Category: Information

I used to purchase my US Apple store and iTunes digital cards from Xcite but someone a few months ago left a comment on my blog letting me know I could actually purchase them from Amazon. I assumed that would be the cheapest option since Amazon is selling the $100 gift card for $100, with no extra fees or commission which I assumed Xcite or any other store locally would be adding.

But, Redditor noooris did a bit of math and turns out if you purchase the $100 gift card from Xcite for 29.750 KD, you’re actually only paying $98.94 for it once converted to US Dollars. On the other hand, it cost me 31.072 KD to purchase the $100 gift card from Amazon after converting the amount to Dinars.

So if like me you routinely purchase Apple cards to top off your US Apple Store account, Xcite is the cheapest option I’m aware of for purchasing $100 cards. Here is the Xcite Link

Update: Xcite have now increased the price of the $100 card to KD31. So it’s back to ordering from Amazon again.

A few years ago, I posted about digitizing your old videos using a video capture device that plugs into your computer. It’s a great way to convert all tapes, but the downside is you needed the actual tape player. If you just had videotapes but no means of playing them then the capture device was pretty much useless. This was my dilemma, I had an old Betamax tape of a school ski trip and no means to play it. I considered buying a Betamax player but the cheapest I found was 50KD and so wasn’t going to be worth it for just one video.

Someone ages ago told me Al-Nazaer converted videos but since all their stores closed down years ago I couldn’t just visit them and ask them about it. So last week while feeling nostalgic I decided to call their head office in Subhan and ask about it. Turns out they have a small media academy in Hawalli that was still functional, and that’s where their digital conversion studio was located.

I headed straight to the studio with my Betamax tape and headed to their conversion studio. I asked if they could convert Betamax tapes and they said yes and took my tape and played it on their screen so we could check and see if it was working. A few seconds later my 11-year-old self popped up on the screen.

It was the first time I had ever seen myself as a kid in the 80s on video and it felt SO WEIRD!

During the 1990 invasion, we took most of our family videos to Lebanon and stored them away in our family home without any means to watch them. So no one in my family has watched any of our family videos that were filmed in the 80s for 30+ years. Since I had no idea what was on this video and since I had never seen myself on video as a kid, it felt like I was watching a video of myself in another dimension. That’s the best way I could describe it in words, it was a very strange feeling.

But anyway, back to the subject of converting videos, Al Nazaer can convert any video format to digital. So camcorder videos like Hi8 or miniDV, VHS tapes and Betamax tapes are all no issues. The cost of converting depends on the kind of tapes you have and how many you want to convert. They charged me KD10 to convert a single Betamax tape and I got the footage on a DVD as well as a digital file. The more tapes you have the better price. Their studio is located on the first floor of the building across the street from Muhallab Mall. Their phone number is 1888900 and here is their location on Google Maps.

You can also find them on Instagram @alnazaer

For someone that spends so much time trying to dig up stuff on Kuwait I don’t know how I just found out there was an English newspaper back in the 60s and 70s in Kuwait called “The Daily News”. I found two copies of the newspaper this weekend while sifting through a pile of old newspapers at an old books and magazines sale in Sulaibiya and was completely caught by surprise since I didn’t know this paper ever existed.

One copy is dated Wednesday August 16, 1972 while the other Wednesday October 17, 1973. The newspaper is described as “Leading Political Daily Newspaper in Arabian Gulf” and Edititor-in-Chief was Fahed Al Massaeed. The newspaper was published by Al Rai Al Aam and was launched in 1963. I’ve found no information about it online which is why I never knew about it.

Both issues mostly covered international news but there were a few articles and ads in the papers that were super interesting. For example, one paper had a TV guide while the other one had a radio guide. Then one of the issues had a section called Kuwait Dateline which must be equivalent to a 1970s version of Twitter. Actually, I thought Dateline was really bizarre, why would random people reading the newspaper be interested in this info I have no idea, and they’re so detailed! For example:

Al Haj Nicola Abu Khater, Bristol Hotel Manager flew for one day – stay in Lebanon which he spent with his children in Aljtoun.

It must have been a thing they did back then because traveling wasn’t so common?

Another interesting article I found was regarding the acquittal of the editor-in-chief of the Al-Siyassa newspaper Ahmad Jarallah from the charges brought against him. I only know of Ahmad Jarallah because he’s constantly in the news, always being referred to the public prosecution or always having charges against him dropped. So seeing this article from 1973 which wouldn’t seem out of place today put a smile on my face. He’s STILL the editor-in-chief of the Al-Siyassa newspaper today and he’s STILL getting in trouble with the courts, I love that!

