Salty Garden Tavern in Mlashe

8 July, 2021 | Restaurant reviews | 42 seen

Salty Garden Tavern is an awesome place located in Mlashe village, some 60 km from the nation's capital Tbilisi near the Bazaleti lake

We discovered this place at the end of May 2021 and were surprised to learn that the owner of the tavern - David speaks some Latvian.

Mlashe village

Our mission is to support the development of our village Mlashe, protection of its ecosystem. Salty Garden provides working places to local people, therefore they won’t leave the village in search of the other job.

Traditional crafts are valuable resources that need to be protected. 

We have already employed two Mlashe’s families and some more are providing us veggies, fresh milk and meat.

All veggies and fruits are growing with no use of pesticides, accordingly newest bio standards. The waste is recycling. 

Now Mlashe is a place to be.

Cool views, authentic Georgian cuisine, kid-friendly, pet-friendly,  very friendly, and goodhearted owners.

Dinner at Salty Garden

yummy, one of the best katmis mcvadi and tasty homemade lemonades. the menu is pretty nice and adopted for European style. Our bill here some GEL 100

Author of this blog (left) and David (right) - the owner of this tavern

David speaks quite well Latvian (besides his native Georgian, English and Russian)

Sallty Garden Tavern in Georgia

Visit us for lunch, for a nice walk around, to watch late afternoon sunlight, flames in the fireplace. Visit us for a good talk or a moment of silence. There is something for everyone. Any kind of activity for every taste can be found here.

June 2021 Dividend Income Report - $128.31

7 July, 2021 | Investments | 42 seen

Welcome to the fifthy (#50) dividend income report, covering earnings I've made from dividend-paying stocks in June 2021.

The last June we spent in Georgia and at the end of the month traveled back to Latvia, we did many nice road trips, kept going to the gym and visited swimming pool, English kindergarten for our daughter. Life is very good. I was doing quite a lot of awesome drone videography around both countries, discovered new places both in Georgia and Latvia.

From the perspective of dividend income - Last June was surprisingly good. 

In total, we took  $128.31  in dividend income last month. Which is  quite awesome, for doing nothing, just holding stakes at great companies.

Compared to the previous June in 2020, when we took just $82.11 in dividend income,  monthly dividend has increased by +56%  (+$46). A year ago we did set a goal to take at least $300 this month, now this unfortuneltly didn't happen. 

Luckily, an additional $1,223 was made from options trading.  

As options trading is not a passive form of making money while you are sleeping it wouldn't be fair to include them in dividend income reports.

Dividend income in June 2021

From the stocks we got the following income last month:

Total: $128.31

Quite a nice dividend bump from INTC, PFE, USA.. suprsingly but I got also dividend from VTRS and GOLD. Nice.. Now i wont get such high dividend in the next quarter month, because I sold INTC and USA stock. I will miss some $70 in September's dividend income. But I will try to compensate by adding more ARCC and VTRS stock (also some small bits with INTC stock)

Monthly income

I've been tracking my journey towards million dollars in a savings account since January 2017. More than 4 years already. 

The cumulative earnings for 2021 now are $423.05 which is exactly 16.26% from my goal of 2021 ($2,600). On average, it would ask me to generate $362.83 every month for the next 6 months to reach my goal. Right, now this goal looks pretty much impossible

2020 in Review and Financial Goals for 2021

Goals for June 2022

This is my favorite part of the reports - trying to forecast/set goals for the next year. But before setting a goal for 2022, let's see what I forecasted/said a year ago (June 2020)

I will be optimistic and say we are still looking to crack that $300/mo goal in June 2021

Not happened.

Now, when looking at June 2022, I will be quite optimistic and say USD 150 is what I'm looking at.

How To export Image from Video File in Adobe Premiere Pro

6 July, 2021 | Digital Photography School | 19 seen

Lately, I've put my DSLR camera aside and mostly using DJI Mavic AIr 2 + phone for photography and video (mostly video). 

