crunch Labs channel that did a good job of communicating the feeling of being an engineer.

As an aside, the build box subscriptions from Mark Rober’s Crunch Labs are fantastic. We’ve tried some others but this is one that I’m happy to keep paying for. Not only are the builds very high quality and educational, but he makes a special video for each one that gives a ~10 minute science lesson related to the build.

benmartens July 10, 2025 Links

Weekend in Spokane

Sometimes we try to squeeze in a quick random weekend vacation, but there are so many great options, how do we decide what to do? To help with this, we kind of fell into the odd goal of trying to touch every county in Washington with our electric vehicle. The bar is very low. We just have to drive through it and while I try to limit the times we just drive in/out of a county to say we were there, it’s ok if that’s what happens. We invented the challenge so we can invent the rules and we can change them later if we want to!

We’ve been doing this for a while so the counties are getting harder to hit. For this trip, we targeted the northeast corner of the state. There are some really interesting spots in that area. For example, Crawford State Park has an amazing cave system that I would like to explore. But when you try to cram a bunch of stuff into a quick weekend trip and group a couple counties together, it gets tougher.

The itinerary for this trip was that we would drive to Spokane on Friday evening. Saturday we would do a counterclockwise loop north and west of Spokane and then Sunday we would drive back. And of course, we would stay at a Best Western Plus which Elijah thinks is the best hotel chain in the whole world. That status got a bit of a blemish when we pulled up and found out that their pool was closed for repairs!

I chose the Liberty Lake hotel because it was right across the street from a Tesla service center and Supercharger. That was very convenient and made staying there worth it even with the hotel being on the east side of Spokane.

  • Our tour started with driving north to Pend Oreille County Park. The park had a disc golf course but it wasn’t very well kept so we decided not to play and continued heading west.
  • Our next stop was breakfast-all-day at Hunters Holy Grub. We had a seat next to a window with a very active hummingbird feeder which Elijah and I enjoyed watching while Tyla pet the dog that was trying to sleep on the couch.
  • Our main stop for the day was Fort Spokane. I didn’t expect it to be super impressive (and it wasn’t) but to make things a little more interesting, I had AI create a ~15 minute podcast about the history of the fort. This ended up being incredibly interesting and provided great context as we walked through the museum and old buildings. I uploaded the podcast to YouTube with a static image if you are interested in hearing what it created for us.
  • On our way back through Spokane, we stopped at Riverfront Park where we tried the gondola over the falls (not worth it) and visited the trash goat (obviously worth it.)
  • Dinner was at the delicious No-Li Brewhouse

Our whirlwind tour of those counties was fun but our trip wasn’t over because on Sunday, we were invited to a graduation party on the Olympic Peninsula (west of our house.) We didn’t want to miss the opportunity to connect with old friends so we made the drive back home, past our house, and over to the party.

By the time we were done, we had traveled 989 miles. It was probably too much driving but we crammed a lot in and collected 5 new counties along the way. Below is a map of our route as well as an image showing the counties we have hit in total.

We have touched red counties with the Tesla. Blue counties are only with the truck.
benmartens July 3, 2025 Family, Travel

Leavenworth Chocolate Tour

A couple weeks after Mother’s Day, Tyla finally got her Mother’s Day present. Elijah and I put together our own “chocolate tour” of Leavenworth. There are so many shops there but we used to go to the same one or two every time. But before hitting the sweets, we made a couple other stops.

The first was for the new-ish alpine coaster. Each car on the track holds one (or possibly two) people and you have a hand brake. The brake is not necessary and will annoy the people behind you, but it exists and a lot of people use it. The track is built onto a steep hillside right as you come into town from the west side. There are various YouTube videos if you want to see what the ride looks like, but in general, we all give it the thumbs up, at least to experience once. If you’re a fan of rollercoasters, the thrill level is pretty low, but if you’re a nervous rider, this is good because you can control your speed. It’s worth a visit.

Next we had lunch at Blewitt Brewing. We hadn’t been there before but we enjoyed our pizzas and I enjoyed some beers. They don’t necessarily do flights of beer, but they sell 5oz pours and you can get however many of those you like. I logged (via Untappd) my 1500th different kind of beer there!

Then finally it was time for the chocolate tour! Here are the places we went:

I won’t review them all individually, but it was a blast! It was so fun to explore business and buildings that we don’t normally go in and some of these will definitely get a second visit. This was especially good timing because Rocky Mountain Chocolates used to be our favorite stop by default, but the “Leavenworth Chocolate” business that replaced it is so bad I can’t imagine they will still be there next year. I’m glad we have great alternatives.

Happy Mother’s Day, Tyla!

benmartens June 26, 2025 Family, Travel

AI Video Generation

Do you remember when Dall-E came out and people were amazed that you could generate a picture of a tomato driving a tractor? Those images were amazing at the time but already seem ancient in terms of quality and capability. That was only 4 years ago and now we’re well into examples of convincing AI generated video! Google Veo 3 is the latest video generation tool to make waves. Seeing is believing and while there are many examples floating around, I appreciated this video’s overview of what Veo 3 is an is not capable of.

