The Zulu word "Omhhulu" in the title loosely translates to, "too big, vast, immense, extreme".

I guess I should start at the beginning. I mostly write blogs that are presented on the WWW to share photographs with my family. If they are interested, they can then view them by going to the relevant site on the WWW. To assist myself with the presentation (thumb nails) and display (larger pop UFO window) of the photographs, I wrote a program.

The program presents the photographs as a sequence of rows of thumbnails of the photographs. If the mouse cursor is placed over a photograph, a popup message may appear with details relating to the corresponding photograph. If the thumbnail is clicked, a window pops up containing an enlargement of the photograph.

The program is recorded as a text file known as a BASH Script. (Much the same as a doctor's script contains lines listing medicines. The lines are in effect a list of commands that one could type in in response to the prop mt that is displayed in a computer (screen) terminal window. Some of these commands are part of the computer's operating system. Others are useful programs that provide specific functionality.

A good example would be a program that counts (and reports) the number of characters, words and lines associated with the text in a text file. Another good example, and more relevant to this blog, would be a program that resizes an image file (png, jpg, etc). The program / command known as "convert" is such a program. It could be used to resized copies of a photograph that could be used as a thumbnail image, or an enlargement of the thumbnail, that could be displayed in a window that pops up on a computer screen.

Now for the Nitty Gritties. When I recently upgraded the 2020 version of the UBUNTU operating system that runs on my Personal Computer (PC), "convert" no longer worked. Nor did a host of other stuff. The scale of the dysfunctionality of UBUNTU 24.04 is beyond words. If you do not believe me, guess what, :GOOGLE" it.

So I have had to rewrite my BASH script. To make it easier for myself I have exploited the mega, giga, bits of bandwidth that we have available. I no longer resize images to conserve bandwidth. I simple upload the BIG cellphone pics and rely on the browser to do the resizing of the thumbnails and popup images.

All that remains is to find a way of reducing the horde of rubbish that now arrives on my cellphone, tablet and computer screen. All of this on the back of the mega, giga, bits of bandwidth that we now have available.

phoneLandscape.jpg *

phonePortrait.jpg *

Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a bicycle.

Some Links

• Ubuntu for desktops

If you have any comments, corrections, suggestions or plain criticism,
I would appreciate it if you would communicate the same to me.

[email protected]

www.robdempster.com