Command Line Interface ~ Linux

I never knew it was "punk" to use a Command Line Interface, but it appears to be so. 

Once the idea struck, it became clear that, yes, indeed, I am increasingly anti-GAFAM (Google Amazon Facebook Apple Microsoft).  OK, so this blog is hosted on one of the GAFAM systems, but this can rectified at a time of my choosing.  Cell phone?  Yes, that too can change.  The tablet can change.  The Big Computer was for a very short period of time running a techno-tyrannical operating system, but most of the time for the past 30 years has been liberated.  It's a matter of effort.

Once I understood a little better the history of punk I could re-frame, re-context the contents of the prior paragraph.  Punk started as a youth movement that responded to arrogant "elite" class Thatcher-ism in the UK.  The US version of punk was something a little different.  It dealt with right wing politics and capitalism.  In both cases punk was a reaction to Bad Things perpetrated by "elite" powers far removed from the experiences of everyday people.  

GAFAM power is even greater than what the original punks responded to starting in the 1970's.  Techno-tyranny is extra-political and trans-national.  It determines what exists and what does not, what is remembered and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, and it imposes a value system easily consumed by the masses.  Significant portions of the system is "free."  Whatsapp, Facebook, Blogger (the site I write this on), Gmail, Yahoo mail, Twitter (yes, I know it's newer name), Amazon, FaceTime, iTunes, etc, etc, etc on the surface and at first blush cost nothing.

The "costs" are carefully hidden from users.  Many (most?) "free services" on the internet are synonymous with loss of privacy, intrusive data collection, buying/selling of data, leading to a state of shockingly efficient, nearly seamless techo-tyranny means these services are anything but free.  Ads tailored just for our eyes are the least of it. We so quickly accept this as "the way things are" that we become numb to this truth.  Of course none of this is for our liberation, rather for our compliance and sheep-like acceptance.

I'm reminded of the early days of what later evolved into the internet.  We dug for information and knowledge using Gopher.  We spoke rather freely with each other via (unscanned for advertising opportunities) email (hosted on small systems), held community conversations on (largely troll-free) discussion forums and bulletin boards (both commonly hosted on small systems), and read news on something called Usenet.

It felt more like we were moving into a future of our shared creation, rather than a narrowly offered present imposed on us.  Freedom and liberty vs corporate tended bubbles of narrowed for our "protection" tailored for our unique, personalized, and therefore oh so special experience.  Such sadness to see things so incredibly controlled these days.

My effort to limit/restrict the influence of GAFAM now includes a review of tools used in photography.  Cameras and lenses are owned outright (this is the easy part, rather like a current day holdover of an earlier, simpler time).  My image processing tools are never rented and come from the Open Source Community (which, BTW, often implements industry standards _better_ than RentWare).  To speed the image processing pipeline up even further I sometimes use the Command Line Interface to invoke tools that do specific jobs quickly and efficiently.   I must, by definition, be punk.  Huh.  Never knew.  Doesn't change a thing, actually.

Here is my evolving kept for memory reasons list of commands, expanding to include the above motivations for their being in my life.

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Notes to self:  A few useful image processing commands for running in Linux.  All these are much faster to run from the CLI than using an app that's having to manage graphics at the same time. -

convert *.jpg -average <averaged-filename>.jpg – averaging command

convert *.jpg -evaluate-sequence median <output file-name>.jpg  - a different averaging command

mogrify -resize 1920 *.jpg – resizing command

mogrify -bordercolor black -border 10x10 *.jpg – adding a thin black edge to images

mogrify -bordercolor white -border 400x400 *.jpg – adding a white border to images

convert <filename>.<file-extension> -colorspace gray <output filename>.<file-extension> – command to convert a single image to black and white

for i in *.jpg; do convert "$i" -colorspace Gray  "BW_$i"; done – Bash script to convert a bunch of files into black and white

exiftool -a -u -s -G1 <file_name> - to read EXIF image file data

gmic -input <filename.file-extension> scale_dcci2x , cut 0,255 round output <theOutputFileName>.tif - command to perform a DCCI2x upsize

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