Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem
Mahane Yehuda Market often referred to as "The Shuk" is a marketplace (originally open-air, but now partially covered) in Jerusalem.
Popular with locals and tourists alike, the market's more than 250 vendors sell fresh fruits and vegetables; baked goods; fish, meat and cheeses; nuts, seeds, and spices; wines and liquors; clothing and shoes; and housewares, textiles, and Judaica.
We first visited this market at the end of 2022, during our week-long trip to Israel. Our Air BNB stay was located some 700 meters from this market on Be'er Sheva street - so we discovered this place quite randomly by just browsing Google Maps.
In and around the market are falafel, shawarma, kibbeh,…
Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem
The Church of the Nativity, or Basilica of the Nativity, is a basilica located in Bethlehem, the State of Palestine.
The grotto it contains holds a prominent religious significance to Christians of various denominations as the birthplace of Jesus.
I first visited this church back in 2009 and revisited it again at then end of 2022.
To get here I caught a street taxi near the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the driver agreed to take us here and back to Jerusalem for 350 New Israeli Shekels (about $100). The driver was keen enough and organized us a tour guide on site, with whom we skipped the lines on the site. I was not asked for any additional payment but I gave about 40 shekels (about $10…
Western Wall in Jerusalem
The Western Wall is known in the West as the Wailing Wall, and in Islam, as the Buraq Wall is a portion of ancient limestone wall in the Old City of Jerusalem that forms part of the larger retaining wall of the hill known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount.
Just over half the wall's total height, including its 17 courses located below street level, dates from the end of the Second Temple period and is believed to have been begun by Herod the Great.
I first visited the Western Wall back in 2009, and re-visited again at the end of 2022 during our about week long trip to Israel. Entrance to the Western Wall is completelty free, but men and women have seperated access to the…
New Years Party at the Caucasus Translations office in Tbilisi
On January 7, 2023, New Year's party was celebrated at the Caucasus Translations office in Tbilisi.
We arrived early to set up the party scene, decorating with ballons and more. Pizza, sushi, wine & champagne, pinata game for little ones, t-shirts for employees.
Music by Alexa (Amazon Echo)
In total about 130 helium filled ballons were ordered for the party from myday.ge
Cake from the local Madat bakery in Tbilisi
It was a sushi, pizza and wine party. All the food was delivered from several local sushi places and pizzerias using Wolt delivery
She spends quite a lot of time at the office
Special T-shirts with company logo was ordered from maika.ge
Wishing a happy and prosperous…
Hotel GreenWood in Bakuriani
Greenwood hotel is located in Bakuriani on the A. Tsereteli street is next to the forest and close to the ski lifts and city center.
We booked lux family rooms during Christmas 2022, paying about GEL 1,000 for a 3-night stay, thus as there was little snow in Bakuriani we left one day earlier.
Here I made a short documenary about our latest stay in Bakuriani: Christmas in Bakuriani
Greenwood hotel is a 3 or 4 storey building kind of a loghouse, looks very attractive. We had our superiour room at the top floor without an elevator. Perfectly fine for us, but might be a problem for eldery or disabled person.
Bed was good enough for three of us, watching Netflix on my macbook.…
TerraM Crypto Hedge Fund Portfolio Updates December 2022
On December 12, 2022, I minted 10,000 TerraM coins on the Solana network with an aim to raise $10,000 capital for options trades on Ethereum via the Deribit trading platform.
We didn't raise the capital yet, but we did have a quite good month.
Besides minting and listing tokens for sale on the Raydium network, from the capital raised (I'm the single largest investor) we were able to book a $176.09 profit. That would give about an 11.38% yield.
We were able to grow TerraM by 11.38% despite Ethereum actually dropping by more than -5% last month
All profits were distributed back to the token holders
TerraM Assets
Here are the assets under TerraM control (as of December 31, 2022…
Christmas in Bakuriani
Another awesome holiday weekend has been recorded, this time we had a road trip to Bakuriani, staying in a lovely log house with fine cuisine.
Winter fun, attractions, gifts, and a lot of fun with drones. Made my first real - flythrough. December 23-25, 2022
Enjoy the video and thumbs up!
