Kyle Piira

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  • Do dying industries make good investments?

    I recently watched this video made by Ben Felix. In the video he argues that based on the historical data it is a bad idea to invest into exciting new technologies, and the companies that create them. Historically investors have overestimated the future growth of new innovative firms and underestimated how long it would take…

  • Microsoft Office Online switches to OpenDocument as default format

    So earlier today I was trying out Microsoft’s online office suite and noticed something interesting. Whenever you create a new Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file from the OneDrive interface, it automatically creates it using the OpenDocument file format (odt, ods, odp) as opposed to the Microsoft Office format (docx, xlsx, ppt). Interestingly if you create…

  • Spotify is trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish open podcasting

    I really love podcasts. Not only do they provide great entertainment value as an alternative to audiobooks, but they are also one of the last open ecosystems on the web. Anyone can start a podcast by publishing an RSS feed on their website without having to rely on a central platform (thus nobody can “ban”…

  • Switching to exFAT

    I’ve decided that I’m going to be reformatting my 25 TB of external storage capacity (for storing datasets, backups, etc.) to exFAT. Most of it is currently ext4 or NTFS. exFAT is great because similar to its predecessor FAT it has read-write compatibility with Linux, Windows, and macOS. But while FAT can only have files…

  • Jitsi open source video chat

    So my university has shutdown the campus for the remainder of the semester due to Coronavirus concerns and asked all students to attend classes remotely (mainly using Zoom for live-streaming lectures). I went looking for an open source cross platform video conferencing solution with a fast onboarding process to keep in touch with fellow students…

  • Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone

    Today, I tried out KDE Neon on my PinePhone “Brave Heart” and recorded the following video. Here is a summary of some of the default apps: Buho – the default note taking app. Notes can be tagged by color, keyword, and organized into “books”. It can also save URLs. Discover – the same KDE software…

  • Which Search Engine Has the Best Results

    I was recently wondering which of the popular web search engines provided the best results and decided to try to design an objective benchmark for evaluating them. My hypothesis was that Google would score the best followed by StartPage (Google aggregator) and then Bing and it’s aggregators. Usually when evaluating search engine performance there are…

  • Why I quit using Google

    So I was recently asked why I prefer to use free and open source software over more conventional and popular proprietary software and services. A few years ago I was an avid Google user. I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem and used their products everywhere. I used Gmail for email, Google Calendar and…

  • How to Easily Migrate Emails Between Accounts

    If you’ve decided to move to another email provider it’s possible to take all of your old emails and folders with you. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is using the mail client Mozilla Thunderbird. With Thunderbird installed, sign in to both your old and new emails accounts. This is provider dependent but…

  • A Trip Through New York (1911)

    I find this video just remarkable. It’s only been 109 years and yet things are so much different now. I wonder what things will be like in a hundred more years. With any luck I’ll live to see.