Ogrodzieniec Castle

 

Ogredzienic castle is a bit of a drive outside of Krakow. It’s quite the experience-you can walk around it and inside it and it’s a goddamned castle.

There are many huge limestone monoliths around the site, some incorporated into the keep and walls. We thought that this one looked like a dragon.

The phrase “The very living rock” comes to mind. The builders where taking advantage of the natural stone to its fullest potential here. The keep has the majestic profile of a ship’s prow.

Most exciting of all, perhaps, is being allowed inside. The view from the castle is awesome. Really hammers home how powerful you’d feel behind these walls in, say, the 1400s when it was first built.

The modern safety additions mean that anyone able to brave the height (and ascend several flights of stairs) can get up high into the keep. I think that they mostly replace the wooden elements of the castle that do not survive into the present day.

 

You get a pretty good view of the nearby town from up here. Again, I’ll leave constructing a panorama as an exercise to the reader.

Up another floor, and I again felt compelled to photograph the inside of the castle. With many of the intended walls missing, it takes on a sort of MC Escher quality with windows nobody can look through and doors to nowhere.

The view from the higher turret of the castle is breathtaking. Careful on the ladder up the last story though.

From up here, the limestone looks even more like a dragon, with a few brave trees at the top giving the impression of a spiny crown.

More monoliths in the southern corner of the wall give the impression of a gate house.

The light was perfect for the photos after we did a tour of the interior, I’m particularly proud of this next series.

View from behind the castle.

Cars of Zakopine

This was our view of the Tatras on the road to Zakopine from Krakow:

Not a car:

I promise we’ll get to the cars-though this is of the rail variety. It’s a funicular railway which takes you up the slope of the mountain called Gubałówka.

Ok, back to automobiles. Another Polski Fiat. I’m pretty sure this is the same one twice. How many gorgeous green Polski Fiats could be running around one town?

Our neighbor had a cool black 90s P80. That car has the coolest profile.

This one was on Morski Oko (which isn’t technically in Zakopine) but here you go: Sizuki Jimny. A very popular car that you never see in the US.

This one is actually from Zakopane. I can’t tell if that’s a Nissan badge or an Opel badge, though I’m sure I saw more Opels than Nissans. I wasn’t able to track down the model.

People in Zakopane seem to enjoy off-roading. I’d never noticed snorkels before, and I still see them around New England from time to time, but they where everywhere in Zakopine.

One last vehicle from the top of Morskie Oko.

LEGO Shop At Home Scans: 95-99

A while back, I was trying to find a specific Lego catalog that I’d looked at as a kid. However, when I tried to find the specific one I was looking for, I realized that very few of these catalogs from the 90s had been immortalized by the internet. However, many of them where on sale for reasonable prices (and Sabrina wanted a Scanner for old family Photos anyway) so I got to work.

? 1995

Holiday 1995

January 1996

Holiday 1996

Spring 1997

Summer 1997

Holiday 1997

January 1998

Spring 1998

Summer 1999

Fall 1999

The raw files are here on my archive.org account, if you find my (largely imagemagick-powered) PDFing of the files inadequate. If the PDFs appear small just zoom in, they’re about as high-res as they can be without creating artifacts on the screens I tried. I plan on also scanning the ones that I personally saved when I was a kid, and will post those here too.

And the specific catalog I was looking for? Turns out it was Holiday 1997. Twenty one years ago. The page I was looking for in particular turns out to be this one.


Morskie Oko: The Ascent

Morskie Oko is a lake high in the Tatra mountains in Poland. While you can take a horse-drawn carriage up the hill, we preferred to walk. There isn’t (and wasn’t) much to say, so like us (Sabrina, Tiernan, and myself) please enjoy the scenery.

At some points, we became impatient and decided to take sections at a run. This became a dicey proposition when we reached an altitude where snow remained on the ground.

There where some avalanche warning signs, as well as evidence of previous avalanches. This added an element of danger to an otherwise casual (if exhausting) climb.

There was a base camp building at the top with hot soup and drinks. Once I warmed up a bit, I dipped my hand in the lake, just to say I had. It was extremely cold.

I’ll leave constructing a panorama as an exercise to the reader:

OS9 on Ubuntu

The first thing to know about emulating macs from The Before Time is that if you where using Classic Mac OS at the turn of the millennium, you probably used an iMac G3. This machine was ubiquitous-at least at schools in my area. This machine used a PowerPC chip rather than a 68k, so the emulator you want to use is SheepShaver. If you want to use a 68k there’s Basilisk II, which has a very similar setup, and just needs to be installed via apt.

In order to run SheepShaver you’ll need to download some additional stuff, so you might as well do it up front. Redundant Robot has become the de-facto distributor of these files (email me if this ever goes down, I’ll host’em.) Specifically you’ll want the New World ROM and A pre-made bootable OS9 install.

Next you’ll want to compile a copy of SheepShaver. This is thankfully very easy thanks to StackOverflow:

Install dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev x11proto-xf86dga-dev libesd0-dev libxxf86dga-dev libxxf86dga1 libsdl1.2-dev osspd git

clone the macemu repo from github:
git clone https://github.com/cebix/macemu.git

Build SheepShaver:

cd macemu/SheepShaver
make links
cd src/Unix/
./autogen.sh
make -j3

Install the binary into your path

sudo cp SheepShaver /usr/bin

Run Sheepshaver with

sudo padsp SheepShaver

This will get you to the setup menu. In the Memory/Misc tab, add the new world ROM file. Then, back in the Volumes tab, add the .img file you downloaded, and create a new (big) empty volume to store your apps. Next add a valid directory that you do not care about because it will be consumed by sudo-enabled fire as “unix root.” Now you should be able to boot into the machine by hitting “start.”

