Nicolas Bouliane's most recent posts
I have an LG C5 TV. Great display, terrible software. AirPlay often freezes mid-stream and won’t reconnect, or won’t connect at all right from the start. My iPhone or my Macbook try to connect for about 30 seconds, then fail with “Unable to connect”. The Home app shows the TV as “Updating”. My theory is that the AirPlay service on the TV crashes, and the fix is…
Last month, thieves tried to steal my bike before a shopkeeper shooed them off. They mangled my bike lock, so I got a new one. This one rattles even louder than the last one. It’s all I can hear on my otherwise whisper-quiet bike. I leave my lock at home just to hear myself think! I shimmed the rattly bits with leftover velcro stickers. I would have used foam tape, but that’s all I had…
This is the traffic to All About Berlin , the website that I run since 2017, and live from since 2020. After 7 years of growth, it has lost ~~70%~~ 75% of its traffic to Google AI Overviews. When you Googled something, you used to get a link to my website. Now you get a page of ads, then an AI-generated answer trained on my content, then finally a link to my website. This has a devastating impact…
My resolution for 2025 was to make more art. I had a lot of fun keeping it. I took acrylic painting lessons, got into watercolours, printed stickers , organised art meet-ups and made hundreds of sketches and paintings. Along the way, I have learned a few lessons that apply beyond the canvas. Make mistakes I became a better artist when I allowed myself to make mistakes. Until recently, I used the…
Every year, on the first of January, prices change and new laws come into effect. Mostly, life gets a little more expensive. And thus, every year, I spend a few days updating All About Berlin ’s hundreds of pages and calculators. Same procedure as every year. This is a summary of the changes I have noticed. I will keep updating it as new information comes up. Restaurants Cafés and…
I use webhook and Github webhooks to redeploy All About Berlin when I push new changes. I’m using adnanh/webhook on an Ubuntu 24.04 VPS on DigitalOcean, behind CloudFlare. The problem The webhooks failed with the following message: “We couldn’t deliver this payload: failed to connect to host.” Let’s look at the facts: The webhook server ran properly on port 9000. I…
Two years ago, I have a released a resignation letter generator . There are a few rules and good practices around how these letters should be written, formatted and delivered. This tool makes helps immigrants write a compliant resignation letter. With help from employment lawyer Andreas Martin, I have made a few improvements to the letter generator. Better user experience Users can fill in…
As mentioned previously , we’re building an insurance business from the ground up, starting with a case tracking system. This will allow us to follow a customer’s journey from their first email to their coverage confirmation. Why start with a case tracker? We must do this for a few reasons. First, so that nothing gets lost. A few months ago, I started asking people for feedback, and…
I am on a train to Frankfurt to meet Seamus, the insurance broker I work with. We are building a health insurance business from the ground up, and I have mixed feelings about it. I could wax poetic about our goal of simplifying health insurance for immigrants and making insurance advice more accessible, but let’s be frank: this is about making money. This is what I’m doing instead of…
My motorcycle slips on a patch of mud, the front wheel goes from under me, I hit the ground hard, parts go flying, I get the wind knocked out of me. I catch my breath then prop the bike back up. I hammer my right pannier back into shape with a rock, secure the mirror in place with metal wire, tape my cracked hand guard to the handlebar. The adrenaline is wearing off, and now comes the pain. I can…