christopher

1. Can't help you there as I learned on a manual typewriter years before I saw a computer.
2. Editing on Vim/Neovim is really only good on US qwerty layout. It doesn't matter too much on Emacs unless the layout you chose is missing the symbols for your programming language or you're using evil mode. I had a hard time on a Latin American layout and switched to a "US international, no dead keys" layout. I can type in Spanish quite easily with this layout, it is Right-Alt pressed with e to get é for example. And I use the same layout for programming. The Latam layout I typed 'e to get é but the dead key single quote meant I had to type quote followed by a space to get a quote while programming. I had to change the physical keyboard to a US layout one to get everything right. Without doing that [ and ctrl-[ were on different keys, for example. It took some searching in the shops to find one but it was very much worth it.

I still have an EeePC 900A that came with Xandros. I kept Xandros on it until Ubuntu 10.04 Network Edition came out.

I still have a 9" netbook with Debian 12 Bookworm on it. Sadly, it's 32 bit so won't be getting Debian 13 Trixie. Maybe Void?

I had a machine with multiple OSes chosen at startup with OS/2 Boot Manager, including OS/2 Warp, Windows NT Workstation 4, and Redhat 5.0 which came on a CDROM labeled Pink Tie 5.0. (It was late '90s I guess. I used MSDOS before that. And a Commodore 64 before that) I believe I put a mail server on it (the Redhat partition) while I was still on dial-up (128K ISDN). The mails waited somewhere until I got online and signalled to send them to me. But then upgraded it to DSL. I was still running Redhat 7.3 with my mail server until 2006, even though Redhat 9 and Fedora were out by then. In 2006, I shut it down and bought a Windows 98 laptop to travel around Central America for a year. The Guatemalans laughed at my Windows 98 laptop--they were running Vista. When I got back to the US in 2007, and broke the laptop screen, oops, I bought a $300 desktop PC that had Lindows installed.

Isn't MX based on Debian? So I guess MX is only going to support i386 until about a year from now, as Debian 13 is dropping i386 support.

I am using Music Player Daemon, and I use the following script to turn gPodder into a client. My music is in ~/Music and I put the podcasts in ~/Music/Podcasts. The script works for both streaming or downloaded podcasts.

[~]$ cat bin/mpcut.sh
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$(echo "$1" | cut -b-4)" = "http" ]; then
    /usr/bin/mpc pause
    /usr/bin/mpc insert "$1"
    /usr/bin/mpc toggle
    /usr/bin/notify-send -i gpodder "$1 inserted to next spot in playlist."
else
    /usr/bin/mpc pause
    /usr/bin/mpc add "Podcasts/$(echo "$1" | cut -d"/" -f6-)"
    /usr/bin/mpc toggle
    /usr/bin/notify-send -i gpodder "$(echo "$1" | cut -d"/" -f7-)" "added to end of playlist."
fi

Audio Player in gPodder preferences is set to this: /home/christopher/bin/mpcut.sh %F

I have an application shortcut Super-G set to this in xfce4-keyboard-settings: env GTK_THEME=Adwaita-dark GPODDER_HOME=/home/christopher/.config/gPodder/ GPODDER_DOWNLOAD_DIR=/home/christopher/Music/Podcasts/ /usr/bin/gpodder

or you could use an alias: alias gpodder='GTK_THEME=Adwaita-dark GPODDER_HOME=/home/christopher/.config/gPodder/ GPODDER_DOWNLOAD_DIR=/home/christopher/Music/Podcasts/ /usr/bin/gpodder --verbose'

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.

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.