christopher

monocles browser by default opens sites without enabling JavaScript or cookies, unless they are added to trusted sites. It also has a button to enable JavaScript temporarily per site.

I'm using the Gnome Keyring on my Arch Linux system with Xfce desktop environment, and access its secrets from the command line with secret-tool, but I believe KeepassXC also supports the DBus Secret Service API, so that you can use secret-tool with it also.

Callcentric has Canada numbers. For their Pay Per Minute plan, there is a US$3.95 setup fee. Monthly charge of $3 for the number, plus $0.015 per minute incoming voice (outgoing charge varies by location called) and $0.01 per SMS. Probably an additional charge for 911 emergency number access if you tell them you are going to use the number from inside the USA or Canada.

You can read your text messages on their website and/or have them sent to your email address.

I got a California number from them when I was living there in 2009 or so, and added the SMS more recently (which added $1 to my previous monthly charge of $2). It has never failed me for SMS verification for banks, etc. I have not tried WhatsApp or Telegram.

Belize is an English-speaking country, but many of the innkeepers, shopkeepers, and waiters are Chinese. I asked a shopkeeper, in Chinese, where I could find a particular item, and got quite a surprised look, but was understood, and I understood his answer.

Though later on, in another shop, when I didn't know the Chinese name of the item I was looking for, I of course came upon the person stocking shelves who spoke only Chinese.

In the same country, I was a house guest, when two men came looking for my host, who was out. They spoke at me really fast, and I had no clue what they said. Then more slowly, “Do you speak English?”

“Yes,” I answered. “But please speak slowly.” They were English speakers, but I did not understand them with their Belizean accent.

Somehow I have a problem understanding most people speaking English, except my fellow Americans (and I even have difficulty understanding some southerners there) but I can understand any accent in Spanish except the Cubans.

Though it turns out about half the people in Punta Gorda can speak Spanish as well as English, which helped me immensely.

Later, in Guatemala, I was at the grocery store asking where to find raisins. And saying not just raisins, but describing them as little black dried-up grapes. Most Guatemalans understand me, and I them (in Spanish). But now I know that is because they are accommodating me by slowing their speech. Every once in a while, I run into someone who is like me with the Belizeans and foreigners speaking English. And then there is a failure to communicate.

I like to read info files when there is one (there are only hundreds of info files vs. thousands of man pages). Many are on your computer already in /usr/share/info folder. To read them, either use M-x info inside emacs, or console app info which is part of the texinfo package, or tkinfo from the AUR. The console app will show you the man page if there is no info file.

Info files tend to be organized hierarchically and be more extensive and tutorial in nature than man pages.

There are some memory techniques where you tell yourself a story about the word where you can use some particular person, action, or object to represent the gender. Though these techniques work better if you have the ability to visualize. So for words that are female gender, you could always put your sister in the story, and for the male gendered words your uncle always appears.

On my machine, neovim is visibly faster on uxterm over alacritty, another gpu-accelerated terminal emulator, so I'm not going to bother trying ghostty. Also, I don't have gtk4 on my computer now. I don't see the need to install it just for a terminal emulator. In addition to xterm, I also have xfce4-terminal (included with the Xfce desktop environment I've been using since Gnome 2 went away) for when I want font-fallback support or a drop-down terminal.

A TUI, ytfzf.

No error for me.

$ info {command} although not available for all commands will often give texts that are more tutorial in nature. If you don't like the interface of info, you can use tkinfo instead.

Just get in the habit of checking for your keys before you go through any door. It takes no mental effort once it's a habit. If they aren't in your pocket (or in my case a lanyard) then they are in that room or vehicle, so you should recover them before going out. This method worked for me 100% for decades. It only failed after I got married and my wife started stealing them. But it's usually not too hard to find her.

# No else statement, shorter.
def foo(x: int) -> str:
    if x%2:
        return "first"
    return "last"

This is easier to think about for me: am I weird? Numbers can be interpreted as boolean in C but not in Go, which came later and is presumably an improvement.