AI, Investing, Health, and Building Businesses
Cascais is a good place to pick up a campervan and a hard place to sleep in one. Portuguese law does allow you to spend the night in a van, but the rule that permits it carves out protected areas, and the entire coastline west and north of the town sits inside the Sintra-Cascais Natural [ ] Source
Portugal has a reputation for treating investors gently. Some of that is deserved, and some of it is a hangover from the NHR years that no longer matches what the tax code actually says. The headline number is 28%. That s the right starting point, and it s wrong often enough to matter. Whether you actually pay [ ] Source
This is a sponsored review. Afranga has paid for this placement, and some links are affiliate links, meaning I may be compensated if you sign up through them. This doesn t affect the factual accuracy of the review or the risks described below. Investing in crowdfunding projects involves risks, including the risk of partial or total [ ] Source
Watching someone online for ten years gives you exactly one honest data point about them: whether their work is any good. That part is real. You can read the code, use the product, follow the argument, check it against what you already know. Over enough years it tells you something solid. Everything else you think [ ] Source
What s the best AI model has no answer on its own, and chasing one costs founders money in both directions. Some pay for frontier intelligence on work that never needed it. Others put a cheap model on customer-facing output to save a few dollars and ship a worse product. The model that s right in one [ ] Source
TL;DR: Blockpit is an Austrian crypto tax platform that reports in over 100 countries and goes properly deep in ten of them, producing prefilled national tax forms and applying local rules: Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. Portfolio tracking is free forever with unlimited transactions and 780 [ ] Source
The WordPress plugin directory has a trust problem hiding in plain sight. Its most visible number, the active-install count, is also the one number anyone with distribution can manufacture. I pulled the whole directory apart to measure how often that happens, and the pattern is bigger and more recent than I expected. Install count is [ ] Source
Give a capable model a well-defined project and it can carry it from approved proposal to a result the client signs off on, with barely any help along the way. I ve watched this happen on real work. You define what s needed after the meeting, hand it over, and days later there s something that passes acceptance. [ ] Source
A plugin that almost nobody chose to install is sitting near the top of WordPress.org s search results for AI agent. It has a 1.3-star rating. Fifty-nine of its first sixty-four reviews are one star. And it is still winning. I have made my living on WordPress for two decades. The plugins I run took years [ ] Source
I don’t have a huge LinkedIn following. Roughly two thousand people. What I do have is a profile that works when someone lands on it, a clear idea of who I’m talking to, and a system for what to post so I’m not inventing a topic from scratch every morning. In the first stretch of [ ] Source
I pay for five AI coding subscriptions: Claude Max, ChatGPT (which includes Codex), SuperGrok, Google AI Pro, and ClinePass. Each one ships its own terminal agent: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Grok Build, Google s Antigravity CLI, and the Cline CLI. Add Ollama running local models on the same machine and that s six ways to run an [ ] Source
Hiring remote workers outside Europe is straightforward. Paying them reliably, cheaply, and legally is where things get complicated. I ve been running distributed teams from Europe for years — contractors in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The options have improved significantly since I first had to wire money to a developer in the Philippines [ ] Source
I run WordPress headless in production, and speed, the reason people usually reach for it, is the weakest one on the list. The pitch is familiar: decouple WordPress from its theme, put a fast JavaScript front end in front, and the site gets quicker. That mostly doesn t survive contact with a cache. What headless is [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
I shoot most of my video with a deliberately light kit. No cinema camera, no bag of lenses. A small drone, my iPhone, a gimbal, and a couple of microphones cover nearly everything I make, from aerial follow shots to talking-head clips. The gear list is the easy part, so I ll move through it quickly [ ] Source
I went looking for the current best way to grow on X, and what I found was a wall of 2026 algorithm explained posts that confidently contradict each other. One says a reply is worth 13.5 times a like. The next says 27. A third says 150. They cite the same open-sourced code and arrive [ ] Source
The question I get most often is some version of should I build this in WordPress or Astro or Next. It sounds like a single choice between rivals, and it almost never is. The best sites I ship use three of these at once, each doing the part it s actually good at. After twenty years [ ] Source
If you bought a Mac in the EU and went looking for iPhone Mirroring, the feature Apple demoed for controlling your iPhone from your desktop, you already know it isn t there. The toggle never shows up. The app refuses to do anything useful. And unlike most missing features, this one isn t a bug or a [ ] Source
I use the sauna at my fitness club almost every day, usually right after a workout. It started as something I did because it felt good — a warm wind-down after lifting or a tough padel match. But the more I looked into the research, the more I realized that sauna might be one of [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
Every real estate agent has lived this. You spend twenty minutes on the phone with a buyer. They tell you they want three bedrooms but could stretch to two if there s an office, that the wife works in Poblenou so the commute matters, that they viewed something on Calle Aragón last month and hated the [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
A friend showed me his Claude Code setup and it was the cleanest version of an idea I d been circling for a while. Claude Code runs on a cheap server he rents from Hetzner. His laptop and his phone are just windows into it. He starts a task at his desk, walks away, and finishes [ ] Source
If you earn or hold US dollars in Europe, you ve probably noticed they tend to sit idle. A client pays you in USD, it lands in Wise or your broker, and there it stays, earning either nothing or some quiet rate you ve never actually checked. I held dollars this way for years before I bothered [ ] Source
This afternoon I pointed Hermes, an AI agent running on my Mac, at a language model running on the same machine. No API key, no per-token bill. The change took three lines in a config file, and the model answered in under a second. Setting it up sent me down a rabbit hole. Hermes gets [ ] Source
