![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a taste of bratislava
Dec. 30th, 2025 09:15 pmi'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.
( pictures! pictures! pictures! )
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.
( pictures! pictures! pictures! )
