One Christmas in high school, I got a TI-GraphLink, allowing me to connect my TI-83 to my computer and transfer files between them. This was a great tool: now I could save my programs to the PC and no longer be at the mercy of memory resets from battery failure or an upcoming math test.

It also let me try out some Z80 programming, but I didn’t ever get too far with that. Hard-locking the calculator and forcing a battery pull was just too much of a hassle. I followed tutorials and had plans and sample code, but never pulled off a complete program.

All I have left now is just a handful of TI-83 BASIC programs. Sadly my GoldenEye 007 port is gone. I did find a couple of sprite pages for a work-in-progress “North and South” and “Smash Bros.” conversion, both would have been written in assembly and played over the link cable.

There is still “Fruity Vegas Slots”, my most polished game (a slot machine simulator). Also found Hearts (which used cards 2-14 instead of 2-10, J, Q, K, A), Bombs Away (clone of the Palm Pilot game “City Bomber”), a quadratic formula, and my own version of the classic “RACE”.

I deleted a couple of stupid inside-joke type programs and some WIP stuff. Nobody wants to see that : )

I have a lot of fond memories of working on this platform. The slow execution speed and laggy LCD screen reminded me a lot of working on other 8-bit systems, except this one was a handheld and had a wide user base of “everybody in school”. Built-in BASIC is such an endearing feature that I am surprised modern OSes don’t include something like it: QBasic and HyperCard, for instance, were both greatly loved and yet they’re both dead software.

Click here to download the complete package: ti83.tar.gz [2.88 KB]

I have duplicate photos in my image library.  We all do.  I want to weed them out.  The trouble with using straight md5 for this, though, is that EXIF data on JPEG files may be altered by my photo management tool – thus they contain the exact same photo data, but the associated extra data (date/time, ICC profile, tags, etc) causes pure checksum comparison to fail.

Here’s a Perl script which iterates through a folder list and sends all files off for md5 digest.  However, any jp(e)g files are first run through jpegtran and saved as a temporary file, so they can be “normalized” (i.e. convert to optimized, progressive, and EXIF-stripped) so the md5 is performed on just image data.  This should find duplicates regardless of image program tampering.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# path to jpegtran
my $JPEGTRAN_LOC = '/Users/grkenn/Pictures/jpegtran';

# Somewhat Advanced Photo Dupe Finder
# Greg Kennedy 2012

# Identifies duplicate photos by image data:
# strips EXIF info and converts to optimize + progressive
# before performing MD5 on image data

# Requires "jpegtran" application from libjpeg project
# Mac users: http://www.phpied.com/installing-jpegtran-mac-unix-linux/

use File::Find;
use Digest::MD5;

my %fingerprint;

my $ctx = Digest::MD5->new;

sub process
{
  my $filename = $_;

  # file is a directory
  if (-d $filename) { return; }
  # file is an OSX hidden resource fork
  if ($filename =~ m/^\._/) { return; }

  if ($filename =~ m/\.jpe?g$/i) {
    # attempt to use jpegtran to "normalize" jpg files
    if (system("$JPEGTRAN_LOC -copy none -optimize -progressive -outfile /tmp/find_dupe.jpg \"$filename\"")) {
      print STDERR "\tError normalizing file " . $File::Find::name . "\n\n";
    } else {
      $filename = '/tmp/find_dupe.jpg';
    }
  }

  # open file
  open (FP, $filename) or die "Couldn't open $filename (source " . $File::Find::name . "): $!\n";
  binmode(FP);
  # MD5 digest on file
  $ctx->addfile(*FP);
  push (@{$fingerprint{$ctx->digest}}, $File::Find::name);
  close(FP);
}

## Main script
if (scalar @ARGV == 0)
{
  print "Usage: ./find_dupe.pl [ ...]\n";
  print "\tjpegtran MUST be in the path,\n";
  print "\tor edit the script and set JPEGTRAN_LOC to an absolute location\n";
  exit;
}

find(\&process, @ARGV);

print "Duplicates report:\n";

foreach my $md5sum (keys %fingerprint)
{
  if (scalar @{$fingerprint{$md5sum}} > 1)
  {
    print "--------------------\n";
    foreach my $fname (@{$fingerprint{$md5sum}})
    {
      print $fname . "\n";
    }
  }
}

The output looks something like this:

macmini:Pictures grkenn$ ./find_dupe.pl test_lib/
Duplicates report:
--------------------
test_lib/ufo or moon.jpg
test_lib/subdirectory/dupe_7.jpg
--------------------
test_lib/too cool jenny.jpg
test_lib/subdirectory/dupe1.jpg
test_lib/subdirectory/dupe2.jpg