Poland - Kraków

Tranquillity in Poland - Jewish heritage, klezmer, Wawel castle, PianoMad campaign, little busker, first remote job offer, too spicy lamb, sunny afternoon on a boat, MIDI synthesis, almost missed bus.

11 September 2016 (Sunday)

So after a night in the woods near Wrocław I took the bus to the next destination Kraków. I took around 3 hours and most of the time I was just compensating for the missing sleep. On the second try I managed to get a room on AirBnb. Altough it was a bit older than on the photos it was nice to have a private room and a warm bed. Since I was really tired I slept for 17 hours.

12 September 2016 (Monday)

My brother Pango finally published his crowdfunding campaign LIVE broadcasting of a Travelling Pianist PIANOmad he was preparing during summer. He plays the piano on New Zealand, he loves it and the people coming around love it as well. Now he'd like to move it to another level. Stream his piano improvisations live on the internet, ideally directly from the nature which is his best inspiration.

In the morning I went to explore the town. My room was in between the old town with the castle and Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter. Around 70 thousand Jews were living here before WWII and now the Jewish culture is still alive here.

In one of the museum houses I discovered an old map of land around Poland and found the ford Chyrow-Felsztyn where Švejk got lost. It was Sunday and the main museum was open for free so I spent some time there. Very interesting to learn more about Jewish people, their culture and history. I got some potato cake and coffee and it was pleasing to hear some klezmer music around.

In the afternoon I continued work on writing the article about ADS-B hardware.

Since I didn't have a data SIM card it was a bit hard to connect when being outside in the city. Fortunately, you could find a free wifi quite often.

In the evening we met via Couchsurfing Hangouts with Tobi, a student from Austria. Although he studies social work he was very interested in maths, machine learning, music theory, etc. We had a nice chat until the night. The main square is nice at the night. Nicely lit buildings and horse coaches. On the other hand some strange guys offer you various adult services and substances.

13 September 2016 (Tuesday)

Nice to have a solid breakfast again - eggs, tomatoes, etc. Good day needs good food.

Recently I joined CZADSB, a Czech community of radio-amateurs interested in flight tracking. Tonda, one of the guys is preparing an experiment to compare the quality of a few ADS-B antennas. I decided to help him with storing the data and evaluating the experiment.

During the day I was happy to publish a post about stories from Wroclaw and write another article about ADS-B.

14 September 2016 (Wednesday)

After a few days in Krakow I finally visited the Wawel castle and the old town, the square, barbican, etc. Very nice. Near the barbican there was an interesting open-air photo exhibition. By the way the barbican is a very intersting building. It served as a fortified gate in defence against Turks. It is one of the three in Europe which survived until today.

At Wawel I met some guys from Czechia who were just on a trip.

While walking the streets of Krakow, I heard some strange music. After I followed the sound I saw this little boy playing his small accordion. The sound was like from another world, unlike conventional music, yet full of passion and emotions. I wish him to stick with music throughout the life.

Since I was hungry in Kazimierz I got a local kebab, but it was brutally big and spicy, something like 500g of lamb meet. I was feeling quite sick afterwards.

The 2nd part of the ADS-B series, ADS-B - Hardware, was published.

In the evening I was thinking where to go next. Originally I though I'll go by hitchhiking/bus/train to Slovakia and then to Budapest. However, accomodation offer in Bratislava were not quite appealing and I found a cheap bus connection directly from Krakow to Budapest: 400 km in 7 hours for 40 PLN. So I decided to go on Saturday.

15 September 2016 (Thursday)

I ordered more nights in the same hostel, the bus (now for 46 PLN) and a room in Budapest. I'm about to come in the afternoon, cross the river and accomodate comfortably.

During the day I had to go out with the backpack due to another check at 2:30 PM. I sat down at he Barca boat on the river, got a coffee, a nice jazz was playing and sun was shining. Good time to clean up a huge pile of notes in Evernote.

Since the AirBnb request in Budapest was declined I had to find something else. There was a nice shared room in a hostel.

A problem appeared when trying to connect to my ML computer with a GPU (called "mlok") located at my parent's house. It turned out that the ISP guys changed something in the configuration and the router lost it's public IP. Fortunately, when we found out the problem, they quickly fixed it.

Some guy (a CEO of some company) wrote me they're looking for an ML/NLP/big-data developer, remote and part-time wihthout a problem. Nice.

In the everning I started figuring out how to synthesize audio from MIDI in a scriptable way - using the fluidsynth synthesizer. Also I explored generating MIDI from symbolic chord sequences using the mingus library. This way I can generate training data for the chord classification task or other audio/ML tasks.

16 September 2016 (Friday)

In the morning I started my ride to Budapest. The departure should have been at 9:20. Nothing on the board of departures. Strange. I was afraid it has already left. Then it turned out that it had 35 minutes delay. But why the hell they didn't put the link on the table with marked delay?! Probably because we're in Poland. At last the bus came, so lift the anchors and hooray to Budapest in Hungary!

The whole gallery of photos