The drone is an awesome replacement for a DSLR camera - you can have both video and photography, the only drawback - no audio, that's why I'm using a phone. 

anyhow, recently I discovered an awesome place here in Georgia, the restaurant Salty Garden, I did some drone videography, did some mobile videos, made a nice short clip at the end, but I forget to take any photography - so I was left with no other option - export a single frame (s) from Adobe Premiere

And here is how:

From your timeline, with the frame selected press CTRL+SHIFT+E (or locate export frame icon under the selected video)

Export Frame from Adobe Premiere Pro

You will be prompted to select the Format and chose the location. I chose JPEG (though you can export also BMP, DPX, GIF, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, Targa and Tiff)

Next, I can import selected frames in Adobe Lightroom and fine-tune.

Hope this helps!

Restaurant Chiko near Aspindza

5 July, 2021 | Restaurant reviews | 23 seen

Restaurant Chiko near Apsindza is one of our best discoveries lately here in Georgia, the restaurant no only offers amazing and spectacular views but it also serves tasty cuisine for a very very affordable prices.

First discovered in June 2021, when returning from Vardzia cave town, we made a stop here because of spectacular views and I really wanted to have a good cappuccino. I got both + more.

The view that attracted

After seeing this views when passing by, we decided to take a stop here and have a cup of coffee.

The mountains are called - Aspindza mountains

River Mtkhari passing by

The views are just worth a million.

Hotel under construction

There was ongoing hotel construction works performed during our brief stay here, should be very nice hotel in future, for travelers exploring this part of Georgia.

Weekend

2 July, 2021 | Living in Georgia | 8 seen

Weekend - turned out quite a nice video, despite a bad luck filming. Got a no-fly warning from monks at Zedazeni monastery and heavy rain ruined my plans filming at Birtvisi canyon. From the good - discovered how to use action track on Mavic Air 2.

All the rest - enjoy!

Music by Scott Holmes: Storybook

April 9-11, 2021

How to Flip a Mirror Video in Adobe Premiere Pro

1 July, 2021 | Digital Photography School | 75 seen

Recently I launched my YouTube channel where I talk about stocks, options trading, and finance in general. Most of the filming and editing I'm doing myself.

As I'm filming with my Samsung Galaxy A51 phone  and then importing video in Adobe Premiere Pro for editing I noticed that some of my videos kind of look weird as t they are in a "mirror effect"

Mirror effect video

Look at the T-shirt - the text is in mirror effect. 

Now to change it  - select the video file and apply Horizontal Flip from the:

Effects - > Video effects - > Transform - > Horizontal Flip

Flip horizontal video in Adobe Premiere Pro

Hope it helps!

Hotel Abastumani Residence

28 June, 2021 | Hotel reviews | 13 seen

Located in Abastumani village, this hotel features a shared lounge, garden, BBQ facilities, and free WiFi. Featuring family rooms, this property also provides guests with a terrace. The accommodation provides a 24-hour front desk, room service, and currency exchange for guests.

We booked a family room for one night stay in mid-June 2021, and paid for that GEL 350 (with breakfast included). The place seems nice, kid friendly. We enjoyed our brief stay here a lot. 

Abastumani residence

Surrounded by pine trees, the area of Abastumani is a popular health resort. 

All units are equipped with a flat-screen TV with satellite channels, fridge, a kettle, a shower, a hairdryer and a wardrobe. Featuring a private bathroom, rooms at the hotel also provide guests with a mountain view.

Guests at Abastumani Residence can enjoy a continental breakfast.

Clouds over Abastumani

You can play table tennis and darts at the accommodation, and the area is popular for hiking and fishing.

The nearest airport is Kutaisi International, 55 km from Abastumani Residence, and the property offers a paid airport shuttle service

Book now on Booking.com

How I Migrated my blog from Drupal 7 to version 9

27 June, 2021 | Drupal Development | 13 seen

The blog you are currently reading now is more than 7 years old.

I launched it back in October 2013 on the Drupal 7 platform.

During the years blog has expanded a lot and now is heldong a few thousand articles - zillions of photographs, more than 700 articles with geo location information and so on. 

The more the blog grew, the less I wanted to do any upgrades between Drupal versions, but then come the end of June 2021 and I just did it.

The past couple of days and hours I've been spending migrating my Drupal powered blog from version 7 to version 9. 

If you are reading this, you are reading the migrated version. 

Originally I started this upgrade path a few years ago, but was never happy with the result (too much complicated things to migrate, like gmaps, location, amazon filters, custom fields etc etc).

