Tusheti trip, July 2016

We went to Tusheti region of Georgia at the end of July 2016 for a ten day trek. Here is a short summary of practical information from the route.

Maps

• Geoland maps, both on paper (purchase in Tbilisi at their HQ), for GPS and on-line at http://mygeorgia.ge (use the flag to switch to Latin letters).
• OpenMTB maps are a good free data source for Garmin GPS.
• Soviet 1:100 000 military maps are still worth the try. 

Getting there and back

Tbilisi-Alvani-Omalo

Marshrutka goes every morning at ~9-10 AM from Ortachala bus terminal in Tbilisi to Telavi and possibly Khemo Alvani (price is 7 GEL with luggage, the driver will try to get more).

From Khemo Alvani over the Abano pass you'll need a 4WD jeep (seriously). You can ask the marshrutka driver to negotiate you some, or get some on the spot. Standard price is 50 GEL per person or 250 GEL per jeep; most common is Mitsubishi Delica.

We went with Mamuka Kindolauri, +995 577 378 414 and we can recommend him (he can also arrange to pick you up at the airport).

Shatili-Tbilisi:

There is a marshrutka link between Shatili and Tbilisi twice a week. The road is way better than the one to Omalo, but still it takes six hours to get to Tbilisi. Buy tickets in advance, the driver stays in Shatili on Tuesday night and during the weekend.

Marshrutka schedule:

Tbilisi (Sangori station) to Shatili: Tuesday and Friday at 9 AM.

Shatili to Tbilisi: Wednesday and Sunday at ~10 AM.

Approximate price of Delica to Tbilisi is 250 GEL; the price is generally the same to Barisakho (200 GEL) or Roshka (250 GEL).

Food and fuel

In Tbilisi, gas cartridges can be purchased in Geoland and there's one more shop to be opened in the Old town, near the Public service building, soon.
Also, you might succeed in Tbilisi mall.

There's a small shop in Omalo, but no option to buy fuel.

There's a small shop in Shatili, with canned meet, sweets, tea etc..

On the Shatili-Tbilisi road benzin/gasoline can be purchased in the grocery shop in Barisakho (5 l bottles for water), the shop is generally well equipped.

Mobile coverage

4G is widely available in villages, not in the mountains to much, though. MagtiCom seems the best option, if you want voice and data coverage.

SIM can be purchased at the airport for all three companies, beware that at least Beeline does not offer all the options at the airport.

• Beeline: Limited coverage around Omalo and the upper valley. No coverage in Shatili and further then Verkhovani. See the coverage map. Note that international SMS don't work off the shelf and aren't covered by "unlimited SMS" plan.
• Magti has better coverage in the mountains and covers Shatili and the Shatili-Tbilisi way (coverage map).
• I didn't find coverage map for Geocell.

This could help: http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Georgia

Electricity

Many guesthouses in the villages have solar panels and will be able to recharge a phone or so. In Shatili, there's a hydroelectric station and power is abundant (everyone has electricity).

Other resources

• Slavomír Horák's http://tusetie.webnode.cz 
• http://www.caucasus-trekking.com/tusheti
• Wikiloc has numerous track records in the area, downloadable to GPS:
  http://www.wikiloc.com/trails/hiking/georgia/akhmetis-raioni/omalo
• Tusheti national park: http://www.tusheti.ge/

Using Samsung Gear 360 without a Samsung phone

Samsung Gear 360 is a 4k 360-degree camera designed to be used with a Samsung VR ecosystem and a phone capable of running the Samsung 360 Manager.

However, it seems at least partially usable without it.

Data access:

• Images and videos can be read out using the MTP protocol via a USB cable.
• There is microSDXC card slot with DCIM and MISC folders, where the images and videos are stored as JPEG and MP4 files.

Image stitching: 

In the single-lens mode, the camera writes out rectangular image (what's that projection called?).

In the dual-lens mode, it writes out one JPEG with two cylindrical fisheye images. Those can be separated and then stitched using Autopano or Hugin for example.

The videos can apparently be stitched in Autopano Video, but the workflow demonstrated in "360 Rumors: Stitch Samsung Gear 360 videos and photos, and correct color differences with Autopano" requires preprocessing on Windows/Mac.

Remote control options:

The camera has Bluetooth, WiFi and USB interfaces and there are three modes controlled by the Bluetooth button.

Gear 360 Manager

That's probably of no use unless the Manager interface is somehow discovered.

Remote control

This enables BT, but I failed to pair it with anything I have.

Google Street View application

When in Google Street View mode, the camera acts as a WiFi AP with a DHCP server. The network seems to be chosen a randomly chosen C class one from the 192.168.0.0 range, the camera sits at .1.

The ESSID is shown on display, just add space and underscore for the default one: e.g. "Gear 360_(xx:yy)" and the number below is WPA2 passphrase.

Then it provides DHCP, DNS and HTTP services (port 80).

This suggests that there might be some way to trigger image capture at least.

