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Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of technology in which you focus your online time on a few carefully selected activities that support the things you value.

About 50% of Indians use Hindi as their primary language. Hindi/Devanagari is fairly phonetic except when it starts to import foreign words. And that’s why many Indians, with Hindi as their primary language, end up with incorrect pronunciations of foreign, mainly English, words. Let’s look at a few specific categories of mistakes.

Aruba, a small Caribbean island 29 km north of Venezuela, is a part of the ABC islands - Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, which form the Dutch Caribbean and is a part of the Netherlands. It is famous for its white-sand beaches.

Google Play Music was great. Apart from one missing feature about the inability to upload music from the phone to the Google Play Music library, I had no other complaints. Then it was forcefully shut down.

There are tons of hyped-up claims surrounding React Native that are worth addressing. The reasons why companies run for React Native are usually, We already use Javascript for the website and now, we can build apps in that as well. We can use one codebase for Android, iOS, and web apps. Or at least, Android and iOS apps. Facebook uses it

On Android catching Java exceptions is easy via UncaughtExceptionHandler. Catching NDK crashes is a bit more convoluted. Since the native stack is probably corrupted, you want the crash handler to run on a separate process. Also, since the system might be in an unstable shape, don’t send the crash report to your web server or do anything fancy. Just write the crash report to a file, and on the next restart of the app, send to your web server and delete it from the disk. I ended up using jndcrash package for this.

Indic-origin names should not use “v”, the sound is entirely non-existent in Indic-origin languages.

Egypt, locally known as Misr (मिस्र) is world-famous for its pyramids and ancient polytheist temples. I made a trip to Egypt in Nov 2020, during the COVID-19 era. Given the general lack of tourism, it was a great time to travel since I didn’t face any queues and in many temples, I was the sole visitor. Very few people outside of the tourism industry understand English, so, it is good to make yourself aware of a few basic phrases. The equivalent of “hello” is “As-salamu alaykum”. To ask for a price, say " bekam da". And of course learn the common numbers like five (hamza), three (thlath), ten (ashri), and twenty (ashrin) since these are what you will encounter on the street. And “I don’t understand Arabic” is “Ana mish fahem al Arabee”. As a vegetarian, I did not face any problems finding food since Falafel and Ful sandwiches are aplenty and available for cheap (1-5 EGP per sandwich). The national dish Koshari is neither delicious nor nutritious. The Egyptian Pizza, Feteer, however, is darn delicious.

After I wrote my previous post, some suggested that I can cut down the image size further by using a “scratch” image. And that’s true, “scratch i"s a reserved 0-sized image with nothing in it. And utilizing a scratch binary image did cut down the size of the final Docker image from 13MB to 7.5MB. Pretty good, right? Except the image cannot do an SSL cert verification because of the missing SSL certs!!! Bash 1 Failed to reach google.com: Get https://google.com: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

Glacier National Park, Montana is considered to be one of the most gorgeous national parks in the US. We went there in September 2020. It wasn’t snowing but the weather was still pretty erratic with random cold showers during the day. So, I would recommend going no later than August. Also, the east side, which has Native American reservations were closed to prevent COVID-19 spread. Dressing in at least three layers is highly recommended as the weather changes dramatically with heights and the time of the day.