Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Geek

Saving Money Is Cool

I’m very thankful that we added air conditioning to this house. This last Sunday it was in the mid-90s and we burned that sucker all day long. But I’m also a cheapskate at heart. I haven’t yet figured out exactly how much energy it consumes, but it’s far from free to run so I try to use it as little as possible. Here’s our basic strategy if it’s going to be warm:

  • Leave windows open the night before to cool the house down as much as possible.
  • In the morning, leave the windows open until it’s the same temperature inside as it is outside. Then close every window and close all of the blinds on the south side of the house. Turn on the AC.
  • In the evening, once the outside temp is the same as the inside temp, turn off the AC and open everything up to get free cooling from outside.
  • Run the house fan to keep the air circulating. Our vents pump more air downstairs than upstairs (they were designed for heating) so even just running the fan can cool it off upstairs.

We are PacNW wimps so we run the AC if it’s 80 or higher and we have it set to keep upstairs at 76 degrees. Our EcoBee thermostat supports multiple thermostats which is really handy in situations like this. It also has an API so I can connect to it and pull data off. I have logs of the indoor temp from each sensor along with the outdoor temp so I wrote a quick program that helps us remember when we should close the windows or open them back up. Now we get a text reminder when we need to make changes to the windows/blinds.

Here’s an example of what it looks like on a day that got up to 84 degrees. The night before, it got down to 59 degrees outside and inside it got down to 69. Around 10:30, the outside temperature got up to the same as the inside temp so we shut the windows, closed the blinds and turned on the AC. The house coasted until 5pm before the AC finally kicked on a few times until 8:30 when we shut it off and opened the windows.

Here’s a comparison to show how much of a difference this strategy can make: On Sunday, it got up to 96. By cooling the house down a lot the night before, the AC didn’t kick on until 2:35.

That night it stayed very warm so I never opened the windows until 6:30am when I got up. The house barely cooled off at all before I had to shut things up again. Monday only got up to 87 but the AC ran almost exactly the same* amount of time as the day before!

This works really well around here because even on hot days, we get a “marine push” that brings cool winds in the evenings. Another key is that we have low humidity so I only remember one or two days where we ran the AC more than normal because of high humidity.

* On Monday, I shut the AC off at 8:40pm. So to compare the two days, I took all of the AC usage up until 8:40pm on both days. Sunday’s usage was only 20 minutes less than Monday’s usage even though it was 10 degrees warmer.

benmartens August 18, 2020 Geek, Home Improvement

Android Security: Bouncer

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I like to keep track of what permissions various apps have on my phone and I like to keep them as limited as possible. The Bouncer app is awesome for this and even though I’ve used it for a couple years, I don’t think I’ve ever written about it here.

When an app requests permissions, you can configure bouncer to automatically remove those permissions immediately when you’re done with the app, after a fixed amount of time or never. So for something that I use all the time like Google Maps, I never remove the permissions, but for something like Untappd or Instagram, I make it request camera permissions from me each time and then Bouncer removes those permissions when I’m done.

The removal happens by automating your user interface so you need to stop touching it for a couple seconds. It can be annoying, but generally it makes me happy because I don’t have to wonder what those apps are doing with my camera or location information in the background.

It’s a free app so it’s worth a shot if you’ve ever had similar concerns.

benmartens July 31, 2020 Geek

Davinci Resolve

One of the big reasons I built a new PC recently was to make it easier to edit 4k video footage as more and more of my devices are able to record it. I’ve been using various versions of Adobe Premiere Elements for 10 years, but I’m starting to feel like I’ve outgrown it. The problem is that the next level of video editors is the same stuff the pros use which means it’s complicated and expensive. The main contenders are Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro from Apple. Thankfully there’s a third option: Davinci Resolve.

Resolve initially started as a color correction tool but evolved to include a full editor and special effects tool. The best part is that it is FREE. That’s right. Free! Or at least it’s free until you start editing the next Marvel movie and then you’ll want to shell out a few hundred bucks for the Studio version of Resolve. But there’s no way a mere mortal at home is ever going to get that far.

One downside to Resolve is that it has a very steep learning curve. Thankfully I’m not totally new to editing and our library also includes a free subscription to Lynda.com. I took a ~5 hour course, learned the basics, and then plunged into my first video: a full church service.

