2018-05-29
Switching from IrfanView to ImageMagick
After having spent a couple of hours to write and test several hundred lines of Perl code to block access from certain countries, because of GDPR, i finally can sleep again, since i have done enough to keep the wildlife out. These people don't understand technology, by choice, to maintain the status quo. Because it can empower everyone, what these politicians don't want. It feels like they have only nightmares and a "Ponzi scheme" slowly falling apart, and no real ideas. This will not end well with these kind of priorities: Procrastination makes the hard things even more difficult to solve. Europe has too much overhead, and they like the lag. Especially these Germans with their ancient cars.
This is why i wrote some rules, combined with a GeoLite2 IP geolocation database by MaxMind, to protect the last survivor of my purge after the burn out: My 10 years old embeddable "chat widget" with an integrated automated management system, without any need for moderators or admins since 2008. Everything based on Perl, made from scratch by myself, and the best part: Not much "personal data" required, since there is no sign up process. I also stopped Apache logging IP addresses. But since i'm not making any money with it, i'm not going to waste time explaining. It's just something i like to keep alive on the internet as prestige. Unlike these animals, i know how to get things done. And i have never run a web project for that long before.
While getting myself into more PowerShell, i found ImageMagick again, which i discovered around 15 years ago. But without a lot of experience with command-line interfaces, i did not much with it, back then. After having now worked with computers for twenty years, i see all these things as Lego bricks. In this year alone, for my time-lapse photography with a Raspberry Pi, i processed over 60k JPEG files with IrfanView and a Windows batch script. But now, i wrote the job in PowerShell, and switched to ImageMagick. The image quality is better, which gives FFmpeg more bits to work with, for additional details in the highlights and shadows. The performance is otherwise similar for batch editing around 8k photos each week.