Yaky

I have been following linmob.net for news and developments. They do a good job aggregating from conferences, boards, HN, and reddit.

Is your iPad on iOS 9.3.5? It is infamously slow. It is possible to downgrade it to 8.4.1 (faster, partially more broken) or even 6.1.3 (fast and old school, many apps don’t work, but there are apps in Cydia to fix stuff). Biggest issue I encountered is sites requiring TLSv1.3 for HTTPS encryption, and browsers simply do not support that.

I think most larger (or older) immigrant communities have their own dialect. Runglish is Russian spoken with lots of words borrowed-adapted from US English. In parts of Eastern Ukraine and Western Russia, there is also surzhyk, which is a difficult-to-describe blend of both languages, often difficult to comprehend to those who do not speak both or dis not grew up in the area.

Snikket is an all-in-one XMPP server-client that supports calls. But yes, in its current state, Matrix calls are pretty broken as there is no feature parity between Element Classic and Element X apps.

I have to perform a context switch between “v” and “w” sounds, so words and phrases that contain both (e.g: “very well”) sometimes end up with only “w” sounds. (My native language does not have a regular “W” sound) But even after 20 years speaking it, English pronunciation is complete nonsense. Most of the time, you just need to memorize the words. Because trying to figure out how to say something, you also need to know if the word is borrowed from any other languages that use Latin alphabet, and then pronouce it pretending to speak that language. Simplest example: Mocha (moh-ka) and matcha (maht-cha). But there are countless borrowed words that don’t change spelling in English.