How to obtain a tourist permit to fly a drone in Israel
In this article, I will share details on how I obtained a tourist permit for flying a drone in Israel at the end of 2022.
We booked a short one-week trip to the State of Israel for the 2022/2023 New Year celebrations. I have my DJI Mavic Air 2 drone and I thought it would be cool to bring back some drone memory from Israel as I did from Sri Lanka.
I know different countries have different drone regulations, and I assumed Israel might have one as well.
I started by simply googling several articles about flying a drone in Israel, at one point I got even more confused and was considering not taking a drone with me to Israel until I found the official website for obtaining a tourist…
Could TerraM coin price reach $2 in 2023?
At the end of December 2022, I minted 10,000 TerraM coins with an aim to raise $10,000 for covered call writing on Ethereum.
TerraM coin has been on the blockchain for just some mere 2 weeks and has already raised about 13% of our total goal, for truth's sake, the largest investor still am I.
Nevertheless, the funds have been deployed to the Deribit trading platform for covered call writing and already we have distributed the first week's profit of $24 back to the token holders, and are on the track to distribute about $67 for the second week.
See TerraM on the Solana Scanner
These are quite impressive numbers and give about 7% return in about 10 days.
At the moment there are two…
How To Buy TerraM Token Using USDC coin and Phantom wallet
At the start of December 2022, I minted 10,000 TerraM tokens on the Solana blockchain, tokens are available for sale on the Raydium decentralized market. Update: A Step-by-Step Guide to Buying TerraM Tokens via Raydium AMMIn this article, I will provide a brief tutorial on how some, perhaps you, could buy TerraM tokens online. Things you will need: USDC coin, Phantom wallet, few SOLs as a network feeFirst things first - TerraM coin runs on the Solana network and it is available to buy with USDC token at the moment. If you already have USDC coin, skip this part, if you don't have yet any USDC, keep reading.For my cryptobuys I prefer Coinbase over other exchanges, but you should be…
How To update SPL Token Metadata
It has been recently since I minted the first 10,000 tokens for TerraM coin on the Solana network.
The launch has been very successful and the token is growing, so far we have been able to list it already on the Raydium pool, also tried to list it on CoinGeckom but due to the lack of trading activity got rejected so far. No regrets here, as the token is growing and eventually we will get there.
How To Create Custom Token on Solana Blockchain without Coding - Part 1
Besides that, TerraM token asks for some upkeeping work, for example, when minting the TerraM coin I didn't pay much attention to the ico style image, I uploaded for the ico, I just used some randomly generated ico from online…
How To Fix Drupal AMP Error with Google Analytics
AMP for Drupal is a really powerful module, that can give your Drupal-powered website an impressive website traffic boost. But it will only work if there are no AMP-related issues - like Custom Javascript error from the Google Analytics module.
I have been using Drupal AMP since 2016 or 2017 but stopped using it after upgrading my Drupal version from 7 to 9, as there were some bugs with the Drupal AMP module - it just didn't work.
At the end of 2022, I decided to fix it and get AMP back for Drupal - it took me several days and nights, a lot of clean state servers, MySQL dumps.. but in the end, turned out just a line of code in amp module. Victory, I thought, when noticed…
Life and Business in Georgia
Life and Business in Georgia - or another awesome weekend has been recorded - Together with a business partner from Canada exploring construction sites in Tbilisi, building relationships while hiking around Turtle lake, and sipping hot wine with Guliani.
Fun with Santa and his socks. Thumbs up and enjoy!
How To Buy (or not) Real Estate in Tbilisi - Samgori EcoCity December 2022 Update
At the start of December 2022, Uday, a business partner from Canada arrived in Tbilisi, and we went together to the Meti office in Saburtalo to meet with the developers and sign the documents on-site (we already had them electronically). After the meeting with the developers, we went to the actual construction site in Samgori.
I have been eyeing real estate in Georgia since I originally come up with my idea - buying black frame projects in Batumi, I wanted to raise the capital using a token (and I'm still open) until at the start of September Uday contacted me and showed his keen interest investing in more classical FIAT way.
