My name is Ryan Young. I’m a computer nerd, urban transportation enthusiast, and an occasional blogger.

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True Facts About Ryan Young

  • I still use Mozilla Firefox—and you should, too!
  • I’m a developer for the Open Rails free train simulator, and my favorite level is the Pacific Surfliner route from San Diego to San Luis Obispo.
  • I once wrote a UT Austin newspaper column advocating for the adoption of IPv6—which still hasn’t happened.
  • I wrote a skeptical essay about self-driving cars that appears in the 4th edition of How to Write Anything by UT creative writing professor John J. Ruszkiewicz—as a learning and revising exercise! I’m no genius.
  • I was a one-time freelance reporter for the Austin Monitor.
  • A series of complicated events led to my being followed by the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority of Austin, Texas on Twitter.

Recent Posts

A Farewell to Arms: Why I’m Quitting Linux on the Desktop

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 Internet.

How to Fix Grandma’s Network on Verizon FiOS

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 gatherings.

The 30-Second WebRTC Guide

(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 decentralized web apps, just waiting to get written!

More

For Alon Levy, the Future Is Not Retro, but It Might Still Surprise

Movie Review: Moana (2016) Was Quintessential Late-Stage Disney

Introducing Sia Slice, My Absurdly Cheap Block Storage Solution

Movie Review: John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

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