Did you know you can earn interest on the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto you already hold? The old criticism that crypto is a dead asset that yields nothing hasn t been true for years. Through savings products, lending, and staking, you can put idle coins to work and earn a yield on top of any [ ] Source
TokenTax sits in a different part of the crypto tax market from most of the tools I cover. It is both a software platform and a full-service accounting firm: you can use it to crunch your own numbers, or hand the whole return to its in-house CPAs and have them file for you. That combination [ ] Source
Most people who think they have a backup actually have sync. They keep their files in Dropbox, or iCloud, or Google Drive, and they assume that if the laptop is stolen or the drive dies, everything is safe in the cloud. It usually is. The problem is everything else. Sync mirrors the current state of [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
Most subscription plans for AI coding tools meter you on a rolling window. On Claude Code, that window is five hours: you get an allowance, it refills, and whatever you didn t use is gone when the next window starts. There s also a weekly ceiling on top. Overnight, you sleep for seven or eight hours. During [ ] Source
TL;DR: CoinTracking and Koinly are the two heavyweights of crypto tax software. Choose CoinTracking if you want the deepest analytics, the widest range of transaction types, and the best long-term value (its lifetime licence is unique). Choose Koinly if you want the easiest experience, the largest integration library, and the broadest country coverage. Both have [ ] Source
TL;DR: After years of using these tools for my own crypto taxes, six stand out in 2026. CoinTracking is my Best Overall pick: the deepest, longest-running platform, and the best value thanks to its lifetime option. Koinly is the easiest for most people, with the widest country coverage. CoinLedger is the best choice for US [ ] Source
TL;DR: Divly is a European crypto tax tool built around one thing most competitors treat as an afterthought: your country s actual tax forms. It generates the real documents your tax office wants (Sweden s K4, Germany s Anlage SO, Poland s PIT-38, France s forms 2086 and 3916-bis, and more), with native-language support to match. The free plan tracks [ ] Source
TL;DR: CoinLedger (formerly CryptoTrader.Tax) is a crypto tax tool built around one of the cleanest user experiences in the category. It connects to 1,000+ exchanges, wallets, and DeFi protocols, calculates your gains, and exports straight into TurboTax, H R Block, TaxACT, and TaxSlayer. Portfolio tracking is free with unlimited transactions, and you only pay when you [ ] Source
TL;DR: If you re tax-resident in Spain, your crypto gains are taxed under the savings income base at 19% to 28%, with no discount for holding long term. Every sale, swap, and purchase with crypto is a taxable event, and if you hold more than €50,000 of crypto with foreign providers you must also file the [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. The series is aimed at WordPress veterans who, like me, have built things on the web for years and feel quietly behind the curve. The goal is broad literacy, not [ ] Source
I have built on WordPress for 20 years. Long enough to watch it go from a blogging script to what runs nearly half the web, and long enough to start asking an uncomfortable question: what is WordPress actually best at now, and what is it just used for out of habit? My answer, after a [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
There was a moment, somewhere around 2008 or 2009, when it felt like the internet was a secret that hadn t fully leaked yet. You could spin up a WordPress site, find a niche with decent search volume, write useful content, slap some AdSense on it, and build something that actually paid the bills. No investors. [ ] Source
Nectaro and Afranga are two of the most interesting newer platforms in European P2P, and they re remarkably alike on the surface: both regulated, both yielding roughly 14%, both with clean default records, and both concentrated on a single lending group. If you re building a high-yield, regulated corner of your portfolio, these two are natural rivals. [ ] Source
TL;DR: Germany has one of the friendliest crypto tax rules in Europe: hold a coin for more than one year and the gain is completely tax-free. Sell within a year and the profit is taxed at your personal income rate (up to 45%), unless your total private-sale gains stay under the €1,000 annual allowance. The [ ] Source
Nectaro and ViaInvest are the closest match-up in this comparison series. Both are Latvian, both are MiFID II regulated, both work exclusively with loan originators inside their own corporate group, and both keep things simple. They re built on the same template. The differences come down to age, liquidity, and yield. The short version: ViaInvest is [ ] Source
TL;DR: In France, occasional crypto investors pay a flat tax of 30% on gains (with social charges rising, pushing the headline rate toward 31.4%, so check the current figure). The standout rule: crypto-to-crypto swaps are not taxed. Tax is only triggered when you convert to euros or spend crypto, and if your total disposals stay [ ] Source
This is part of an ongoing series I am writing as I work my way through the modern web stack from a WordPress developer s perspective. It is for people who, like me, have built on the web for years and still hit words in a modern stack they could not confidently define. The goal is [ ] Source
Afranga has built a strong case for itself: ECSP regulation, returns around 13.9%, a zero-default record, and a growing six-originator marketplace. It deserves a place in a diversified P2P portfolio, and it has one in mine. So why look elsewhere? A few reasons. Afranga has no auto-invest, so every reinvestment is manual. Its secondary market [ ] Source
Nectaro has quickly become one of the most compelling newcomers in European P2P. A 14.91% return in 2025, MiFID II regulation, zero investor losses so far, and the backing of the billion-dollar Dyninno Group. It s earned a place in my portfolio. So why look elsewhere? Two reasons. First, Nectaro has no secondary market yet, so [ ] Source
Shopify gives every blog its own feed. Add .atom to your blog URL (for example yourstore.com/blogs/news.atom) and there it is, updating itself every time you publish. In theory you can drop that URL into Klaviyo s RSS block or hand it to Pinterest and let your content syndicate on autopilot. In practice, the moment you try, [ ] Source
Afranga and PeerBerry both live in the high-yield consumer-loan corner of European P2P, and both rest heavily on a single lending group. The defining difference is regulation: Afranga is ECSP licensed, PeerBerry is not. That, plus scale and convenience, is what separates them. The short version: Afranga has the regulatory edge and a slightly higher [ ] Source