After some longer e-mail correspondence, one Zoom call, and…
Pullman Tbilisi Axis Tower Gym and Pool
Pullman Tbilisi Axis Towers Wellness Center is located in Vake (37M Ilia Chavchavadze Avenue) on the 6th floor at Axis Tower. It has a 25 meters heated indoor pool with a retractable roof, sauna, steam room, gym (more like a fitness), spa treatment rooms, and a lounge.
We booked an unlimited membership here for one month in November 2022 (paying GEL 600 each, kids go free) with unlimited access to the gym pool and sauna facilities.
Kids (pre-schoolers) going free was the selling moment for us - as I believe this is a great family deal, spend about GEL 1,200/mo but gain access to a gym, and swimming pool - a good and healthy way to spend the winter months in Tbilisi.
My favorite gym…
How To Create Custom Token on Solana Blockchain without Coding - Part 1
It has been already several years since I have been originally thinking of launching a custom crypto token.
For most of the time, I was thinking about issuing smart contracts on the Ethereum network. Probably a high price for minting on the ETH network and the additional learning curve kept me back most of the time and I never actually proceeded with my idea.
Back in spring 2022 again I returned to the idea of issuing custom tokens, for Batumi Real estate crypto investment, I even launched a pre-sale token, but at the end attracted anchor investor who was more interested to make this deal in a more classical, FIAT way, now we are coinvesting in Tbilisi with cash, see: Ecocity…
Raising $10,000 capital for issuing Covered Call Crypto Fund (Solana blockchain)
I'm raising $10,000 for the covered call crypto fund.
For the past several years I've been trading and investing in crypto with mixed success. I've made my gains and taken my losses. Covered Calls with crypto have been one of the hardest to learn -and I'm still learning.
Over the years I've realized - making money in a growing market isn't hard - preserving and growing in a bear market is much harder. But possible.
Hedging with futures makes it possible. At some point, it can get tricky, but with the right mindset and some expertise, it can be achieved.
Despite, the time has proved that dollar cost averaging investing is one of the best investment approaches when investing with…
How to Install Drupal 9 with Nginx, PHP-FPM 8.1, MySQL, phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 22.04 - Linode Guide
In this article, you will learn how to set up a webserver for serving Drupal websites running with Nginx, PHP-FPM 8.1, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 22.04
For the following tutorial, I used very much the information from my previous guide with Ubuntu 18.04, but I decided to rewrite it for Ubuntu 22.04 version as it is shipped with php8.1 version and will work with Drupal 9 (most probably with previous versions too)
Prerequisites
Ubuntu 22.04
Root privileges.
You can get a cheap VPS starting just $5/mo from Linode. That's what I did - bought a new nanode from Linode
Literally, in a couple of seconds, the new server was up and running - that's what I…
How To Gain Access to Linode over Finnix SSH in Rescue Mode
In this article, I will keep some notes on how I accessed an "inaccessible" Linode over SSH using Rescue mode.
Brief background: More than 10 years ago (in 2012) I did set up a virtual server for XTRF translation management software, back then I choose freshly released Debian 6 (which reached its end of Life back in February 2016).
Back in the day, XTRF was not a big name, and most of the help support was done over some simple MS Word documents. I followed the tutorial and set and forget the server for years to come.
At the end of 2018, the server just stopped working - after several unsuccessful attempts to reanimate it I just gave up, as the newer and better…
Shaori Reservoir
Shaori Reservoir is an artificial lake located in the region of Racha, Georgia - some 170 km northwest of the capital Tbilisi.
I first visited it in mid-October 2022, during our first trip to Racha
The Shaori reservoir stretches from the southwest to the northeast, its length is 7.1 kilometers, the greatest width is 2.7 kilometers.
The greatest depth is 14.5 meters, the average depth is 9.8 meters, the area is 9.2 km². The volume of water is 90.6 million m³. It is fed by tributaries and precipitation that falls on its surface (1500 mm per year).
The banks of the reservoir are mostly low and steep, in some places they are flat.
I can see some great tourism potential…