Around a year ago I almost did the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, but again too many things were left broken and I decided I will keep the 7th version as long as I can (and I'm happy for that)

Around Aprl/May 2021 I noticed search traffic to my blog has started to decrease significantly and in June my site lost about 50% from its orginal search traffic.

After doing some investigation it turned out - site needs some serious improvements in page laod times, and this was the time I thought - alright, lets do this update!

The overall upgrade process went quite smooth, except I lost all of the geolocation data (will spend upcoming autumn season to fix and build better maps).

Also lost all of the custom built views and many other little things, but this is not something to worry about much, because I can easily rebuild them from scratch. The most important thing - the content is succesfully migrated, the page load times are less, and I hope that in the next few months I will be able to recover the lost search traffic

Final thoughts

Drupal 9 seems much more modern than Drupal 7, a lot of features are already enabled in the core version and we writers can focus more on what is really important - writting. 

I hope I will be able to use the Drupal 9 version for the next 7 years to come

Vilgāle Winter Edition

25 June, 2021 | Tourism objects | 5 seen

Made a quick stop at Vilgāle today to check how our apt renovation works are going and made this short drone footage.

There is some recreational potential at Vilgāle. There is a guest house, a Montessori school, some shop (s), and a huge Vilgales lake (a couple of months ago I met some Aussies here). Quite often properties go from the hammer in this village. they just sold kindergarten for EUR 20K (we wanted to buy, but hell - what would we do with a kindergarten)
DJI Mavic Air 2, February 27, 2021
Music by Scott Holmes: Hotshot
 

GDP Per Capita In Former Soviet Union Countries 2019

23 June, 2021 | Macroeconomics | 74 seen

It has been a while since I last time compared the economic output of the former Soviet Union states.

Last time I did, I had data for 2013, see: GDP Per Capita In Former Soviet Union Countries 2013

With the latest economic sanctions against Belarus I decided to take a look, how does each of the former Soviet countries stands now, the latest data I was able to gather was from 2019 (World Bank).

Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is a metric that breaks down a country's economic output per person and is calculated by dividing the GDP of a country by its population. For the ease of calculations GDP per capita nominal is used in following table

Without further ado, here is the raw data

Data source: World Bank

As we can see from Table above - Baltic States leads the Table, with Russia left behind with some impressive gap.

For now, the clear leader in race for higher GDP per capita is Estonia with $23,723 thousands per capita in 2019, followed by Lithuania, and Latvia.

It's also worth mentioning that the Baltic states have experienced impressive 22-33% growth over the period of 6 years, while countries like Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have actually decreased their GDP per capita amount.

Euro aspiration have helped to countries like Georgia, Moldova and in some matter Ukraine to increase their economic output.

Again, it will be interesting to see how data will change in the next 5 to 10 years. I guess we will see Baltic states reaching $30,000 GDP per capita by the middle of decade. Also the growth seems will be in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. 

I guess hard times are waiting Belarus and Russia, while the raising cost ot the oil, could actually help and stimulate economies of Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkenistan. 

What are your thougts? Leave me a comment! Readers and I would love to hear!

Green Cape near Batumi

21 June, 2021 | Tourism objects | 60 seen

Green cape is one of the most beautiful places in Georgia, located just some 9 km outside of Batumi. 

Batumi Botanical Garden is located within Green Cape's picturesque setting. You can reach Green cape from Batumi by a taxi or bus.

Pebbled beach at Green cape

There are several cafes located in and within a close proximity to Green cape. The main entrance to the Batumi Botanical garden also is located here.

Green Cape and a pier

This place has also some special place in our hearts, as back in the Summer of 2012, we camped overnight here at had a very very nice Summer Solstice (June 23) with grilled meat and a morning swim in the salt waters of the Black sea. Sweet memories. 

See this short video from Batumi and Green cape.

beach near the Green Cape near Batumi

The area is 70-92 meters above sea level.
Thousands of visitors come to the garden each year due to its wide variety of flora.

Javakheti Trip

18 June, 2021 | Living in Georgia | 9 seen

One of the strangest weekend trips, - from the Russian Tsar favorite places in Abastumani to the footsteps of Khertvisi fortress which, rumor has it, Alexader the Great has visited.

