christopher

joined 2 years ago
[–] christopher@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

I drop files I want to share in ~/public_html/files/ as I have a webserver running on my desktop with the firewall open to the local network. Might be tough for a noob to setup though. But on my phone the file shows up in /~christopher/files/ and I have trouble remembering how to type the tilde.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

No toca los PopOS!

[–] christopher@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

To install it on emacs 29 paste this into a scratch buffer and evaluate it:

(package-vc-install
  '(minimpc :url "https://codeberg.org/nmtake/minimpc.el.git"))

And put this in your init.el: (require 'minimpc)

You don't need Vertico or Orderless. I'm using emacs' built-in completion--it works fine.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

In case you're on Archlinux, the thonny 4.1.4-1 package in chaotic-aur unofficial repo works for me.

[–] christopher@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

For the ebook, install pandoc, then run this:

pandoc -f rst -t epub2 -o pkgsample.epub --metadata title="nedbat/pkgsample: A simple example of how to structure a Python project" --metadata author="Ned Batchelder" https://github.com/nedbat/pkgsample/raw/main/README.rst

[–] christopher@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

Can you follow Dave Touretzky's book? The 1990 PDF version is free.

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