Kyle Piira

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  • 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.

  • Orchid VPN

    I have previously mentioned how I felt that Tor should offer some way for users to pay for bandwidth on its network to incentivize more nodes to join. Well, today I found out about Orchid which is a decentralized VPN that allows users to do just that. It’s basically a marketplace for bandwidth between clients…

  • Building a Robot Cat

    I recently took the CICS Make course available at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with my colleague Hannah Dacayanan. At the end of the course we were required to build a final project that involved interacting with the physical world using computers. We decided to build a robot cat. More specifically, a small motorized car…

  • Cloudron

    Cloudron is fascinating piece of software I found out a few days ago. It makes it super easy to self-host a bunch of applications like Nextcloud, GitLab, Wallabag, etc. They all have one-click installers and SSO with your Cloudron user accounts. Also, it supports encrypted backup to various cloud providers like Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces,…

  • Pamac > Pacman

    I must say that I much prefer the Pamac CLI package manager to Pacman. It’s much more intuitive and I’m glad that Manjaro includes it by default.

  • Arduino Pong

    This is a simple pong game I created for fun for the CICS 290M Makerboard running Arduino software. The board is part of the CS Make course at UMass Amherst. Below is the source code, it’s also available on GitHub.

  • Signal Foundation Donation

    I’ve decided to set up a monthly donation to the Signal Foundation. I’m not the biggest fan of Signal and I’ve been critical of the fact that it relies on central servers that can be shut off at any time. But none of the peer-to-peer apps I’ve tried (such as Tox) seem competitive in this…