Anyway, I’ve uploaded all the interesting bits from both papers and you can check them out above and in the post below (click on more).

Back when I was looking at automatic coffee machines, one of the brands that I was checking out was JURA. I hadn’t heard of them before since I hadn’t seen the brand in Kuwait but according to reviews online they had the best automatic coffee machines on the market. Automatic coffee machines are machines that make your coffee at a press of a button. They can grind your coffee, heat up and froth your milk and then mix it all together for you.

Al-Wazzan who carry the La Marzocco commercial grade coffee machines are now the dealers for JURA. Prices locally seem cheaper than Amazon UK. The JURA A1 for example costs 383KD on Amazon but 290KD locally while the JURA E8 costs 759KD and 550KD locally.

If you’re interested, they have a JURA display at their store in Shuwaikh as well as on their website.

Construction of the Sheikh Jaber Causeway Vaccination Centre is done and is now set to open soon. The drive-thru vaccination centre will be able to handle 5,000 cars a day and was built by KIPIC and KOC for the Ministry of Health.

KIPIC have posted some pictures of the centre on their instagram account and you can check them out here.

I’ve asked for more information like when they’re planning to open it and once I get the info I’ll update this post.

Update: Here is some more info, the center can handle 4,000-5,000 people depending on the working hours that will be set by the government. There are 20 stations and each can handle around 8 cars at once. It took only one month to set up. No launch date was shared with me.

Good Game, the popular tabletop gaming store is finally allowed to have in-game play at their store again. The only provision is that you need to be vaccinated to do so. If you are vaccinated then you will need to show your green vaccinated status on the Immune app to play or participate in any events at the store.

If you previously missed the announcement, Good Game moved to Salmiya into a much larger space. Make sure you check out their Instagram @goodgamekw

Over the weekend PACI updated the Kuwait Mobile ID app and added vaccination data to it. This means the vaccination data is now part of your Civil ID information alongside other important info like nationality, birth of date, and sponsor. Clicking on the vaccine status pops up a window revealing details on the first and second dose.

If you’re anti-vax this isn’t good news because it’s starting to look like vaccination will eventually be required for things like residency renewal, traveling, and maybe even accessing gyms or other indoor public spaces. So if you’ve been holding out on signing up for the vaccine you’re just delaying the inevitable.

As you are probably aware by now, movie theaters will reopen again during eid after having been closed since the very start of the pandemic. Here is some information I was able to obtain regarding the opening and what the safety measures will be taken:

• Only vaccinated customers will be allowed into the cinemas. Your vaccination status will be verified using the Immune App. Only people with a green color bar behind their name will be allowed entry.

• Cinemas will operate with 50% occupancy

• 2m social distancing will be enforced

• Cinemas will be promoting online ticket and food sales to reduce the lines

• Cinemagoers will have their temperature checked at the entrance

Some more info:

• If you vaccinated outside of Kuwait, you will have the chance to upload your vaccination to the Immune App. This update will not be available for Eid.

• After taking your first vaccine shot the Immune App will not display a green color bar behind your name until 5 weeks have passed.

All the above has still not been finalized so there might be adjustments made.

A few days ago Mahmoud Alghanim, a pioneer in the local restaurant industry sadly passed away. Mahmoud was the creator of the popular pizza concept “Pizza Italia” as well as the Italian concept “Prego”. Considering the popularity of the concepts, there is oddly very little information on the brands online which is why I was always hoping to meet him so I could document his story and make it available to everyone.

From what I gather, Pizza Italia opened sometime in the mid-80s (1984?) and had at least 16 locations. They were open at least till 2005 since that’s when I took the photo above.

Prego, on the other hand, I found the CV of their executive chef “Luca Umberto Voncini” online so I have a bit more information. Based on his CV they opened their first location in Dalal Complex in Salmiya in 1993 and then closed it in 1995. This was the same location where their Pizza Italia branch was previously located. They had two other Prego locations, one in Mangaf and one in Kuwait City. Those opened up in 1996 and closed in 1997.

Both concepts were under the mother company “Arab Food Service Co.”

An accident in front of Pizza Italia Riqqa Coop branch in 1987.