See also:

• 360 Rumors: Interval shooting for the Samsung Gear 360
• Google Street view setup
• 360 Rumors: Stitch Samsung Gear 360 videos and photos, and correct color differences with Autopano

Tethering Blackberry cellular data connection to other devices

This is to summarize tries to get a Linux laptop (with success) and an Apple iPad 3 (without success) connected to a Blackberry phone and use its cellular data connection.

Blackberry OS 7.1 introduced a WiFi hotspot feature. It does work as expected for laptops and non-Apple devices. There's battery drain problem and the phone gets hot, but overall it works and with 3G it's fast enough for me. It does not work with Apple iOS devices since iOS 6—there are numerous posts on this topic, Apple does not care to respond.

Up to now, I didn't find a working solution. Below are the dead-ends I did explore, with a short explanation. Which can be wrong—and you are welcome to comment.

WiFi hotspot tethering

The phone acts as a ad-hoc WiFi network peer and after connection provides an IP address via DHCP and set's up a NAT. iPad usually does associate (WiFi level), but fails to get DHCP.

There is a number of tricks people on the forums recommend. One that works and is recommended by the Apple support is to do hard reset/full wipe on iPad and restore the apps and data from backups. I can confirm that works—for the first connection. Also, changing name of the network and iPad and resetting the iPad network settings works for the first time. Dead end here.

Bluetooth tethering

There are two common ways used to utilize other devices network link via Bluetooth. One is Dial Up Networking profile (DUN), second the Personal Area Network profile (PAN).

Dial Up Networking (DUN) profile

When using DUN, the client device has to specify/know what APN to use and possibly what number to dial. The phone acts as a PSTN modem, basically. That's the older way and iOS does not support it—unless you jailbreak the device and install third party apps. The Bluetooth on Blackberry Bold 9900 that I used for the test does support DUN and it's possible to utilize it from a laptop in the usual way.

Personal Area Network (PAN) profile

Personal Area Network is used to set up network connection. The client does not care about how the upstream link is to be established, that is on the phone/modem to take care of.

Blackberry OS 7.1 does not support PAN profile. However, there are downloadable applications such as EasyTether Pro, which provide that part of BT stack. The BB then acts as a NAP (Network Access Point), much the same way as a WiFi AP.

There are few steps required to connect an Ubuntu 12 laptop to the phone. Associate them, find the device in Bluetooth settings, enable use of PAN. Then initiate the connection in the Network Manager (all via notification area icons).

Linux computers can also act as NAP's—if you have a laptop connected upstream via WiFi, you can use it at the same time to provide connectivity to an iOS device. That requires enabling the Network Access Point switch in Bluetooth settings/Local services.

On the iPad side, you pair the BT with the laptop and initiate a connection. An infinity-like icon will appear in top left corner of the screen—where normally the WiFi signal strength indicator is. You can't ping the outside world, but everything else works flawlessly.

Now, what if we try this between the iPad and the Blackberry. You pair them (this works), then tap to connect. That fails—iPad fails to connect. Easy Tether people kindly responded to a support request, saying that due to Blackberry imposed limit on L2CAP size, they really can't do anything to support iOS in Easy Tether. That's it then.

There's only one way I made the iPad utilize the BB cellular data. You bring an extra laptop with you. You connect iPad to the laptop (via PAN/NAP). You connect the laptop to the Blackberry (via PAN or WiFi). And hey, it works. Super practical way, I'd say.

Zenfolio referral code

Hmm, just if anyone happens to have use for a discount ticket for Zenfolio.com: you can get 5 USD discount using referral code: WKW-S52-A7J.

From DV to Vimeo on Linux

Short summary of "how to get a movie from DV camera to Vimeo on Linux" (after several tries with 16:9 format rendered as 4:3 :-)).
Download data from camera (used Firewire port and Kino). Only needed thing was to load raw1394 module and add permissions to r/w to /dev/raw1394 before launching Kino.
Exported movie as DV-AVI (type 1).
Converted the resulting AVI to H.264 (and rescaled it on the way).

mencoder -profile vi -aspect 16:9 -vf scale=848:480 $1 -o $2

Here the vi profile refers to a section in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf:

[vi]
profile-desc="Lo-quality x264 video with aac"
vf="pp=ci"
ovc=x264=yes
oac=lavc=yes
lavcopts="ac3"
x264encopts="threads=auto:subq=6:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:qp=30"

Value of the qp parameter in x264encopts determines quality - the lower, the better (and larger file). In general 10 seems very nice, 30 acceptable for not-so-hi-quality source.

Actually - the size it's rescaled to should probably be chosen better...

Playing with Selphy CP530 (and not really amused)

Selphy printers are small, cheap to get and not that expensive to use. In addition, there are are no inks that would dry when you don't use it for few days. Why is it cheap? Color space of the printer is very poor and there's no support for color management - so except for special types of images you are going to need more then one paper to make the result look acceptable (and in many cases even that is not going to help).