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 our age (mid-teens), gathered around some of the other machines.

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 ntplib Then, I put together this short script (amazontime.py): import ntplib from time import ctime ntp = ntplib.NTPClient() response = ntp.request("time.aws.com") print(ctime(response.tx_time)) Here’s the invocation and the output:

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 speak of, a number of images that I used to test the library were transformed into images highlighting a central person or object while rendering the background transparent.

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 appropriate counterpart libraries.

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 community. Rest in peace, Mr. Butterfield.

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 implemented a symbolic assembler on the unexpanded VIC-20.

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 noticed that his complete bio was missing from the text, I asked if he’d permit me to interview him.

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/

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 experiment, I rewrote in Python the bulk of the command-line MP3 player I had originally written in C.