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.

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.

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.

No toca los PopOS!

I’m pretty sure Android Studio has a search function for its menus.

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

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

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

My neighbor at the trailer park was a janitor at the university. I built my computer from parts he salvaged from the recycle bin, and put Redhat 5 on it.

Presets for EasyEffects and PulseEffects.

On Debian, there is a package that displays system documentation including, if I remember correctly, man pages. I think I had to set up a local web server first.

On Archlinux at least, the glibc package includes info pages for C functions. Just type info libc at the command line, or use info inside emacs. There are hyperlinks in info pages, it’s a nicer interface than man pages.

PulseEffects can moderate the high-volumed sounds too. It has a complex set of controls and filters, and I’m not a sound engineer, so I just followed someone else’s recipe.

My middle school algebra teacher sparked my interest in coding.

Due to moving around a lot, I never learned any mathematics, not even basic arithmetic before middle school. In the seventh grade, I was put in a class where the teacher just handed out worksheets with arithmetic problems, and then usually left the classroom until the end of the hour. On the rare occasions when she stayed, I asked her to teach me arithmetic, but she didn’t believe I couldn’t do it, so she never taught me and I failed the class.

But in the eighth or ninth grade, they allowed me to sign up for the Algebra for dummies class, which taught in two semesters what the normal class taught in one. My new teacher taught me arithmetic the first day, and I was his star pupil from that point.

He invited me and some other students to stay after school to learn FORTRAN. We did not have a computer at the middle school–it was at the university. We didn’t even have a card punching machine. So we had cards that looked like punch cards, but instead of punching holes in them, we coded the Hollerith code in them by filling bubbles with a number 2 pencil. Then we sent the cards on a mail truck to the university and got back a printout a week later.

I don’t have any need to edit markdown, but I sometimes use Marker: “Simple yet robust Markdown editor made with GTK” as a viewer.

It might be possible to boot into a bootable image from grub so you don’t need to set up another bootable partition.

Or you could disable your display manager in systemd. This will start in console, then if you want X just run startx.

Or you could change your display manager to Lemur, which supports X, Wayland, and TTY sessions.

Or you could just press control-alt-F2 at the login screen to switch to a console.