Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem

12 January, 2023 | Shopping Venues | 30 seen

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, kebab, shashlik, kanafeh, baklava, halva, zalabiya and Jerusalem mixed grill stands, juice bars, cafes, and restaurants. The color and bustle of the marketplace is accentuated by vendors who call out their prices to passersby.

On Thursdays and Fridays, the marketplace is filled with shoppers stocking up for Shabbat, until the Friday afternoon sounding of the bugle that signifies the market will close for the Sabbath. In recent years, the 'shuk' has emerged as…

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem

11 January, 2023 | Churches and Monasteries | 32 seen

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) to the tour guide. 

The Grotto is the oldest site continuously used as a place of worship in Christianity, and the basilica is the oldest major church in the Holy Land.

The church was originally commissioned by Constantine the Great a short time after his mother Helena's visit to Jerusalem and Bethlehem in 325–326, on the site that was traditionally considered to be the birthplace of Jesus.

That original basilica was likely…

Western Wall in Jerusalem

9 January, 2023 | Tourism objects | 23 seen

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 Wall.

The very large stone blocks of the lower courses are Herodian, the courses of medium-sized stones above them were added during the Umayyad period, while the small stones of the uppermost courses are of more recent date, especially from the Ottoman period.

The Western Wall plays an important role in Judaism due to its proximity to the Temple Mount. Because of the Temple Mount entry restrictions, the Wall is the holiest place where Jews are permitted to pray…

New Years Party at the Caucasus Translations office in Tbilisi

6 January, 2023 | Living in Georgia | 13 seen

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 2023 to the team and families. Gilocavt Akhalcels!

Hotel GreenWood in Bakuriani

5 January, 2023 | Hotel reviews | 18 seen

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. Hotel had two TV's, but just local Georgian TV was presented.

The hotel features a garden, a terrace, a kind of restaurant, and an onsite bar. 

A decent hotel for a decent money. What felt we were missing - some kind of a kitchen.

For getting here from Tbilisi we used gotrip application, hiring a driver and paid about GEL 210 one way (GEL 420 round trip). 

During our stay in Bakuriani and at this hotel, I enjoyed trading…

27 places, hotels & restaurants in Georgia we discovered in 2022

4 January, 2023 | Living in Georgia | 21 seen

In this article, I've listed 27 awesome places (including hotels and restaurants) to visit in Georgia, Tbilisi, Batumi, Gori, Bakuriani, Rustavi, Racha i, and more.

These are the places I actually visited and discovered for the first (Well most of them) back in 2022.

From the impressive Gori Fortress to fine french cuisine in Tbilisi

December 2022 Blog Traffic And Income Report 20,598 Users / $411.86

3 January, 2023 | Blogging | 19 seen

Welcome to the #2 renewed blog traffic and income reports covering blog traffic and earnings for the month of December 2022.

These reports help me track my progress or failures and also can give some glimpse behind the scenes and hopefully can generate some ideas for you as well.

The last December comes with a -4.86% traffic dip compared to November and resulted in 20,598 unique users visiting my blog.

I was hoping to reach at least 25,000 in December, but that just didn't happen.

If compared YoY to December 2021 that is a -10.53% traffic drop. It has been about 12 months already since my blog actually lost its stem and right now I put my effort to stop the loss and return to growth. 

• 20,598 users is a -4.86% drop if compared to the previous month
• decline by  -1,052 users
• 20,598 users in a month are about 664 daily users

For a blog that has had more than 120,000 monthly visitors in the past these numbers are very humble., I'm…

TerraM Crypto Hedge Fund Portfolio Updates December 2022

2 January, 2023 | Crypto | 10 seen

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

Here are the assets under TerraM control (as of December 31, 2022)

On the last day, od December TerraM crypto hedge funds' total value was $1,572.72, which makes the value…

Christmas in Bakuriani

30 December, 2022 | Living in Georgia | 67 seen

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

28 December, 2022 | Travel guides | 46 seen

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 permit for flying a drone in Israel - and it was much easier than I thought. 

There was a 350 ILS fee (about EUR 100), PayPal was available and it took about 10 minutes to complete the registration form (though it took another 24 hours to get the actual permit to my email)

In case you are wondering how to get a permit to fly a drone in Israel in 2025 or 2030, this article might get outdated, as drone rules change quite quickly

At the time of…

Top 15 Best Selling Laptops January 2023

26 December, 2022 | Laptop Reviews | 208 seen

Unlike the previous months, January 2023 data for best-selling laptops might seem skewed,  Apple has given up #1 to the Lenovo Ideapad 3 laptop.  

The explanation is simple - Holiday season, with increased laptop purchasing, many good bargain deals

Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, HP, and Apple are the laptop brands among the best-selling on Amazon for January 2023. Laptops for everyday computer needs, as well as gaming laptops under $1,000, are among the top-selling laptop models. 

Keep reading to learn more.

A quick note: This article contains affiliate links to Amazon.com, by clicking on links on this page and by making a purchase on the Amazon site, I might earn an affiliate income from that. The prices for laptop computers listed on this page are retrieved using Amazon Product Advertising API and are updated daily. For actual prices please refer to the product page on Amazon.

• Memory is 8GB high-bandwidth RAM to…

Could TerraM coin price reach $2 in 2023?

23 December, 2022 | Crypto | 16 seen

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 options available on how to invest with TerraM coin - either purchase directly from me at the rate of 1 USD: 1 TerraM (7,798 TerraM available) or swap them on the Raydium liquidity pool at the dynamic rate, as of writing this: 1 USDC ≈ 1.096008 TerraM (80.54 TerraM available)

With time (weeks and months) the total liquidity will increase on the Raydium poll, while the total amount of coins will decrease for direct…

How To Buy TerraM Token Using USDC coin and Phantom wallet

22 December, 2022 | Crypto | 105 seen

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 AMM

In 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 fee

First 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 able to buy USDC coins from any reputable centralized exchange. If you are a first-time buyer, I would recommend starting small, by purchasing some 10 USDC at the begging. 

Once you have bought some amount of USDC on Coinbase or your exchange of choice you are ready to transfer them to Phantom wallet and then buy TerraM coin on Raydium

Again you could use some other wallet that supports Solana tokens, Phantom is quite…

How To update SPL Token Metadata

21 December, 2022 | Servers | 544 seen

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 ico generators.

Now, once the coin started growing I was not quite happy with the visual presentation and decided it would be good to update the custom image and also change the coin name.

So far I have found two working solutions (services) to update the SPL token:

• https://sol-tools.tonyboyle.io/token-tools/edit-token
• https://app.strataprotocol.com/edit-metadata

Updating from the Google Chrome browser is quite easy…

How To Fix Drupal AMP Error with Google Analytics

20 December, 2022 | Drupal Development | 34 seen

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 ?amp pages working out. Just a few days later I noticed that despite ?amp being up and running it is far from perfect - there was zillions of errors and AMP was just not valid.

turned out I didn't have enabled (or built) an AMP theme. Which I did. Then fixed some minor things with the Advanced Aggregation Module, till was left with the last error standing - custom Javascript from Google.

After several hours of research, I found a working solution (Drupal 9.4 and…