Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I wrote two utilities today that are primarily intended for the management of collections of CBR/CBZ files. Those are comic book archives — essentially ZIP or RAR files containing sets of images. An annoying thing I’ve noticed is that often people are sloppy and they’ll call a ZIP-based archive a “CBR” file instead of a “CBZ” like it’s supposed to be, or vice-versa. Many viewers will automatically detect the error and ignore it, but other viewers crash and won’t let you read the comic. So my first utility scans through your collection and corrects any files that are misnamed. To run it, just go to the root directory of your comic book folder and run it. It will check all the files in that directory as well as those in any subdirectories. It’s a [win32] command line utility so it’s intended for people who are somewhat computer savvy. To give you a sample usage, imagine that you have your comics in “N:\comics\” and you’ve placed this program in “C:\bin\nounder.exe”. After you open a command window, first navigate to the comics folder (ie. “N:<enter>” and “cd \comics<enter>”), and then run the program (ie. “c:\bin\nounder<enter>”). That’s all there is to it.

Download link: https://zentastic.me/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/nounder.exe

Edit: There’s some sort of bug in this that makes it not always rename files successfully. It doesn’t do any damage but sometimes files get missed. I think it has to do with the request to rename failing for some reason, rather than it not being made. If I bother fixing it I will update this entry.

The other utility is similar but perhaps has broader function. Often downloaded files use underscores instead of spaces. All this program does is scans through a directory tree and renames both files and directories so that all the underscores are replaced with spaces. It will skip renaming files that would cause two files to collide (ie. where a files of the target name already exists). Usage is the essentially same as the above program.

Download link: https://zentastic.me/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/fixcbtype.exe

These programs should be safe to run but I admit I haven’t used them extensively other than running them here on a rather massive test archive. So use at your own risk. PB/CC5.0 source code for both utilities are here: nounder and fixcbtype. Public domain. Free software. No warranty. Yada yada yada.

On to the physical world.

Because the first ones I made sold out so quickly, I cast four more of my new skull ring design this afternoon. Top left picture is how they look straight out of the mold (after finishing of course, but without any customization). The other three are all customized using a soldering iron to weld more metal to the rings and then by carving that extra metal with my Dremel. I made a new pirate ring (by request), a horned ring, and I also mounted a pair of Spider Jerusalem (Transmetropolitan) glasses on one that I’m extremely pleased with. Feel free to click on any of the pictures for a zoomed in photo. I finally got a battery charger for my old (but still very nice) Rebel XTi so for a change my jewelry pictures don’t look like total junk.

I do really enjoy making these custom versions of my existing designs, so if you have an idea for something you’d like — or even something you think someone else would like — don’t hesitate to play the muse!