I think pacman should at least warn you if the problem is enough to warrant a post on the arch website.

It will, if you install the informant package from the aur or the chaotic-aur unofficial repo.

Otherwise you can follow the advice in the wiki System maintenance page, which says to read the home page, or news RSS feed, or arch-announce mailing list before upgrading.

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'

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.

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.