Recent content on Jim's Place
Several months ago, I made the switch to Linux Mint (Cinnamon) as my primary OS for my computing activities. One utility that I used often on my prior OS was a utility that would capture images as they appeared on the clipboard, writing them to sequentially numbered files with a chosen name-prefix. I regularly try to save batches of images all in some sort of theme and I wanted a tool that could…
We went to the car show today hosted at the Strategic Air Command Aerospace Museum in Ashland, Nebraska. The cars were featured near the planes that are normally found in the museum.
Bob’s Mustang My brother-in-law, Bob Sorensen, had his 2011 Mustang at the show. It’s parked under a B-52.
Kim Had Fun Kim got to sit in one of the classic cars while we were there.
More Cars…
This was a good trip down memory lane for me. One of the stories that stood out to me was Batman #251 ( which made the cover ) I think Batman #251 is just a great comic. I had the Batman #251 issue and a number of the issues of The Joker but I seemed to be missing about every other one of them. I hadn’t realized the #10 was never actually published.
When I was most actively reading comics in the 1970’s and early 1980’s comics with a space-bound characters or characters in science-fiction stories often piqued my interest. In the 1970’s, the various reprints of the adventures of Adam Strange, The Space Ranger and Cryll, The Atomic Knights, and Captain Comet (among others) were favorites of mine. DC had begun a reprint-line of…
I reviewed the previous Epic trade here.
Collecting The Defenders #26-41, Giant-Size Defender #5 & Annual #1 and Marvel Treasury Edition #12.
The Headmen return in this collection although their name was in the last collection’s title. This collection helped to cement the ongoing story together for me since I had a bunch of these issues, but I was often getting only every-other issue…
Collects Detective Comics Annual #1, Green Arrow #1-8, Green Arrow Annual #1, The Question #17-18, The Question Annual #1, Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters #1-3
This was an impulse buy when I was in the shop not too long ago.
I have The Longbow Hunters in a collected edition. I enjoy that story. I wanted to see a bit more of where Grell took Green Arrow having only seen the Urban Hunter…
This review is based on the Kindle™ edition of the book.
The cover says that it collects issues #1 - #10 of Omega the Unknown and issues #76 - #78 of The Defenders. That’s not correct. Defenders #78 isn’t in this collection, nor does it need to be.
I had Omega #5 and the two Defenders issues as a kid. Going back and re-reading those issues plus the entirety of the series, plus…
This volume collects the first eleven issues of the series that began in 2018.
This was an impulse buy for me. I saw it in the shop a few weeks ago and I picked it up. after looking through the first few pages. The art was nice enough and with Waid at the writing helm, what could go wrong? Doctor Strange can be really a hit-and-miss for creative teams. If you get the wrong team on the title…
With quite the list of contributing creators :
Collecting DEFENDERS (1972) #12-25, GIANT-SIZE DEFENDERS #1-4 and MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE (1974) #6-7 - plus material from MYSTERY TALES #21, WORLD OF FANTASY #11 and TALES OF SUSPENSE (1959) #9.
I originally sought out this tome as I was going to do a write-up about the weird super-villain group known as The Headmen who appeared in several of…
Shortly after I arrived on the planet, a television series appeared featuring a comic book character who would grow to be my favorite of them all.
My first recollection of this TV series is actually the film that was based on the first season of the series. In the film, Batman and Robin have to deal with the likes of The Joker ( Caesar Romero ), The Riddler ( Frank Gorshin ), Catwoman ( Lee…
7 Sep 2025
Nick Andrew contacted me with some Python-based utilities for manipulating CMD files. You can find them here:
https://github.com/nickandrew/nick-src-trs80/blob/main/bin/cmdfile.py
https://github.com/nickandrew/nick-src-trs80/blob/main/bin/hex2cmd.py
Nick mentions this in his interview on my Stray Pointers podcast. The link below has a few source URL’s for the…
In 2009, I was tinkering with the Windows multimedia subsystem and I wrote a short program to play MP3 audio files from the command-line ( cmdmp3.exe ). I created a second program that was a GUI application ( cmdmp3win.exe ) for those who didn’t want the console window to show. Althought it’s technically a GUI application, no visible user interface is present unless an error occurs.
