jeangalea.com

# Jean Galea

> AI, Investing, Health, and Building Businesses

## Posts

- [Daily Driver AI](https://jeangalea.com/daily-driver-ai/): Daily Driver AI is about the AI you actually use every day: real workflows, the tools that earned a place in your routine, and what didn't work. We meet in
- [Portugal Mortgage for Business Owners: The Income Banks Want to See](https://jeangalea.com/portugal-mortgage-business-owners/): If your income comes as dividends from your own company, a Portuguese bank will lend against it, but only after it has shown up on your Portuguese tax return for
- [Daily Driver AI – Cascais](https://jeangalea.com/cascais-ai/): Daily Driver AI - Cascais is a curated community for people using and building with AI around Cascais, Sintra and Lisbon. We share tools, workflows and what's actually working in
- [Home Alarm Systems in Portugal: Skip Verisure and Own Your Setup](https://jeangalea.com/home-alarm-portugal/): If you've just moved into a house in Cascais, a Verisure or Prosegur rep will probably get to you before your furniture does. The pitch is a monthly fee, a
- [How Much Database Self-Hosted WordPress Analytics Actually Uses](https://jeangalea.com/wordpress-analytics-database-size/): The objection to self-hosted analytics is always the same: it puts the data in your database, and databases get slow, and backups get big. It is a reasonable worry and
- [WordPress Analytics Without a Cookie Banner: What You Can Actually Skip](https://jeangalea.com/wordpress-analytics-cookie-banner/): Most posts about cookieless analytics never quote the rule that produces the banner. It decides the answer, so start there. The banner on your site doesn't come from GDPR. It
- [Your WordPress Analytics Is Counting AI Crawlers as Readers](https://jeangalea.com/wordpress-analytics-ai-crawlers/): Over three days in September, AI crawlers made 4,058 requests to my site. In the same three days they sent 7 readers back. Googlebot and the other search crawlers made
- [How to Move Your Google Analytics History Into WordPress Before You Delete It](https://jeangalea.com/import-google-analytics-to-wordpress/): Installing a WordPress analytics plugin takes two minutes. What stops people is the four years of history sitting in Google Analytics that the new plugin knows nothing about. So you
- [Koko vs Burst vs Independent Analytics, and the One I Built](https://jeangalea.com/koko-vs-burst-vs-independent-analytics/): I build one of the four plugins below. Vireo Analytics is mine, it’s the newest and smallest of them by a wide margin, and you should read everything here with
- [How to Register With Portugal’s SNS, and What It Actually Covers](https://jeangalea.com/portugal-sns-registration/): Hospital de Santo António dos Capuchos, Lisbon. Photo by RickMorais, CC BY-SA 4.0. Portugal's Serviço Nacional de Saúde is residence-based, not contribution-based. You don't buy into it and you don't
- [Private Health Insurance in Portugal: The Gaps That Matter Most](https://jeangalea.com/portugal-health-insurance-gaps/): Health insurance in Portugal gets sold on two things: the monthly premium and the size of the provider network. Both are easy to compare, and neither tells you what happens
- [Google Analytics Alternatives for WordPress](https://jeangalea.com/google-analytics-alternatives-wordpress/): Most people looking for this have already decided. The cookie banner, the sampling, the interface that needs a course to operate, or a legal team asking where EU visitor data
- [Moving Country With N26: What Changes, What Stays, and the Italy Exception](https://jeangalea.com/n26-change-country/): Moving to another European country while keeping your N26 account sounds like it should be an address change and nothing more. It largely is, but not in the way the
- [The Midlife Squeeze: Peak Earnings, Peak Family Demands](https://jeangalea.com/midlife-squeeze/): A 69-year-old posted the five things he'd tell his 49-year-old self, and the list is a good one. Money can be replaced and time can't. Your job is a transaction,
- [Business Moats: What Actually Keeps Competitors Out](https://jeangalea.com/business-moats/): Being good at something buys you about a year. After that it's been copied, and whatever keeps customers paying has to be something other than quality. That something is a
- [The Sunscreen Rules Worth Following (and the Ones to Ignore)](https://jeangalea.com/sunscreen-rules/): The number on a sunscreen bottle measures how well it stops you burning. It tells you almost nothing about the radiation that ages your skin. That gap sits underneath most
- [Keeping a Spanish Phone Number While Living Abroad](https://jeangalea.com/keep-spanish-phone-number-abroad/): A Spanish mobile number is cheap to hold and easy to lose by accident. Banks send verification codes to it and some government systems will only talk to a Spanish
- [Lisbon From Cascais: When to Take the Train, When to Drive, and What It All Costs](https://jeangalea.com/lisbon-day-trips-cascais/): Cascais sits about 30 kilometers west of Lisbon, and once you live here the city stops being a destination and becomes a routine. What changes is the arithmetic. A family
- [Why Founders Sell for Millions and Bank Nothing](https://jeangalea.com/founders-sell-millions-bank-nothing/): A founder can sell a company for five million dollars and end up with nothing in the bank. It's common enough that the mechanics are worth spelling out, because the
- [Internet and Mobile in Portugal: Why I Use UZO](https://jeangalea.com/internet-mobile-portugal-uzo/): UZO sells mobile and home internet in Portugal on MEO's network at sub-brand prices, and it's what I'd point any new arrival at. Setting it up takes two phone calls
