The personal website of Ryan Young.
Netbooks? Remember those? Sub-10-inch, horribly underpowered, miniature laptops? Asus Eee PC? One Laptop Per Child? Netbooks were all the rage in the late 2000’s. And then, like Zune, the Windows Phone, and the Avatar, they disappeared. Let’s be clear: The netbooks of yesteryear were pieces of utter garbage. Their under-specced innards could barely keep pace with the copies of Windows XP they…
TL;DR Use go-getmail to sync your indie, IMAP inbox to another IMAP inbox supported by Gmailify like Outlook.com in combination with Gmailify to achieve a (nearly) perfect Gmail setup. For as long as I can remember being a sentient Internet user, I have called myself a Gmail addict. I remember chatting with online buddies in the embedded Google Talk widget. I remember claiming two extra gigs of…
GitHub recently made Codespaces available to every GitHub user, and they’ve been getting rave reviews. Like a digital petting zoo in the cloud, a Codespace is a virtual machine built just for programming that you can access through any ordinary web browser. Code on your ultrabook, your iPad, even your phone; it’s easy to see the appeal. The promise of Codespaces is the promise of game…
It goes without saying that 2020 has been the year of the inconceivable. And to top it all off, after daily driving Linux on my laptop for nearly a decade, I just switched back to Windows! Let me explain—it’s not as if I’ve given up on the Penguin OS entirely. My servers and routers continue to run Linux, delivering funny cat pictures to myself and dispatching my own hot takes to the rest of the…
In my family, the person with the fastest Internet connection is… Grandma, a Vietnam War refugee who has never used a computer in her life. This is by virtue of her residence on a main road in the great state of Delaware, which gets fiber TV and Internet service through Verizon FiOS. She subscribes to the cheapest Internet plan so that the grandkids can tap away at their tablets during family…
(Web technology changes fast! Mind the date this post was written, which was November 2019.) I get the feeling nobody uses WebRTC in the real world, since all of the tutorials use the same toy examples that don’t involve any actual network connectivity. That’s a shame, because WebRTC makes peer-to-peer communication a cakewalk. Somewhere in our imaginations, there’s a whole category of…
“The Future is not Retro,” declares a recent Pedestrian Observation post that has been my metaphorical pea under the mattress for the last several weeks. Its tone is so bombastic and cavalier that the piece is difficult to take entirely seriously—much like another Alon Levy hot take, “The NTSB Wants American Trains to Be Less Safe,” or that infamous Market Urbanism tweet about rebuilding Notre…
So far, 2019 has seen the release of the new Dumbo, the new Aladdin, and the new Lion King—and a new Mulan, by the way, is in the works, too. All-mighty Disney used to inspire kids to sing about the “circle of life”; now they’ve got critics jeering cynically about the “circle of franchise reboots.” Et tu, Mickey? At least, Disney partisans can reassure themselves, creative bankruptcy is a…
Sia Slice in action. (On a remote system, with tmux.) I dabble in cryptocurrencies, occasionally. I hesitate to get too partisan on a subject the Internet takes very seriously, but it seems to me that the fairest judge of a coin’s value is the utility it provides to its holders. So Bitcoin is useful because everyone recognizes and accepts Bitcoin, Monero is useful because it facilitates anonymous…
On the night I opened my browser to buy a ticket to see John Wick: Chapter 3, I had never actually seen any of the John Wick films before. Fortunately, the premise of this sequel-to-a-sequel isn’t terribly complicated: John Wick himself (Keanu Reeves) is a professional assassin who has run afoul of the High Table, a world-spanning secret society of assassins. Wick is a master of his occupation,…