Because we’re staying home, we decided to publish as much of a normal church service online as we could. Pastor spent many hours at church recording the various segments and DaveK recorded some organ pieces from home. I was able to get it all pieced together and posted. You can find it on our Facebook page and our YouTube channel.

Other than having to do some searches to find a few very basic things, the experience was good and it didn’t add a huge amount of time to the way I did things before. As I get better I’m confident that I’ll be able to make them look even nicer and do it faster than before. Specific things I’m already enjoying:

  • It has a feature that syncs separate audio and video tracks with a single click! This was a constant source of pain for me before because even if I got them synced up, at some point they might start to drift by a couple frames.
  • The titles are done through their full-blown effects system so the sky is the limit. I stuck with the built-in titles for this first video but I thought even those looked very nice.
  • Rendering is FAST. This software uses both my CPU and video card to get the rendering done as quickly as possible.

The three of us put in a huge amount of time getting this one service done, but it looks like we’ll have a lot more chances to optimize our workflow. The biggest hiccup was transfering ~12GB of files around but it turns out that just dumping them on the PC at church and letting Backblaze put back them up was the easiest and most reliable solution. The upload speed there is very slow (2Mbps) but reliability proved more helpful than raw speed.

It was also really tempting to try to use the special effects to light the candles, but I resisted. We’ll get those lit in real life and made some other small tweaks for next time, but if you’re using these videos and there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, please share them with us!

benmartens March 31, 2020 Gadgets, Geek, Video

4k Video Editor Build

When we got our new Go Pro 8, I learned that my PC wasn’t new enough to play back the HEVC encoded video, much less do any editing with it. Sure, I could save the video in a different format, but I’ve been itching to upgrade my PC at home and this, combined with the 2.7K video that my drone records, was a good reason to go for it.

My requirements were that I wanted to be able to smoothly edit 4k video, view video in 4k resolution, and render edited videos as quickly as possible.

Every PC I’ve built or purchased before this point have been Intel CPUs, but lately, AMD has been kicking Intel around the block in terms of price to performance ratio. Just check out what the stock market thinks about the two companies over the last 5 years. The Ryzen 3770 seemed like a good price point for my build. It has 8 hyper threaded cores running at up to 4.4GHz. I built out a nice system around it with 32GB of DDR-3600 memory and an NVMe SSD. I’ve had no personal experience with that kind of SSD but wow, it’s FAST! Remember how much faster your computer was when you switched from a spinning hard drive to an SSD? This new drive is 10 times faster than the SSD in my last desktop. It reads data at a speed of 2.5 GB/second!

Here is the full parts list:

The build went pretty smoothly. The pcpartpicker.com website helped me avoid some incompatibilities. Once I got all the parts together, I flashed the BIOS, tweaked a few settings to get my RAM clocked up to the right speed and then installed Windows. Or rather, I tried to install Windows. It kept getting to about 60% of the way through and dying. As an “I don’t know what else to try” step, I rebuilt the installation media on the USB key and voila, it worked!

I capped it all off with a 4k monitor, the Asus MG28UQ. That felt like a splurge because my existing monitors were plenty good (though not 4k), but wow, once I got this all assembled, I ended up staring at YouTube demo videos and being amazed at the clarity. Plus it’s fun to see my drone footage in its full glory.

For a perf test, I fired up Handbrake on my old desktop and this new one, gave it a beefy video file from the drone and adjusted Handbrake with the same settings on each machine. This new machine got through it almost exactly 3 times faster than the old one. It’s not all roses though. I had a much nicer CPU cooler on the old machine and this new one is noticeably louder (but it has built in RGB leds… oooooo.)

It’s fun to have this new machine and it’s certainly going to make editing all those videos for church less painful. I’m also very excited to start watching things in 4k. I expect this will translate into a 4k TV before too long and then a 4k projector once my current one dies.

As a small reward for reading through all this nonsense (or at least scrolling to the bottom), here’s the first video I edited on the new machine. It’s all 2.7k footage from my Mavic Mini. Elijah and I went down to 60 Acres and took turns flying it around.

benmartens March 4, 2020 Gadgets, Geek

YouTube Music vs Spotify

We’ve had the Spotify family plan subscription for many years and we get our money’s worth out of it, but I’m always willing to switch to something better if it comes along. YouTube Music is intriguing largely because it comes with ad-free YouTube and downloadable YouTube videos. The family plans for each are withing a couple bucks of each other so if I could get a similar music experience and add those two other features for about the same price, why not?

