a taste of bratislava
Dec. 30th, 2025 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleveni'm trying to finally finish working up pictures from our 2023 danube cruise. this has been repeatedly delayed, often by more working up pictures from more recent trips. (yes, our lives are hard.)
sunday and yesterday's delay was a reprise of the joy of HEIC. as folks may recall from my little adventure on some big hill in africa, HEIC is a great standard, except for two things. 1) only apple uses it to take pictures and video thus far, and 2) only apple implements it correctly thus far. no other software can cope with it properly.
the last time i needed to deal with it, i used blender. sunday's discovery was that blender's VFX tools won't work on HEIC files that contain just a single exposure. apple decides at random which photos taken with its phones do that. (if there's any logic to it, it's beyond me figuring it out. sometimes photos taken seconds apart will randomly have one or several frames.) the current version of imagemagick&tm; does only moderately badly at extracting frames from HEIC, so i needed to get that going, and i didn't want to spend eternity messing around running it under my old linux virtual machine.
so, sunday was lost messing around getting a current copy of imagemagick&tm; running on the mac side of my machine. that involved the usual trip into therabbit hole cesspit of open sores software. but now that's done, and as a side effect, i now have an entire ancient development system running under an equally-ancient version of macos. yesterday, i finally worked up the photos.
thus, we finally return to 2023, in which our protagonists have just left budapest. the next stop on the itinerary was bratislava. but first, our riverboat had to get through the lock at the gabčíkovo dam. i'd never been locked through on anything, much less a substantial boat, so i took some pictures. and also a short movie.
i keep forgetting that apple's notion of panoramic photos involves applying some maximal distortion filter to them, rather than doing something sensible. but have a 180° panorama of the ship in the lock:
huh, a rising lock does lift all boats:
and then we're free! free, i say!
bratislava didn't make much of an impression on me. somewhere, i have a photo of a ship crewman leaping dramatically from a ship to a dock in preparation for making a ship fast, but docking in bratislava was rather pedestrian:
most of what i remember from the organized tour of the city was the tour guide prattling on about slovak politics. while looking up the landmarks we saw, i discovered that not only is bratislava the capital of slovakia, it's a city of a half-million people. i wouldn't have guessed that from the little of the city we saw.
the tour was the shortest of any on the trip. we saw a couple of the old city's squares, some churches i don't remember and didn't photograph, and the outside of bratislava castle.
an interesting scuplture or monument (i have no idea what it says):
main square:
and then we were turned loose. this is where we discovered that unlike other package trips we'd taken, we were have expected to know where to go and what to do for the rest of the day. which we didn't. but fortunately, there were some interesting things to do right on main square.
to my amusement, those pictures of the square were taken from right in front of our first stop, city hall. for reasons i can't remember, they had a small display of embroidered clothing in the basement.
there were some other displays in the building, but in retrospect, none make good photos. but there was a tower to go up. i remember it vividly, since the way up is a narrow, steep spiral staircase without handrails. somebody later added ropes to hold on to, but they were slack; they seemed more for balance than taking somebody's weight if they slipped.
there's a good view from the top:
michael's gate is one of the older bits of the city; from city hall, it's possible to see the top of it.
but wasn't it some guy named george who did rude things to a poor, innocent dragon?
on one of the other sides of the square is a wine museum. it's an old building, so the exhibits twist around from the basement to the third floor in a strange order. but it's probably the best they can do with the space. and it was cheap, like €5.
some random architecture:
i liked the central windows on this building; it seemed like a good way to get a wide view:
since we weren't sure what to do next – and it seemed that many people weren't – we went back to our boat. there's a famous ruined castles down the river a few miles, but we overestimated how hard it would be to get there and back. we thought we'd need to take a city bus, which since it was the weekend, didn't run that often or that late, but a few people walked it. we probably could have walked, but that wasn't obvious at the time.