I…
My First Mac In July of 2012, I bought my first Macbook. It was a low-end model with the minimum RAM configuration and a 13-inch screen. I had come up through the ranks of 8-bit computing and I’d had a dalliance with the 16/32-bit Commodore Amiga, but I had spent most of my time with Intel-based PC’s running Microsoft operating systems. I wanted to try a few new things including…
(The bulk of this post was originally written in June of 2012)
In early 2012, I walked in the door of Krypton Comics in Omaha. I was unexpectedly greeted by Doctor San Guinary … a character originally from Omaha’s own Creature Feature TV show that graced the airwaves on channel 3 ( then an NBC affiliate ) in the 70’s.
He was there seeking blood donations for a bloodmobile drive.
Originally published on: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:15:01 +0000
In my early days of computing, I used to read a lot of tech magazines. I had been reading about this “Operating System” called CP/M: Control Program for Microprocessors. The computers I had owned to date really didn’t have true operating systems, so I had a very vague idea of the significance of an OS.
I did…
I used to sell a command-line email utility that I had written for 32-bit implementations of Microsoft Windows. The utility was named MailSend ( not to be confused with the three or four other command-line mailers which share the name. ) The domain name that I used to host MailSend and other utilities, mailsend-online.com has come up for renewal. After 23 or so years of having that domain, I think…
Originally published on: Fri, 7 Oct 2011.
The Y2K panic was not the first time I had encountered a date-oriented software bug. Years before Y2K problems were even a worry, I ran into a situation where an MS-DOS program written in C began to run amok on October 10th.
There had been no new releases of this particular program in months. It had behaved normally running continuously on an…
My Secret Origin I had a head-start in reading comics with a hand-me-down collection. I began selecting my own comics in the early 1970’s. I was in the early years of elementary school, at the time.
I’d never been to a large con before, but some fellow comic-book-loving friends were getting together at Baltimore Comic-Con this year. I made plans to join them. I was primarily…
I saw a re-mention of a 2019 blog post tonight called I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it and the counterpart commentary at HackerNews/YCombinator …
I thought that I’d reminisce a bit about my experience with Pascal and Delphi.
Padawan Pascal Like many of my generation, I started out coding in 8-bit BASIC dialects and later began to code in assembly language. What…
I believe that I first encountered details of the Perl programming language in the pages of The C Users Journal. I suspect that it was Sydney Weinstein’s article “A Perl of Great Price” in the April 1990 issue of The CUJ. At the time, I was developing software professionally using C almost exclusively. Perl’s use of various sigils and symbols were offputting for me. I…
Setup I recently needed to draw a UML sequence diagram. That’s usually something I’d do in Microsoft’s Visio ™. I was aware of text-to-chart utilities such as Medusa so I assumed that similar tools would be available for generating sequence diagrams. A quick search of the web yielded an open source tool called PlantUML. PlantUML is a set of tools for converting text scripts to…
When I was a kid, my brothers gave me comic books to kind of start and fill out my collection. I wrote about the earliest ones I had owned here: https://jimlawless.net/blog/posts/my-first-comics/
When I started buying comics on my own, DC was probably my favorite publisher. I think the stories were more geared toward elementary school kids like me. At some point, I discovered this hero known…
The original version of this post was published on March 16, 2014.
Back in the day, I used to write machine-language subroutines for the Commodore 64 that I would then call from a main program written in BASIC. I found it easier to use BASIC as the higher-order controller over a set of ML functions that usually did things for which CBM BASIC 2.0 was not well-suited.
In one case, I wrote an…
In the mid-1980’s, I’d owned a used TRS-80 Model I for about a year when I had a yearning for a newer system. I only had cassette-based storage which proved to be unreliable. I had a 16K machine and I had a few games and tools for the TRS-80. I learned Z-80 assembly language and I was having a lot of fun tinkering, but that particular line of computers had met its end.