- [Setting Up Utilities in Portugal: A Practical Guide for New Arrivals](https://jeangalea.com/portugal-utilities/): Four utilities, four different systems. Electricity and gas are fully liberalized, so you pick a retailer and can leave whenever you want. Water isn't liberalized at all, so you get
- [Campervan Rental in Cascais: Where You Can Actually Sleep](https://jeangalea.com/campervan-rental-cascais/): 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,
- [How Capital Gains Are Taxed in Portugal (2026)](https://jeangalea.com/portugal-capital-gains-tax/): 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
- [Afranga in 2026: The ECSP Relaunch, New Originators, and the Latest Numbers](https://jeangalea.com/afranga-2026-update/): 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
- [Don’t Idolize People You Only Know Online](https://jeangalea.com/dont-idolize-people-online/): 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,
- [Which AI Model Should You Use? It Depends Who’s Running It](https://jeangalea.com/which-ai-model-should-you-use/): "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
- [Blockpit Review 2026 – Crypto Tax Reports With Prefilled European Forms](https://jeangalea.com/blockpit-review/): 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
- [The most trusted WordPress plugin signal is also the most gameable](https://jeangalea.com/wordpress-plugin-install-counts/): 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
- [Why AI Stalls for Most People (It Isn’t the Model)](https://jeangalea.com/why-ai-stalls/): 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.
- [How WordPress.org Plugin Search Gets Gamed (and Why It Favors Big Players)](https://jeangalea.com/wordpress-plugin-search-gaming/): 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
- [Treat LinkedIn Like a Landing Page: My Full System](https://jeangalea.com/linkedin-landing-page-system/): 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
- [Frost](https://jeangalea.com/frost/): Frost is a free iOS app for 12V portable compressor fridges: Alpicool, Vevor, Brass Monkey and compatible units.
- [Frost Privacy Policy](https://jeangalea.com/frost/privacy/): Frost collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, no tracking, and the app makes no network requests at all. What stays on your phone Everything Frost knows lives on
- [Frost Support](https://jeangalea.com/frost/support/): Frost controls 12V portable compressor fridges over Bluetooth. It works with fridges built on the Alpicool controller platform, which are sold under Alpicool, Vevor, Brass Monkey and many other brand
- [Malta Supermarket Price Comparison: The Same 15 Staples at All Four Online Stores](https://jeangalea.com/malta-supermarket-price-comparison/): This is a live experiment. I priced the same basket of everyday staples at Malta's four online supermarkets, holding every line to the same grade of product: extra virgin olive
- [One Config, Five AI Coding Agents](https://jeangalea.com/ai-coding-agents-one-config/): 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,
- [How to Pay International Remote Workers from Europe](https://jeangalea.com/pay-international-remote-workers-europe/): 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
- [Retro Gaming](https://jeangalea.com/retro-gaming/): Hobbies Retro Gaming The games I grew up with, running on modern hardware, organized the way a real library should be. Why Retro Old Games, Done Properly New consoles are
- [RC Cars](https://jeangalea.com/rc-cars/): Hobbies RC Cars Half the fun is in the workshop, the other half is finding real terrain to run them over. Here's what I drive and where. Why RC Tinkering
- [When Headless WordPress Is Worth It (and Why Speed Isn’t the Reason)](https://jeangalea.com/headless-wordpress-worth-it/): 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
- [Speaking](https://jeangalea.com/about/speaking/): I give talks about what AI actually does once you stop demoing it and start shipping it into a real business. I've spent 20+ years building in the WordPress ecosystem
- [How the Pieces Wire Up: A Modern Stack Integration Tour](https://jeangalea.com/how-the-pieces-wire-up/): 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,
- [Headless WordPress: The Bridge](https://jeangalea.com/headless-wordpress-the-bridge/): 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,
- [The Lightweight Video Kit I Use for Drone and Talking-Head](https://jeangalea.com/lightweight-video-kit/): 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
- [How to Grow on X in 2026: The Durable Rules vs the Algorithm Myths](https://jeangalea.com/grow-on-x-2026/): 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
- [When to Use WordPress, Astro, Next, or Laravel](https://jeangalea.com/wordpress-astro-next-laravel/): 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
- [How to Control and Automate an iPhone or iPad With WebDriverAgent](https://jeangalea.com/control-automate-iphone-webdriveragent/): 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
- [The Science Behind Sauna: Why I Use It After Every Workout](https://jeangalea.com/sauna-benefits/): 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
- [Observability When You Can’t Just SSH In](https://jeangalea.com/observability-when-you-cant-ssh-in/): 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,
- [From Client Call to CRM: An Automation Workflow for Real Estate Agents](https://jeangalea.com/real-estate-client-call-notes-crm/): 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

## Authors

- [Jean Galea](https://jeangalea.com/author/jean/): Entrepreneur based in Barcelona. Founder of the Good Life Collective. Dad of three. I write about investing, technology, health, and the decisions that shape how we live.