As with all things AI, you have to remember that however you judge the quality today, it will be unimaginably better in 6-12 months.

benmartens June 23, 2025 Geek, Links

Elbow Room

Technically I live in a suburb, but it sure feels like “the city” to me. I grew up in a much more rural area, but how much different is it really? Check out https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/ which shows you how many people live within a spot on the map.

Using a 3 km (1.8 mile) radius, the place I grew up has 1200 people in it. I’m sure that’s dramatically higher than it was back then, but let’s just use that number. My current house has 44,000 people in that same space.

This site is a fun tool to keep in the bag, especially on those evenings when it’s super noisy in my neighborhood and I start clicking around wondering what it would be like to live somewhere else.

P.S. Context for the graphic chosen for this post: Poem: Daniel Boone by Arthur Guiterman

benmartens June 19, 2025 Links

Agentic AI Research

AI is transforming every aspect of life, but one very important area that I think we’re just starting to explore is how AI can speed up physical research. Specifically, you’ll hear the term “agentic AI” which basically means that the AI does more than just answer questions. It can, for example, execute some code to run an experiment or click buttons for you in various apps. All of that can sound vague, but a recent presentation about the new “Microsoft Discovery” platform is a solid example of this.

Before we get into that, have you heard of “PFAS” or maybe “forever chemicals”? Derek from Veritasium did a comprehensive overview of the problem recently.

My area of the company was exploring some extremely promising fluids that would revolutionize the way we cool datacenter computers, and while they were different enough to be safe from PFAS concerns, we stopped using them anyway.

But the problem still exists. How can we meet the ever-increasing demands for data center cooling? Enter the Microsoft Discovery platform. Using this AI tool, researchers were able to identify a new environmentally friendly coolant in just 200 hours instead of the years that it would normally have taken. Watch this 5 minute demo to see how it all worked:

It’s difficult to wrap our minds around the scale of progress here, but try to imagine this level of capability increase across ALL AREAS OF SCIENCE. These initially discoveries are just the first hints of the flood that is coming.

benmartens June 12, 2025 Geek

Leaving the Nest

A few years ago, Elijah and I built a birdhouse. We looked up all the recommendations for the dimensions of a birdhouse that would work for birds in our area and then waited anxiously. Year after year no birds were using it. Initially we found that the inside was getting wet so we improved the design. Then we wondered if the location was not inviting so we attached it to the house under and overhang where no squirrel could ever reach. We even installed an extra security camera aimed at the box to see if maybe they were using it and we just couldn’t tell. Nothing.

Then finally this year we started seeing a couple chickadees making a lot of trips to/from the birdhouse! Later we heard lots of chirping from the babies. The parents made so many trips back and forth bringing them food. Then finally one day it was quiet.

I scanned the camera footage and I think I found video of all five(?) babies leaving the nest. The internet says 6-8 babies are more common so it’s possible that I missed a couple. I edited it down to about 5 minutes so if you want to check out the riveting footage, it’s there for you to enjoy:

It sounds like there is a small chance that a mating pair would attempt a second brood in one year so we’ll wait until later in the summer to clean out the birdhouse and see what we find.

benmartens June 5, 2025 Commentary

DGPT Shelton Review

Last year our family went to our first professional disc golf tournament in Portland. We had such a great time that when we heard about the tour stopping closer to home in Shelton, WA, we quickly bought tickets.

The day was extremely wet at home but thankfully, the tournament happened to be in the rain shadow for the Olympic Mountains. The winds were very strong, but it was warm enough to make for a pleasant day outside. We arrived about an hour before the leaders teed off and stayed through the event.

One highlight for us was seeing Simon Lizotte who wasn’t at the previous tournament. Elijah was also very excited to see Niklas Anttila. Niklas was defending a tournament win at this course from last year but unfortunately wasn’t able to string together enough good holes to contend for the win this year.

When we arrived, we took a lap around the spectator areas getting a feel for the course and watching a few of Niklas’s holes. Then we made our back to the start of the course and watched the lead groups come through. This course looked fun to play but since it was mostly in the woods, it was much more difficult to watch as a spectator. There were way less people at this one which helped, but I think part of the lower attendance might be because there just weren’t many spots to get a really good view of the action.

Towards the end of the day, we parked ourselves at the end of the course and Elijah collected as many autographs as he could. He got a signature from Niklas on one of Niklas’s custom-stamped discs and then loaded up a second disc with signatures from most of the players in the last ~5 groups.

It was another good experience and the whole event was very family friendly, but next year I think I’ll eyeball the course a little more to see what the spectator experience is like. If it’s another wooded course, it might be worth paying for the VIP ticket which lets you follow behind the players on the course.

benmartens May 29, 2025 Family, Sports, Travel