Before switching Tyla over, I tried using it for about a month. The first hurdle was that I have built up some big playlists that I use a lot on Spotify. It’s a non-starter to move more than 1000 songs over by hand so I paid for a month of soundiiz.com. It connects to various services and copies playlists. It’s not perfect but it was plenty good enough to make me feel like it was worth the cost.

Initially, I was impressed with YouTube Music. The selection seemed roughly on par with Spotify. For example, when i converted a 1000 song country playlist, it found over 980 of the songs. Additionally, YouTube Music had a couple albums that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify.

Unfortunately, after a month of usage, I couldn’t justify switching. My main interaction with music is on my desktop because I use it from work and YouTube Music only has a web interface. They have a Chrome App that at least gives you a separate window but the whole experience feels halfway done. Spotify is smooth and easy. YouTube Music isn’t.

I’ll keep an eye on YouTube Music because I’m still interested in getting downloadable videos (for trips) and ad free videos for roughly free, but it’s just not worth the pain yet.

benmartens February 21, 2020 Geek

New Edge Browser

Back in 2016, I switched to Chrome. It was so far superior to Internet Explorer or Edge that I couldn’t resist anymore. But for the last few months, I’ve switched completely to the new Edge browser on desktop and mobile.

If you haven’t heard, the Edge browser has been completely rewritten on top of the same rendering engine that the Chrome browser uses. So if it’s Chrome underneath, why switch? Two reasons: 1) Since Microsoft already owns me, I’m more comfortable with them having access to my browsing information than Google. 2) SPEEEED. Chrome is no slouch but it has gotten a bit bloated and the new Edge browser is sleek and fast. I especially notice it in pages that run lots of Javascript.

Switching was relatively painless, but the one thing that still annoys me is that Edge can’t sync my extensions across various installations of the browser. So when I add a new extension, I have to add it to all of my machines individually. The feature is coming, but it does annoy me regularly.

So if you’re interested in trying a different browser, I give the new Edge browser two thumbs up. You can download it for free here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge

benmartens January 27, 2020 Geek

Disney+ Review

As the parent of a six year old and a lover of both Star Wars and the Avengers, signing up for Disney+ was a no-brainer. I jumped on an early deal and pre-paid for 3 years of the service so we’re on board whether it’s good or not. The only hiccup I’ve had so far came on launch day when the app was overloaded, but since then the reliability has been great.

As I sat on the couch last Friday watching Jungle Book with the family, I kept wondering what my 10 year old self would have thought if it could have seen me watching Jungle Book on a 10 foot screen in my own house without any tapes or discs in a player as it is controlled via my phone.

I’ve seen some comments about various movies that aren’t on the service, but it’s a treat to scroll through the list of what IS on the service. You know how you scroll through Netflix or Hulu and you’ve never heard of most of it? Not so with Disney+. It’s hit after hit after hit. No more frustrating “Disney vault”. It’s all there at your fingertips.

Over the past few years, I’ve felt the Disney brand rising up the list in my head. They’re becoming synonymous with a high quality but sometimes pricey product. Thankfully Disney+ only gets the first part of that. The cost is $6.99/month with cheaper options if you pay ahead. That’s crazy low when you compare it to other services.

Disney+ gets two thumbs up from me!

benmartens November 19, 2019 Family, Geek

Strata 2019 San Francisco

My company was nice enough to send me down to San Francisco last week to attend the Strata Data Conference. If there’s a bigger conference in my field of data engineering/science/analysis, I don’t know what it is.

I attended a big data conference four years ago, but going to Strata was a huge step up both in terms of the quality of the event planning and in the quality of the talks. I came away with a stronger vision about things I want our team at work to accomplish and how we can make a bigger effect on our business group.

I skipped all the social events surrounding the conference, but I filled both days wither every talk I could cram into my schedule. A couple were total duds, but there were a lot of great ones from Netflix, Lyft, Uber, Intuit and others.

Aside from the conference itself, it was strange to be traveling alone. I did spend one evening in a movie theater watching Captain Marvel, but otherwise I mostly hung out in my room. I felt guilty about temporarily forcing Tyla into single parent mode and leaving my team at work short-handed, so I spent a lot of my free time working on the laptop and trying to make good use of my time.