From the Georgian Cave towns in Vardzia to friendly Armenians in Ninotsminda and back to Russian Dukhobor settlements near the beautiful lakes of Saghamo, Paravani, and Tsalka reservoir, not to mention tasty Belgian chocolate from the Phoka Monastery.

Strange, but awesome. Thumbs up!

How To Update to PHP 7.4 Ubuntu 16.04 Drupal 7 Nginx

17 June, 2021 | Servers | 256 seen

I was facing problems with some Drupal modules not being supported, before upgrading to PHP 7.4 version.  

As I had running Ubuntu 16.04 server with Nginx and PHP 7.0 FPM on in I felt a bit afraid performing a live update and decided to make a new backup for all settings. 

Here I found some good advice: How To Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04/18.04/16.04

and also for Drupal specific things took my own advice from here: How to Install Drupal with Nginx, PHP-FPM 7.4, MySQL, phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04 - Linode Guide

Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 18.04/16.04

Step 1: Add PHP PPA Repository

We’ll add ppa:ondrej/php PPA repository which has the latest build packages of PHP.

Step 2: Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 18.04/19.04/16.04

Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 18.04/19.04/16.04 using the command:

Check version installed:

$ php -v

Install  PHP-FPM

Next, install php7.4-fpm with php-gd extension that is required by Drupal core:

Configure Nginx and PHP-FPM

In this step, we will configure Nginx to use php-fpm to serve HTTP requests for PHP pages. Go to the php-fpm directory "/etc/php/7.4/fpm" and edit the "php.ini" file:

Un-comment the cgi.fix_pathinfo line and change the value to "0"

When using nano command you can use CTRL+W to locate that line. Once changed press CTRL+O to save changes and CTRL+X to exit from nano editor

Now we should modify the default Nginx virtual host configuration. Edit the "default" file and enable the php-fpm directive.

Un-comment  location ~ \.php$ section, so it look like this

CTRL+O and CTRL+X

Then test the Nginx configuration with the command "nginx -t" to ensure that it is valid:

If there is no error, restart nginx and the php-fpm service:

That's it! Hope it helps!

Hotel Dalis Mta

14 June, 2021 | Hotel reviews | 45 seen

Hotel Dalis Mta is located some 35 kilometers from the Dedoplitskaro town, right next to the Dalis Mta water reservoir in the Chachuna managed area.

We had a chance to stay here overnight at the start of June 2020, as the trip was organized by a German friend, he was the one who found and booked this place. The hotel charged GEL 50 per person, plus an additional GEL 30 dinner and an additional GEL 30 breakfast. If you are into grilling I guess it shouldn't be a problem to prepare a grill (as long as you have firewood and meat with you)

We booked this place in the frames of a weekend trip to Chachuna managed area, visiting mud volcanoes, eagle canyon and Big Shirtaki airfield

Solar panels installed at Dalis MTA hotel in Georgia

There is limited power (runs on solar panels plus generator) and no internet connection or phone coverage (so I guess it would be hard to call the place)

We got a nice, simple room with 3 beds, a separate bathroom and electricity was turned in for a few hours in the evening. 

I had a short small talk with the owner Lia and her associate, I was told this houses were originally built as houses for the workers for Dalis Mta water reservoir (just later I learned the reservoir has been built at the 80-ies). In the past it seems are had both electricity and telephone cables available.. Hotel owners are participating in some kind of Georgian govt support fund, and are receiving some tax-payer money.

In short very nice stay, during the night we could hear crickets and see clear sky, which is rare. Maybe I could return here for some Milkyway photography in the future, who knows.

Here I'm leaving some contact information I was able to found:

• phone: +995 .599 90 18 06
• email: lia.kobaidze26@gmail.com
• Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HOTELDALISMTA

Vashlovani Trip

11 June, 2021 | Living in Georgia | 32 seen

Epic Georgia! Epic Vashlovani!

Another awesome weekend recorded. Crossing desert sand, meeting more than 30 turtles, reaching man-built Chachuna reservoir, stepping in volcano mud puddles.

With an overnight stay in a camp base powered by solar power. Reaching Eagle canyon near Dedoplitskaro and having fun at abandoned Russian airfields in the middle of nowhere.

Many thanks to Ralph Schmidt for making this trip happen.
June 5-6, 2021