In order to get apps working, you’ll generally want to first get them out of your unix folder and only then unpack them (most vintage mac files are in Stuffit format, so you’ll want a copy of Stuffit Expander to be your first install.)

Unfortunately, the Redundant Robot image is too small to fit many apps. What you’ll want to do is make your own image. Make a blank disc with SheepShaver’s interface download  this disc (you’ll need an account.) In order to boot from a file, it needs to be read-only (in fact it will render any writable file that it tries to boot from unbootable.) But you need to run SheepShaver as root. So to render the file unwritable to root, you need to make it immutable with

chattr +i ~/Downloads/Mac_OS_9.0.4.toast

Then add it to the boot list and it’ll boot to the installer.

Cars of Krakow

The dramatic but friendly outline of Wawel castle greets you when you get to downtown Krakow.

But of course, what you’re here for is that Ford Focus at the bottom of the frame right? Foci where the only Big Three cars that I saw in any signifigant number, and they where the early-model foci from before they could be had in the US.

Apparently the Polish word for Loratadine (as in, the drug that makes allergies go away) is “Loratadina” as luck would have it. On the way to the drugstore, I saw this beautiful Skoda Felecia. As you might guess from my love of 80s and 90s Volvos series cars, I’m a huge sucker for sharp angles, and this has so many of them.Front of a red car

You don’t see a lot of Italian cars in New England, but Fiat is all over the place in Poland, and people drive around in Alf Romeo 159s.

Inside Wawel castle there’s a bell tower with a view of the city. A harrowing climb just due to how dark it is and the knowledge that if you fall, there are plenty of stairs to go down. Schoolchildren prod at the enormous bell for good luck-I just hope to be lucky enough not to be around when someone manages to ring it. The view is, of course, very nice.

Immaculately maintained Polski Fiat. A classic car with a ton of history. We saw this while out eating in Krakow. I can’t overstate how delicious the food was.

A Volvo serving as a taxi. And I thought the Subaru Outbacks I was seeing in Cambridge where out there. Usually the plastic line you see on these is long faded, someone here knows how to get the original color back, which is nice.

Most of the police cars we saw where Kias, but there where also Toyotas. The rental car was a manual Kia which lead to several burnouts as our driver re-learned how to operate a manual.

Row of Kia police cars

A gem: Multiverse In Review

Multiverse In Review is the type of treatment that makes reading a bunch of background story for a tabletop game worth it. Source by source, the author is examining every available piece of Fluff in (and out of) the Magic: The Gathering cannon, with (so far) an emphasis on the type of sources that most fans never would have seen, especially in the pre-internet “before time”.

The most fascinating bits are the insights into how the story evolved, and what hidden information those changes reveal. I find these big shared universes very fascinating, and would love to see a similar treatment of, say, the Warhammer 40k setting. A good example, if you want a horizontal slice, would be these three articles on the conception of the Antiquities story the Antiquities comics and the Jeff Grub novel that slots the story into the modern (ish) cannon. Every article is a good read if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cars of Katowice and Gliwice

I arrived in Glowice airport severely jetlagged after sleepless night of watching the moon over our wing. There was a festival with music and beer trucks in Katowice so we hung out there for a while, delirious.

Buildings in Katowice
Some of Katowice’s more striking buildings. The coal towers where cool too but I didn’t get a clean pic of them.

The following morning in Gliwice, the car spotting began. I saw three Volvo wagons in quick succession which I think is what inspired me to start collectibg pictures of eurocars like trading cards.

 

White Volvo V70
Slick white 740(?), very boxy (82-96)

Picture of a car with a parking sign in-frame
Blue 95-00 V70 (?)

In addition to the Volvos, VWs and Fiats, there where tons of Skoda, Renault, and Opal cars.

Red four door hatchback car, sadly obscured by a tree
It’s definitely a Renault, I think it’s Cilo. The front looks right.

At an apartment block somewhere between Katowice and Gliwice we saw what might be the coolest car a super clean FSO Polonez Caro from sometime around the 90s. The orange plastic grille cover will probably aid in identifying it, I can’t find any pictures with the grille like that in my shallow googling.

SYLP is dead, long live SYLP

emf.sdf.org, or “The Shipyard Liberation Project” hasn’t been updated in years. This is mostly because I haven’t had anything to add to it-I think I got every last graphic I could, contacted everyone who’s email address still worked, etc. I’d also all but run out of space for my SDF account (I even had to host the 3d models from Ares on my own site.) Somewhere along the line, I lost access to my SDF account, but by then I was using Unix every day so I didn’t really miss it.

Fast-forward to now, I’ve realized that the fine folks at the Internet Archive have a sweet upload utility that allows you to upload whatever files you want, and (critically) add metadata to them so that some sort of context can be preserved. So I’ve uploaded those files to the archive, you can enjoy them here. That puts out the “what if SDF deletes my account” fire, but some stuff remains:

  • Files with appropriate licenses ended up on OpenGameArt rather than on SDF because I figured more people would see/use it. They ought to be mirrored on the archive.
  • Someone from the Ambrosia forums kindly ripped the graphics from a TC called “The Novel One.” I’ve got the graphics somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find the thread.
  • The “Open Source TC” had some assets at some point, and the notion was that anyone could take it and run with it. I’ve never run across a copy of it (it was hosted on DropBox of all places)
  • The list of missing shipyards on the SDF site still stands – if anyone out there has any of those graphics, I’d love to see them!