Before I was in Kindergarten, I had a comic book collection. It began with some issues that were hand-me-downs and it grew slowly from the late 60’s into the early 70’s.
I had plenty of exposure to Batman and Superman:
“Night of the Reaper” scared the bejeebers out of me.
The DC 100-Page Super Spectacular anthology issues were great!
There were a few Marvels…
Once Upon a Time In 2009, I created an image capture utility for Windows called Pic2File. It wasn’t like a number of capture utilities. For Pic2File to function, images needed to be copied to the Windows clipboard. Pic2File would scan the clipboard periodically for images. If image content was present on the clipboard, it would save the image to the specified file format in a…
Shooter
I was a little surprised when I saw an announcement from Krypton Comics in Omaha ( http://www.kryptoncomicsomaha.com ) that comics legend Jim Shooter would be the guest of honor on Free Comic Book Day, this year. I was very happy to chat briefly with him.
I had wanted to bring something for Shooter to autograph, but I have had so many comic book purges throughout the years, that my…
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration” – Edsger Dijkstra
My early days of computing began in the late 1970’s. I used to go in to the Radio Shack in the mall where they would let the patrons type stuff into their display-model…
In the late 80’s, my programming team was in search of a decent programmer’s text editor for MS-DOS. At the time, a number of editors seemed to have comparable features. Any missing features could often be added via the embedded macro language that each of these editors sported. What was it that helped to make the decision?
The advertisement from American Cybernetics above ( excerpted from the…
Originally published on: Sat, 22 May 2010
The first computer in my household was a Radio Shack TRS-80 pocket computer that my dad owned. My brother got it for him as a birthday gift in 1980.
This was essentially a calculator with a pretty nifty BASIC interpreter built in. The BASIC was not without its own personality. Although it supported arrays, I found that if I DIM’ed an array…
I saw another Facebook “squares” puzzle this morning. Here is the blank image:
Here are the squares that I count:
I see the first eight in the image…
Originally Published on August 2, 2012
A number of my Facebook friends have been posting a puzzle based on the image below.
How many squares can you count in the above image. I count 40. I’ve included several sequences of the puzzle with squares colored in red and yellow to illustrate the ones I see.
First, let’s just count the basic squares across and down.
That gives us…
Radio was a constant in my early childhood and teen years. I don’t have the old gear that I used to, but in trying to piece together old memories, I’ve searched the Internet for pictures of the now-vintage radios that I used to have. The First Radio I believe that it was Christmas Eve of 1970 when I received an AM radio as a gift from my eldest brother and his wife.
Originally published on: Tue, 04 Aug 2009
I needed a little mental exercise tonight, so I chose to write a quine ( a program that produces its own source as its output ) in the Forth programming language?
Why Forth? Because I’m a novice Forth programmer at best. I don’t think very well in Forth, so this took some effort. Here’s the quine: ( the source for this quine is in…
Originally published in Commodore Hacking electronic magazine #15, April 1998
In the early 70’s, Charles Moore designed one of the most powerful computing languages known. This language, Forth, was very different from the traditional procedural languages.
Forth is a language which allows the programmer to change most any facet of the language they wish ( including syntax extensions…
This post was formerly hosted at a couple of my other blogs. I’ve moved it here. It was originally posted in 2000.
If you’ve ever used a Forth compiler, chances are you’ve heard the name Tom Zimmer. Tom’s been a staple in the Forth community for a few decades. Tom developed a number of Forth systems for popular 8-bit microcomputers that dominated the home-computer…
A friend and I used to really enjoy playing pinball. We happened upon a group of stand up video machines in the late 1970’s as we were exiting our local mall through a Sears store. We noticed Atari’s video pinball which we thought was interesting. We played it a couple of time but we didn’t really enjoy it as much as a real pinball machine.
