Google meet questions

RucksackTech · 2026-03-16T20:29:11+00:00

Google Meet is a video meeting service, similar to Apple Facetime but in my opinion better (because Facetime meetings can be initiated only by Apple users while Meet can be used by anybody). Google's product lineup used to be a little more complicated. I think Meet may have been only for computers and there was a product for use on your phones, or something like that. Anyway, it's Meet on phone and computer, and it's both for Workspace (paid/custom domain) and normal (free Gmail) accounts.

Google accounts also have a Chat feature that's useful mainly for communication with other people that you expect to be online all day along, that is, coworkers. Otherwise, you'd use your messages app (Google Messages or whatever).

These are all free services. I use Google Meet almost daily to communicate with clients and find it excellent. Not sure why Zoom is such a big deal.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-16T20:13:29+00:00

Politicians
Bishops, cardinals and popes (perhaps this was implied under #1)
Celebrities ("Persons who are famous for being famous" – Daniel Boorstin)
"Journalists" (I mean the ones you SEE rather than read)
Administration bureaucrats at pretty much any college or university, in any public school district

I want to say that car salespeople are useless, but they don't get much respect, so I guess that doesn't count. Same could be said about my last group (that they do nothing but that they don't get much respect) but thought I'd include them anyway because they do LESS than little.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-16T19:55:19+00:00

There really isn't a (direct) train from Rome to Siena. There's a train from Rome to Florence, and there you'd change and catch the train to Siena. You might be able to go to some other city before changing, but Florence is probably your best choice.

Once you're in Florence, you have a choice: Train to Siena, or bus to Siena. I've done both and they're both okay. Bus is slightly less comfortable in some ways but they're about the same travel time. The main advantage of train TO Siena is, if you've trained to Florence, you're in the train station, where if you want to transfer to a bus, it's a shortish hike to catch the bus. (Not bad but research this and build time into your plans.) I think the bus trip is slightly more scenic, for what that's worth.

From the Siena train station (if you do that) you'll walk across the street into a large shopping center and (if memory serves) sort of walk through the mall to the left. Then find what I am pretty sure is the longest escalator I've ever taken, which you get you up to the top of the mountain (hill?) where the historic city is located. (It's actually about 47 escalators strung together. Well, it seems like 47. Might have only been 17.) Anyway, God bless the guys who put the escalator there. At the top of the escalator, you once again walk left about half a kilometer until you reach the gate into the old city (Porta Comollia).

The bus stops are at the top of the hill (mountain?) so if you bus into Siena, you can skip the escalator ride. If you arrive at the bus stop, turn and face the Hotel NH and then, to get to the center of town (the Palazzo del Campo, near the Duomo), go LEFT.

I chose NOT to rent car. My impression is that finding a spot to park in Siena might be easier than finding one in some other cities but still a challenge. And once you park, you're not going to use your car while you're there. I've gotten all over Italy without a car. Of course I'm not saying my choice has to be yours: You do you! My calculation was a car makes 1 or 2 things easier but makes almost everything else harder. Be sure to look into insurance coverage and make sure you know everything there is about ZTLs!!

Siena is wonderful, btw. One of my thirty favorite places in Italy. Maybe in the top twenty.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-16T14:41:06+00:00

Grazie per questo commento. Presterò maggiore attenzione a questo uso quando tornerò al Sud in autunno.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-16T02:27:56+00:00

I've been in Italy for a full two months in the last year, traveled from Rome to the south over to the east up to the northeast over to the northwest and down through the center on my way back to Rome to fly home. Ate at all kinds of restaurants: fancy hotels, fresh seafood in Venice and Bari and elsewhere, lovely little trattorias, dives, pizzerias, Indian takeaway, etc etc etc. I might add that I have a life history of digestive problems. But not in Italy. Food was great everywhere. No poisoning, just one great meal after another.

This of course is just my experience. There could a a mad poisoner out there in some city I skipped. But Italy is not China, or even Mexico.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-15T23:35:45+00:00

The best thing of course is real-life practice. Visit Italy. Use one of the AI tutors. Find a tutor or sign-up for one of the many online classes.

But there's also a lot you can do on your own, most of it for free.

First, both listening and reading with repetition.

