Krehn Solutions Blog

The personal blog of Raymond Krehn

Category: Studies

  • I’ve been building a search engine

    I’m a fan of Ecosia, but it needs a lot work. Ecosia is a search engine using Bing’s engine to generate search results. A majority of their revenue goes to reforestation. Some of the things they have done for poor communities in areas like Madagascar that were dried up and now thriving is nothing short of incredible. DuckDuckGo is a far better search engine with a lot of instantaneous feedback, similar to what you can expect from Google. DuckDuckGo uses a mix of both Bing’s engine and Google’s engine. Both search engines have a better privacy policy.

    I thought to myself: What if I made a search engine combining some concepts of these two, but using the revenue for charities that users can vote on? Each month, they would be able to select a few charities where profits are donated to like cancer research, feeding the hungry, fighting climate change, etc. I named it YoFlux, and you can view this for early alpha testing at www.yoflux.com.

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  • I’m probably shutting down FluxRobot

    A couple of years ago I created a website and an algorithm called Flux Robot that would automatically invest funds in a user’s Lending Club account to maximize their potential return of investment (ROI). In a lot of ways, I succeeded. The average ROI for the very few accounts in Flux Robot was 7.92%, which is much higher than Lending Club’s ROI, and more than most people make in any stock market. The site, however, failed and will be shut down.

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  • Stop Calling Analysis “AI”, Because it isn’t

    There’s a disgusting trend reoccurring lately. The most recent misuse of “AI” set me off a ledge regarding the Voynich Manuscript. For anyone unfamiliar, the Voynich Manuscript is a 270-page book that has been carbon-dated to roughly 15th century written in a language using an alphabet no one recognizes. There have been dozens of theories, and dozens of people have been dedicating their lives to deciphering this cryptic text. A computer algorithm recently tried, and failed, to solve it too.

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  • Block Advertisements and Watch Movies with Raspberry Pi

    I got a Raspberry Pi 3 the other day and turned it into a dual-purpose server in my household. The first purpose disables ads on all websites from any device on our network. The second purpose is it acts as a media server where I can watch various movies and TV shows I have stored on my computer.

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  • I hacked Excel

    And it was incredibly easy. Some background: I received a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (xlsx file) from someone at my company that was struggling with incorrect numbers. The spreadsheet was password-protected. I noticed one of the formulas wasn’t calculating correctly and giving a percentage of a score that they had a 0%, which was incorrect. This was something they had to complete quarterly, and each tab represented a different quarter. I noticed that on the tabs for the first two quarters, the formula for calculating the percentage was completely different than the last two quarters. I thought that if I updated the formulas to correctly calculate their score, then everything would work fine. Unfortunately, the formulas were password-protected.

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  • I wrote a letter to my 30-year-old self when I was 25

    I don’t remember what sparked the idea, but I thought it would be interesting to write a letter to my future self in five years when I was 25 years old. It’s interesting to think about what my priorities were then, and how it’s shifted to now. I’m halfway on to my next mark five year mark, but I thought I’d share the questions with answers (as of 2015). The original copy is at the bottom.

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