Aspecta Command Line

Aspecta is not just a pretty face. Everything it can do through its visual interface, it can also do from the command line—which means you can script it, batch it, and let your AI assistant drive it without ever opening a window.

How to Use Aspecta

A detailed walkthrough of Aspecta's interface—every panel, every control, and what it all does.

My Real Job With Arlington Hospital

It was a rainy night. I practically ran outside without a jacket or umbrella. The moment I stepped outside, I burst into tears. I mean, gut-wrenching, sobbing tears. I couldn't stand upright, I was shaking, I was crying so hard. I went to work every day. I worked long hours. I paid for everything, including food for my mother-in-law. And I did it, and was doing it, for the people who had just laughed at me for not doing my part.

A World Split Apart

When I was in 4th grade in Vermont, Mrs. Howe showed us a world map. And I immediately said, "Doesn't it look like North and South America were split away from Europe and Africa?" And, since it was 1958, Mrs. Howe replied, "It does, doesn't it? But that's just a coincidence."

Aspecta

Aspecta converts images between formats while giving you precise control over cropping, resizing, and basic color adjustments—all with a live preview so you can see exactly what you're going to get before you commit. I built it because I was tired of bouncing between multiple tools just to crop a photo to a specific aspect ratio and save it as a different format.

The Peasants Are Revolting

People had grown used to the small fees at first—charges for processing a permit, for certifying a transaction, for moving goods from one place to another. But over time, those fees multiplied, and each new regulation seemed designed less for public order than for funneling money upward. Ordinary families found themselves paying for things that had once been simple courtesies: a signature, a blessing, a burial. The officials administering these services, on the other hand, lived very comfortably, insulated from the consequences of their own policies.

Methyl Folate

I was soaking in a hot spring in Tonopah, Arizona, mildly depressed and trying not to think about it, when a friend who was studying to be a pharmacist asked me a question that changed my brain chemistry. Not metaphorically. Literally. He asked why I wasn't taking methyl folate, and within two days of adding it to my supplement stack, the gray fog I had been living under began to lift.

Liposomal Glutathione

Of the heaping handful of supplements I take every day, most are acts of faith. I swallow them because the research sounds plausible, or because I read something persuasive at three in the morning when my judgment isn't always at its best, and the tab for Amazon is right next to the tab for YouTube, and when it arrives of course I take it and hope for the best. After all, at worst most impotent supplements are harmless if not helpful.

But there are a few exceptions, supplements I took that made a noticeable difference in how I felt. Liposomal glutathione is one of those exceptions. It is one supplement I know works, because the day I first took it, something changed that I could feel in the middle of a sentence.

Creativity, Mark 2.0

In kindergarten I wrote stories using the twenty or so words they had taught us, getting Mom to spell the rest. One of those words was "Gulf," as in the gas stations, so every story included a stop for gas. At a Gulf station. I was five, and already understood the value of product placement. I have been creating things ever since—stories, code, books, websites—and the tools I use to make them have changed so completely that the five-year-old with his workbook and the seventy-five-year-old with his AI would not recognize each other's instruments.

SuperFonts

.NET can render any installed font, but it offers no convenient way to load a font file from disk, discover which styles it supports, or build a preview. SuperFonts provides two classes that fill this gap: FontFileInfo wraps a single font file and exposes its families and available styles, while FontFileList scans a folder (or the system Fonts directory) and collects the results.

A Man On A Galloping Horse

My grandmother, Dorothy Weems Brown, was a font of sayings and aphorisms, many of which would be all but incomprehensible to young folks of today. Born in 1901, she lived through the transition from gaslight to fiber-optics with a keen, observational eye that never blinked.

SuperFiles

The SuperFiles module adds extension methods to FileInfo, DirectoryInfo, and String that cover everyday file-system operations that .NET doesn't provide out of the box.

SuperColors

.NET's System.Drawing.Color stores RGB values cleanly and integrates well with WinForms and GDI+, but it stops short of offering tools for manipulating color in perceptual or design-oriented ways. There is no built-in support for HSL, HSV, or HCL—color spaces that make tasks like lightening a shade, generating harmonious palettes, or checking contrast far more intuitive. SuperColors fills that gap with three lightweight structures, a set of extension methods on Color, and accessibility helpers that make color manipulation both expressive and mathematically reliable.

SuperStrings

The low-level classes provided by .NET are nevertheless very powerful. However, they inexplicably omit some equally basic, and very useful properties and methods. While the effect of these missing elements can be performed by another combination of elements, doing so doesn't usually make for more readable code. And that's where extension methods and properties come in.

SuperMessages

WinForms provides MessageBox.Show for dialogs, but calling it with the right combination of buttons, icons, and default-button constants is verbose and easy to get wrong. SuperMessages wraps the three most common patterns—a yes/no question, a simple notification, and a text-input prompt—into short, readable functions with sensible defaults.

SuperImages

SuperImages provides extension methods for common image operations—cropping, stretching, covering, and fitting—as well as a scale calculator class and a comprehensive EXIF property reader/writer for working with image metadata.

Namtira: Percentage class

I have dyslexia, and as a partial consequence I can never get the equation for calculating percentages right on the first try. Which side does the 100 go on, and is it divide or multiply? And so, for me at least, it makes sense to get it right once...in a reusable function (or, better yet, object) that I can reference by name when needed? And thus is born the Percentage class.

SuperMath

SuperMath currently contains the Percentage class, which manages a value and its maximum, automatically clamping the value between zero and the maximum. You can read or write either the raw value or the percentage, and the class keeps everything in sync. Two shared helper functions provide quick calculations without creating an object.

Basic Extensions

The modules in this section extend .NET's built-in types with everyday operations that are either missing or unnecessarily verbose. Because the rest of NamtiraLib depends on them, they live here in their own folder.

Canoodling with Colors

As Walt Disney used to remind us every Sunday, the world is a carousel of color. And, thanks to high quality color monitors, smartphones, and other devices, so is the Internet. If you want to create web sites or even boring apps, you still need to know at least the basics of mathematically-calculated colors: How to create them, compare them; how to lighten, darken or ensure readability of one against another.

NamtiraLib

NamtiraLib is a shared .NET class library written in Visual Basic. It started as a handful of extension methods—the kind of small conveniences that .NET almost provides but never quite does—and has grown into a collection of modules, classes, and custom controls that any WinForms application can reference.

Namtira

The basic premise of Namtira, and how it differs from all other shells, is that instead of being bottom-up (starting an app to work on a document) it is top-down (start with the document and do things to it). This is a much more natural way to work. When people begin a project, they say, "Today I am going to write my novel, or plan my vacation, or update my contacts." No one ever gets up in the morning saying, "Today I am going to use Microsoft Word! or Excel! or Outlook!"