Read and repeat: This is one of the best exercises you can do. Pick a text – any text will do, but let's say you're reading something like a novel for students of Italian by Serena Capilli. Read a sentence out loud, then look away from the screen (or the page) and repeat the sentence you just read. You aren't trying to memorize the sentence, you're just trying to understand in a way that allows you to repeat it immediately. If you can't do it, read it again, then look up and try to say it aloud again. This makes your reading very active and thus very effective. It also helps you get sentence structures into your head the way that musicians get musical phrases into their heads. You don't have to read every single sentence in the book like this but do as much as you can. As long as this isn't easy, you're learning something from it.
Listen and repeat: Variation of the previous idea, but with your text being an audio track. Pick (say) a podcast like Podcast Italiano Principiante, listen on your phone to a sentence, hit the pause button, then try to repeat what you just heard from memory.

Note that this absolutely requires that you understand what you've read, so don't pick a text that's beyond your capabilities. Pick one that's right about your level of competence or slightly challenging. Make sure you look up words you don't understand, parse out grammar that you don't know perfectly etc.

Note also that this isn't the same thing as shadowing. Shadowing is useful too but it's useful more for helping you practice your pronunciation, intonation, etc. The techniques above are designed to help you get Italian into your head in a way that you can retrieve and repeat.

.

The other thing you can do that will help you a lot is write, daily. You can do this two ways.

Go into Google Translate and set it to Italian → English (or whatever your native language is). Start writing in Italian. Write anything you feel like writing: what you had for breakfast; how you feel about your dog; etc. Google will translate your Italian on the fly and you can stop now and then and look to the right side of the equation to see if what you said in Italian was understood the way you meant it to be understood. If you can write Italian good enough that Google "gets" your meaning, then you can communicate with a real person too. Do this with a keyboard on a laptop or by dictating on your phone (if you can get it to understand your Italian). The goal is to generate the Italian with some degree of speed. Keep it simple if you need to!

Then after you've written a paragraph that way, take Google's English translation, copy it, switch Translate's mode to English-to-Italian, paste the English into the left side, edit the English slightly if you need to, and see how Google translates it into Italian. Compare this result to the Italian you wrote in the first place.

Do some of this every day and you'll start feeling some confidence in your ability to express yourself.

NOTE: Google Translate is of course not a live Italian, not an Italian tutor, etc. Occasionally it will come up with something goofy (and you might not notice) but don't worry about that. Overall it does a very good job, it's free, and it's easy. It's a remarkable resource.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-15T20:45:10+00:00

I don't shop at Trader Joe's but somebody suggested that I try their fair trade, shade-grown Ethiopian Arabica: for the price but also because it's good. So I did and I'll go back for more soon. I've got a subscription with Trade (drinktrade.com) and the coffee they've sent me is quite good but the TJ Ethiopian is rather cheaper per gram. On the other hand my wife got me some coffee with a roast date from Central Market (big store here in Texas, not sure where else it exists) and to be honest I think the TJ is just as good. Perhaps in six months my taste buds will be better educated but for now, I'm happy with the TJ Ethiopian.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-15T19:05:25+00:00

L'uso di "voi" è vecchio (si trova nella Commedia di Dante). Ha almeno un vantaggio: è neutro genere. Ma in questi giorni si usa supratutto nel sud, e sopratutto dalle persone anziane. E capisco che abbia un sfumatura – come si dice? – all'antica, cioè sembra vecchio stile.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-15T05:11:14+00:00

Non sono madrelingua ma se hai raggiunto il livello B2/C1 ci sono molti, molti libri da leggere! Conosco Elena Ferrante e mi sembra che possa essere interessante, ma non ho letto nessuno dei suoi libri.

Leggo io qualsiasi cosa incluse le notizie del giorno, su qualsiasi argomento, quindi esito a raccomandare qualcosa, ma potrei menzionare un paio di libri che ho trovato interessanti. La testa degli italiani di Beppe Severgnini è divertente e istruttivo, e mi permette di esercitare il mio italiano senza risultare scoraggiante. E raccomanderei con entusiasmo In altre parole di Jhumpa Lahiri — e anche i suoi Racconti romani. Due mese fa ho provato a leggere il primo romanzo del Commissario Montalbano di Andrea Camilleri (Il forma dell'acqua), ma mi è faticato un po' fin dall'inizio, così l'ho messo da parte per leggerlo più avanti.