I’ve started scouring the internet to try and find as many photos, commercials, and information related to the brands so I can put them all under one post. If you have ANYTHING related to both brands, a menu, a business card, anything no matter how insignificant you think it is please let me know.

Tidbit: The popular Pizza Italia commercial above was filmed in Salmiya, in the old souk on Salem Al Mubarak Street. It was directed by Nick Cate on a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera. The music was composed by an Egyptian composer called Mohammed Al Banna. The actor running in the commercial is a Lebanese actor but I don’t have his name.

Update: Managed to get some dates!

Pizza Italia opened in 1983 with its first store in Daiya. They ended up closing the whole brand in 2005.

Prego opened in 1993 with its first store in Salmiya, Rabih Building (now demolished), followed by another store on the Gulf Road in Sharq. Prego also closed down in 2005.

The photo above is a before and after photo of Sharq. It’s taken from a recent study by architect Khalid Alsafi highlighting the constant aggressive destruction of Kuwait’s heritage and cultural areas, only to then become abandoned empty desert spaces for decades.

If you want to see a higher resolution photo of the above click here.

If you live outside of Kuwait and were trying to access the blog over the past few days you might have noticed a Cloudflare page or a Captcha page before access the blog. That’s because my blog was under a DDoS attack and so I had to increase security to block the attack.

Last week I got the following email:

DDOSIng ur website

hello i am going to be your senpai today and treat you really well mark-chan.

so recently my whoremones are really high but not my pockets.

email me back for the amount to be paid.

buh-bye

I didn’t really think of it much, I definitely wasn’t going to pay the person and figured if they did manage to bring down the blog that it wouldn’t be an issue. If the blog went offline it would mean I wouldn’t have to post so it would be a mini-vacation of a sort. Over the next few days, my blog got hit with close to a billion requests!

For those of you who don’t know what a DDoS attack is, it’s when an attacker sends an overwhelming amount of traffic to a website which would then either slow down the site to a crawl or bring it down completely. My blog gets around 10,000 visitors a day give or take but just like that I started getting millions of visitors per hour. It was insane!

Luckily for me, all my blog traffic is routed through a service called CloudFlare. I actually did that a couple of months ago when some readers using STC were having difficulty accessing my blog, I figured that might solve the issue (it didn’t). But one of the benefits of CloudFlare is the ability to set up firewalls and extra security measures to block DDoS attacks. Over the next few days I watched CloudFlare spot and block attacks from all over the world, the numbers were just insane and impressive. In just a few days CloudFlare blocked nearly a billion requests, here are some numbers:

Total Requests: 774.65 Million
Total Requests Blocked: 638.32 Million
Total Bandwidth: 6.73 TB

Top Threat Countries:
United States 108,540,196
India 76,169,029
Indonesia 68,455,987
Ukraine 47,789,199
Mexico 40,210,543

If I had set up CloudFlare properly from the start it would have blocked all the threats but it took me a few hours to realize what was going on and set up all my firewalls.

One benefit from all of this is that it taught me how to use CloudFlare properly and now I’ve actually managed to completely block all spam from the blog. Over the past weekend, not one single spam comment made it to the blog and that’s because any traffic coming from countries like India, China, Russia etc.. will now go through a security check to make sure they’re not bots.

So anyway, if you had difficulty accessing the blog this past weekend now you know why.

Back in December, I posted about the Japanese restaurant Kei closing down because the hotel was getting renovated. Since then more details have come out on the project as well as renderings of the new facelifted hotel.

• The hotel’s ground floor will be converted to mall use and become a continuation of Salhiya Complex with a dedicated entrance on Shuhada street. There will be an additional 6 stores on the ground floor and 5 more on the mezzanine.

• The hotel entrance will still be on the ground floor but the hotel lobby will now be moved up higher into the building, possibly the rooftop.

• The entire building exterior will be redone. Although I’m a fan of the current retro exterior, the 40-year-old design does look dated and gloomy.

The project is expected to be completed sometime in 2022.

Thanks ChaoticTranquility

If you order a laptop from the US or Europe it would generally come with an English-only keyboard. So people who require Arabic get Arabic letters printed or stuck on the keyboard which is fine unless you have a backlit keyboard. If you just printed Arabic letters on a backlit keyboard you wouldn’t be able to see them in the dark so when I found out about laser engraving a few days ago, I was a bit surprised it was something that was so easy to do and also available in Kuwait.