My hotel was right next to Moscone West where the conference was held and that was fantastic. I was able to get from my room to a talk in about 5 minutes. That let me hustle back to the room even when we had ~45 minute breaks to get away from the crowds and recharge a bit. It’s surprising how tiring it is to sit on your rear end and listen to talks all day. I felt like my brain was very full!

It was a great trip, and while it’s not something that I need to do every year, I hope I can go back in 3-4 years. Thank you Tyla for holding down the fort while I took this trip!

benmartens April 4, 2019 Geek, Travel

Patent Application

Azure Data Explorer has made a dramatic impact on my career. It has inspired a whole new breed of data engineering and it feels like a wide open playground for ideas and innovation. There were so many new ideas and patterns floating around in my head that I decided to attempt the patent process (through work) for one of them. I’ve never been through it before and it was interesting to see all the different levels of scrutiny and checks that go into it before you even sit down with a lawyer to start drafting the application.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve completed all of that work and my patent application has been submitted! Unfortunately… I’ve been advised not to share the details of it yet. After about 18 months, the US Patent Office will publish the application. At that point it will be public information on their site but it will still take another 2-3 years from that point for them to review it and either approve it or ask for some more information.

So I guess the point of this post is to say that I’m really excited about applying for my first patent. Even if it doesn’t get approved, it’s neat to see how the process works and it has me thinking whether or not other ideas are patentable too.

benmartens March 11, 2019 Geek

Analyzing Water Data in Azure Data Explorer

One of my favorite systems at work officially launched a couple weeks ago as Azure Data Explorer (internally called Kusto). I’ve been doing some blogging for their team on their Tech Community site. You can see all my posts on my profile page. This post will use Azure Data Explorer too but I thought it fit better on this blog.

A year or two ago, our local water company replaced all of the meters with digital, cellular meters. I immediately asked if that meant we’d get access to more data and they said it was coming in the future. The future is now! If you happen to live in Woodinville, you can get connected with these instructions.

The site is nice and lets you see charts, but by now you probably know that I love collecting data about random things so I immediately tried to figure out how to download the raw data. The only download directly supported form their site is the bi-monthly usage from the bills, but from the charts, I could see that hourly data was available somewhere. A little spelunking in the Chrome dev tools revealed the right REST endpoint to call to get a big JSON array full of the water usage for every hour in the last ~11 months.

I pulled that into Azure Data Explorer and started querying to see what I could learn. This first chart shows the median water usage by three hour chunks of the day. Tyla and I usually both shower in the morning so it makes sense that 6-9am has the heaviest usage.

WaterUsage
| summarize 
    sum(Gallons)
    by Hour=bin(hourofday(Timestamp), 3), bin(Timestamp, 1d)
| summarize percentile(sum_Gallons, 50) by Hour
| render columnchart  with (title = 'Median Water Usage by 3 Hour Bin', legend = hidden)

I feel like there’s probably a better way to do write the next query, but this works. It’s the cumulative usage throughout each month. The four lines at the top of the chart are the summer months when I’m using the irrigation in the yard. The lines that drop off at the end of the month are because I ran the x axis all the way from 1 to 31 for every month so months don’t have enough data, but it still conveys the general idea. It’s interesting how similar all the non-watering months are.

union
(
    WaterUsage
    | summarize Gallons=sum(Gallons) by bin(Timestamp, 1d)
    | extend Month=monthofyear(Timestamp), Day = dayofmonth(Timestamp)
),
(
    // Original data had some missing rows
    datatable(Timestamp:datetime, Gallons:long, Month:long, Day:long)
    [
        datetime(2018-11-26T00:00:00.0000000Z), 0, 11, 26, 
        datetime(2018-11-27T00:00:00.0000000Z), 0, 11, 27, 
    ]
)
| order by Timestamp asc
| serialize MonthlyWater=row_cumsum(Gallons, Month != prev(Month))
| project Month, Day, MonthlyWater
| make-series sum(MonthlyWater) on Day from 1 to 32 step 1 by Month
| render linechart with  (ycolumns = sum_MonthlyWater, series = Day, Month, legend=hidden, title='Cumulative Gallons By Month')

The data is in 10 gallon increments so it’s not super precise but it’s a LOT better than the two month resolution I had previously. I’m excited to play around with this data and see if we can start decreasing our usage.

Along these same lines, I heard that the local power company is starting to install power meters with Zigbee connectivity so there’s a chance that I’ll be able to start getting more insight into my power consumption in a similar fashion…

benmartens March 1, 2019 Geek