We did, however, notice other kids…
Originally published on: Sun, 08 Nov 2009
My first computer was a second-hand TRS-80 Model I with 16K of RAM and a cassette-recorder for auxiliary storage. I was 17 years old when I received this computer in the Fall of 1982. My goal? Like many kids my age at the time, I had intended to write a video game or two and live happily on the riches that would befall me.
I’d just read a new article describing Amazon’s new publicly available NTP service (Amazon Time Sync). You can read the article here:
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/amazon-time-sync-internet-public-ntp-service/
I thought I’d give it a try with a Python script.
I first needed to add ntplib to my local Python libraries:
pip install…
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a notification containing a simple Python script that would remove backgrounds from images. The sample source code was something like this:
from rembg import remove
from PIL import Image
inp = Image.open('image.jpg')
output = remove(inp)
output.save('image.png')
I tried it. The results were pretty impressive. Without providing any parameters to…
I had read the first edition of this book in 2015-ish. That version was very intriguing, but it exclusively used Python version 2 for all examples. This was a time when the language was known to be in transition to version 3, although many were doing so somewhat cautiously, if at all.
The 2nd edition of this book covers the same material with updates that include usage of Python 3 and the…
Originally published in the Commodore Hacking (C=Hacking) electronic magazine #14, November 1996. This post has been reprinted in Commodore Free magazine and other e-magazines. Jim Butterfield passed away on June 29th, 2007 after a long battle with cancer. I grieve with the family and the legions of techies who looked upon Jim as a mentor via his articles and ongoing contact with the Commodore…
Originally posted 5-21-2004. In the early days of 8-bit computing, a programmer’s most often-used tool was the assembler. Due to memory constraints, many of the early 8-bit machines could not run a full assembler. At best, one could hope for some sort of machine-language monitor that would include a mini-assembler and a disassembler.
That was … until Don French came along and…
This post was originally published in 1999.
Being a bit of a video-game and classic computer enthusiast, I recently purchased the electronic book Halcyon Days - Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers. Note: In 2002, this book was made available to read freely here: https://www.dadgum.com/halcyon
The author of the book, James Hague, is himself a game developer. Since I…
The original intent of this post was to focus Python-related materials to another of my sites. I have decided to just merge it into the main jimlawless.net site. Please see this link for posts about Python programming:
https://jimlawless.net/blog/tags/python/
The Cycling Tour is the eighth episode of the third season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Cycling Tour is unusual when compared against other episodes of the show as the entire show is dedicated to one long skit. Michael Palin portrays the central character of the show: a bicycle tourist named Mr. Pither.
Pither goes about his way on his bicycle repeatedly crashing and damaging his…
Portions of this post were previously published on Sun, 26 Jun 2011.
I read the book Grey Hat Python : Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers by Justin Seitz. The book introduced the Python ctypes library to me. The ctypes library, allows a Python program to access to lower-level features of the operating environment normally reserved for C programmers.
As an early…
When I was a kid … ten or eleven years old … I happened upon a local AM radio talk show called Beatles Trivia. It aired Sunday nights at 10:30 p.m. I was a burgeoning Beatles fan, having “discovered” them in the mid-70’s. The show began as a 5-minute segment during the 7:00 p.m. to midnight “Hall of Fame Show” on Omaha’s WOW AM radio (590 on the AM dial.) By the time I happened upon it, the show…
I had discovered the International Obfuscated C Coding Contest (IOCCC) some time in the late 1980’s in the pages of a printed technical magazine. At the time, my C skills were still in their larval stage, but I was very intrigued by the handful of entries that had been presented.
In later years, I tried my hand at other obfuscated coding contests, each time usually on a whim. I managed to…
I like to use the PNG format for Mac screen-captures to ensure that I don’t lose any clarity in the source images. I often convert these images to JPEG format for inclusion in email or posts. I got tired of running the conversions by hand.
tojpeg.rb is a Ruby script for OS/X and MacOS that uses the sips utility to convert the PNG files in ~/Desktop to JPEG counterparts. The PNG files are left…