the riverboat stuck around in bratislava until it was dark. vienna, the next stop, is something like 30 miles down the river, which the boat could manage in a couple of hours. had we left bratislava after the afternoon's sightseeing, we would have gotten us into vienna around sunset, which wouldn't be ideal for an introductory tour of the city.
in any case, it seems that the bratislavans like their castle:
sunday and yesterday's delay was a reprise of the joy of HEIC. as folks may recall from my little adventure on some big hill in africa, HEIC is a great standard, except for two things. 1) only apple uses it to take pictures and video thus far, and 2) only apple implements it correctly thus far. no other software can cope with it properly.
the last time i needed to deal with it, i used blender. sunday's discovery was that blender's VFX tools won't work on HEIC files that contain just a single exposure. apple decides at random which photos taken with its phones do that. (if there's any logic to it, it's beyond me figuring it out. sometimes photos taken seconds apart will randomly have one or several frames.) the current version of imagemagick&tm; does only moderately badly at extracting frames from HEIC, so i needed to get that going, and i didn't want to spend eternity messing around running it under my old linux virtual machine.
so, sunday was lost messing around getting a current copy of imagemagick&tm; running on the mac side of my machine. that involved the usual trip into the
thus, we finally return to 2023, in which our protagonists have just left budapest. the next stop on the itinerary was bratislava. but first, our riverboat had to get through the lock at the gabčíkovo dam. i'd never been locked through on anything, much less a substantial boat, so i took some pictures. and also a short movie.
i keep forgetting that apple's notion of panoramic photos involves applying some maximal distortion filter to them, rather than doing something sensible. but have a 180° panorama of the ship in the lock:
huh, a rising lock does lift all boats:
and then we're free! free, i say!
bratislava didn't make much of an impression on me. somewhere, i have a photo of a ship crewman leaping dramatically from a ship to a dock in preparation for making a ship fast, but docking in bratislava was rather pedestrian:
most of what i remember from the organized tour of the city was the tour guide prattling on about slovak politics. while looking up the landmarks we saw, i discovered that not only is bratislava the capital of slovakia, it's a city of a half-million people. i wouldn't have guessed that from the little of the city we saw.
the tour was the shortest of any on the trip. we saw a couple of the old city's squares, some churches i don't remember and didn't photograph, and the outside of bratislava castle.
an interesting scuplture or monument (i have no idea what it says):
main square:
and then we were turned loose. this is where we discovered that unlike other package trips we'd taken, we were have expected to know where to go and what to do for the rest of the day. which we didn't. but fortunately, there were some interesting things to do right on main square.
to my amusement, those pictures of the square were taken from right in front of our first stop, city hall. for reasons i can't remember, they had a small display of embroidered clothing in the basement.
there were some other displays in the building, but in retrospect, none make good photos. but there was a tower to go up. i remember it vividly, since the way up is a narrow, steep spiral staircase without handrails. somebody later added ropes to hold on to, but they were slack; they seemed more for balance than taking somebody's weight if they slipped.
there's a good view from the top:
michael's gate is one of the older bits of the city; from city hall, it's possible to see the top of it.
but wasn't it some guy named george who did rude things to a poor, innocent dragon?
on one of the other sides of the square is a wine museum. it's an old building, so the exhibits twist around from the basement to the third floor in a strange order. but it's probably the best they can do with the space. and it was cheap, like €5.
some random architecture:
i liked the central windows on this building; it seemed like a good way to get a wide view:
since we weren't sure what to do next – and it seemed that many people weren't – we went back to our boat. there's a famous ruined castles down the river a few miles, but we overestimated how hard it would be to get there and back. we thought we'd need to take a city bus, which since it was the weekend, didn't run that often or that late, but a few people walked it. we probably could have walked, but that wasn't obvious at the time.
the riverboat stuck around in bratislava until it was dark. vienna, the next stop, is something like 30 miles down the river, which the boat could manage in a couple of hours. had we left bratislava after the afternoon's sightseeing, we would have gotten us into vienna around sunset, which wouldn't be ideal for an introductory tour of the city.
in any case, it seems that the bratislavans like their castle: