With my route across BiH all planned out, I had to decide when to travel. It was necessary to schedule my train journey from Zagreb to Ploče, via Banja Luka and Sarajevo, before the end of August. The train from Sarajevo to Ploče runs only in the summer, and only on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. I scheduled the trip for Friday, August 29th. If everything went as planned, that would get me to Sarajevo on Saturday, August 30th and I would get on this summer’s last train to Ploče on Sunday, August 31st.

I spent most of this summer based in Zagreb, taking trains and riding bikes. While I mostly traveled around Slovenia and Croatia, in late August I embarked on a multi day trip across Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), taking trains to the Adriatic port of Ploče via Banja Luka and Sarajevo. This article is the first in the series about this trip, where I will share some background on why this trip is so long and complicated, and how I planned it despite these difficulties. In the following articles I will write about the trip itself.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a rare occurrence at Dobova, a border station between Slovenia and Croatia: a few HŽPP local trains crossed over from Croatia into Slovenia to pick up passengers going to Zagreb holiday markets. This summer there have been some additional positive developments at this station. In addition to regular long distance trains, SŽ (Slovenian railways) started running seasonal weekend trains between Zagreb and Pula via

Note: this trip was inspired by Jon Worth’s Cross Border Rail project. Make sure to follow him on Bluesky and Mastodon! History On the first of October 1862, Südbahn-Gesellschaft (South Railway Company) opened the Zidani Most – Zagreb – Sisak railway. This was one of the first railways in what are now Slovenia and Croatia, and this route is still the main rail link between the capitals of the two

Photography is arguably my oldest hobby. I’ve loved taking photos for as long as I can remember. I reflected on my first encounter with digital photography in 2003 in a recent post, but I’m old enough that I first got to know photography through film. I still don’t know what it is exactly that draws me to still images, but I find the same joy capturing light with a camera

A childhood friend of mine got an iPod in 2004. It was a third generation model with a mind boggling 40 gigabyte hard drive. This was incredible at the time – I had just gotten my first MP3 player with very modest 128MB of storage, a NAPA PA28. Despite its minuscule storage size, it was still exciting to use at a time when portable CD players still reigned supreme. But

The digital Dark Age The October Archive.org attack shook me in a bad way. For a while now I’ve been increasingly convinced that in the not-too-distant-future we will be referring to the period of the early 21st century as a digital dark age. Not just because of the seemingly unstoppable rise of anti-intellectual, anti-science fascist movements around the world that use the internet to spread like wildfire, but also due

I’ve been wanting to see the SS United States, which has been docked in Philadelphia since 1996, for many years. The SS United States is a fascinating ship. One of the last great ocean liners built, setting sail in 1952 and maintaining line service for only 9 years before starting cruises in 1961. It is still the holder of the Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic crossing. I once saw

Earlier this year I had lots of fun participating in GlobalTalk, a fun collaborative experiment where a bunch of folks interconnected their home AppleTalk networks into one global network that allowed their classic Macs and other devices to communicate across vast distances. While AppleTalk is normally tied to a physical location (contemporary uses were usually limited to offices or schools), I was eager to experiment with using it on the go.

The organization I work for thankfully wasn’t affected by the CrowdStrike incident, but I ended up assisting a subcontractor who works at our site since their IT team was of course swamped all day with calls. This article covers two issues I ran into: Getting into Recovery mode via SecureBoot toggling This particular machine that was affected by the faulty CrowdStrike driver kept BSOD-ing, but it wouldn’t actually get to