Laser engraving as you can see in the video above basically cuts out the letters on your keys so that the light can pass through them as well. There is a store in Sharq area called Sharq Center which does it and charges KD15 for it. The process takes only 15-20minutes so you don’t have to leave your keyboard or laptop there overnight. If this is a service you’re looking for then check out their Instagram account @sharq_center

Thanks Sahbig

Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches”, at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world.

A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing items for trading, such as toys or trinkets, usually of more sentimental worth than financial.

Someone was asking about geocaching in Kuwait and I hadn’t heard that term in years. The first time I heard about geocaching was back in 2002 and back then GPS devices weren’t as common, Google Maps didn’t exist and phones didn’t have GPS built-in so the only way to find a geocache was using a dedicated GPS device like a Garmin. I faintly remember a geocache located near Radisson Blu and after a bit of researching it turns out it was actually the first geocache in Kuwait.

The cache was called “Ya Darina Ya Kuwait” and the coordinates were N 29° 17.860 E 048° 05.205. The cache was placed there back in June 2002 by a user called walzuhair.

What’s cool about caches was that you never knew what you’d find and you were always meant to take whatever was inside and then replace it with other items for the next person to find. There still seems to be a bunch of active geocaches in Kuwait so it might be a fun activity to do this Ramadan.

Recently I started having lower back pain and after visiting the doctor I decided based on his recommendation to work on improving my posture, mostly when sitting in front of the computer. Like most people, I tend to hunch over the computer and I wanted to stop doing that so the first thing I did was get a posture corrector strap. A posture corrector strap kinda looks like a gun holster you see detectives wear on TV shows under their suits, just minus the gun. Although it did its job in keeping me from slouching, it wasn’t comfortable to wear for long periods, and depending on what you’re wearing, it could be visible.

I then found out about the Upright GO 2 through a friend of mine, a tiny device you stick to your back and monitors your posture. Whenever you start slouching it buzzes. My friend recommended it so I ended up ordering one for myself.

The Upright GO is super easy to set up. All you need to do is attach it to your back and then connect to it via Bluetooth and an app on your phone. You then sit or stand upright and hit the calibrate button in the app and that’s it, you’re set. It takes around a second or two but once the device calibrates it starts recognizing your movement when you slouch or hunch over. Anytime you exceed a certain angle threshold for more than a few seconds, the device buzzes gently to make you aware that hey, you’re hunching over.

The device is really tiny which is why I used my AirPods for scale in these photos. It’s also very lightweight and so whenever I stick it on my back I can’t tell it’s even there. The reusable adhesive on the back of the device uses a medical-grade sticky silicon, and in my case, it lasts for 7 days. After the 7th day, it no longer is as sticky and I swap the adhesive with a new one. The device came with 10 adhesives so it should be good enough for nearly 3 months of use since I don’t wear it on weekends.

Does it work? Yes, it does!

After using it now for two weeks I noticed my posture has improved. Not only that but because I hate the buzzing so much, even when I’m not wearing the Upright GO I still have the fear it will buzz. There is a bit of PTSD involved because even when I’m not wearing the unit, out of habit I expect my back to buzz anytime I hunch over. So I’ve mentally started recognizing when I start to hunch over and right away straighten up.

The Upright with the help of the app tracks your posture throughout the day and in my case, I recognized I am worse when I’m at the office. When I’m home on my computer I have a very ergonomic TOM chair that offers great back support and keeps me sitting up straight. When I’m at the office I sit on a regular chair with no back support so I tend to slouch and hunch over my laptop. But looking at my data over the past couple of weeks I can see that I have improved overall.

There are two versions of the Upright GO, the original version which is larger, has a shorter battery life and cheaper, and the Upright GO 2 which has a longer battery life, is much smaller but also slightly more expensive. I bought the Upright GO 2 for $99 from Amazon but I noticed it’s now selling for $79 and I’ve even seen it as low as $69. An extra pack of adhesives costs $9. If you don’t want to stick it on your back there is a necklace you can buy that attaches to the Upright GO but I haven’t tried it. The Upright comes with a small case that holds an extra adhesive and it’s where you are meant to put the unit when you’re not wearing it. Battery life on the Upright GO 2 is 35 hours so I only charge it once every few days.

The Upright is not something I’d wear for more than a couple of months at a time, it’s a behavioral training device and as I get the hang of not hunching over I’ll stop wearing it. When I see myself starting to hunch over again I’ll star wearing it again. If you want to get one, here is the link to Amazon.