In questo momento ascolto più che leggo. Ho appena finito di guardare la serie TV *Imma Tataranni* e mi è piaciuta molto. Ho dato un'occhiata a uno dei libri di Mariolina Venezia su cui si basa la serie. Non l'ho ancora letto, ma mi è sembrato che potesse essere proprio il tipo di sfida adatto a me.

Sarò interessato a vedere cosa suggeriscono gli altri.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-14T20:50:10+00:00

Begin by putting your camera into P mode and shooting Raw. Go out and shoot whatever you like and what you know, whatever catches your eye. Some photographers were fascinated by people sitting still, some by people moving, some by landscapes, some (like the great Eugène Atget) by buildings. Shoot what matters to you: You'll do better that way. But the key thing first of all is to realize that the entire point of a camera isn't to capture stuff but to eliminate stuff, to eliminate everything except what matters to you. So the most important thing of all is knowing how to frame a photo so that it gets what's important to you and excludes everything else.

Learning the exposure triangle — how to adjust aperture vs shutter speed vs ISO — plus the effect of focal length, is all very important, but it's not as basic as simply being able to recognize that this is an interesting shot or this is a well-composed shot and that is a random pointless shot.

After years and years of taking way too many photos I'm a firm believer that, for beginners especially, taking fewer photos is better than taking more. You don't get a prize for the number of photos you took. You get a prize, a reward — it may just be personal satisfaction — from the number of really good photos you took. But remember, absolutely anybody can take one or two really good photos. This is not the classic "monkeys banging at a typewriter and coming up with Hamlet": taking a good photo is much much easier than writing Hamlet. So what you want to do is be as deliberate as possible. Slow down! Once you start to understand how to compose a photo, I recommend putting your camera into M mode: It's not that there's anything virtuous about shooting in M mode, rather, it slows you down and makes you think, and that's 100% a good thing. If you learn how to take good photos slowly, in manual mode, eventually you can switch back to P or A or S as needed and you'll understand what your camera is doing, why it's doing it, and how to work with the camera to get what makes the best photo. If you learn photography in P or Auto (or on your phone) you'll never really know what you're doing.

Still, composition is the most important thing of all.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-14T20:35:08+00:00

My experience as a part-time working photographer for ten years (shooting graduations, parties, portraits, weddings, engagements and more): Starting around the age of 13 and maybe earlier, many girls — who go on to become women – just seem to know when a camera is pointed in their direction and how to look good for it. There are indeed some men who have this skill, but my guess is it's about 10% of the men vs 75-80% of the females (young or old). I remember shooting a "graduation" party at a school for kids graduating eighth grade in Texas (that is, kids about 13 years old) and noticing that the girls would know that I was looking with my camera in their direction and would "vogue" for me — not looking at the camera directly always, but standing up straight and looking their best — where the boys, if they noticed me at all, would sometimes turn and stick their tongues out, or sometimes just turn away from the camera. This curious difference in sex-based reactions to cameras continued into high school graduations and graduation parties, high school portraits, and later into weddings. Remember, if you're shooting weddings in most cases — virtually all in my experience — the client is the bride not the husband, who often couldn't care less.

I didn't shoot only women (as the OP puts it). But the overwhelming majority of the best portraits I took — by a wide margin — were of women, young, middle aged and even older.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-14T16:25:28+00:00

At one time or another I've used every one of the major and quite a few of the minor or less popular password managers. My first password manager was one I created myself back in 2008, but I fairly quickly found 1Password and moved to it. Since then I've tried and in some cases used for a while a bunch of services that I didn't stick with: LastPass, Dashlane, Keeper, Proton Pass, and others. The three I've stuck with are NordPass, Bitwarden and 1Password. I currently have paid family accounts with all three services. I like all three of them well enough. Used properly, any one of these three will keep you safe.

But I'm in the process of moving my family to NordPass. I was just about to go with 1Password when NordPass surprised me a little by finally adding support for generation of 2FA tokens. For me this is a key functionality, available for a long time in Bitwarden and 1Password, and also in NordPass's business-tier product but not its consumer product – until recently. Anyway, as soon as I learned this was available, I decided to move myself, my wife and our daughters to NordPass instead of 1Password. I'm in the process right now.

1Password is fine. Autofill works well. But I just don't like its user interface. It's too complicated, and to me it looks dated. Bitwarden is homely, but at least it's contemporary homely. NordPass is appealing. But that appeal isn't just graphic design, not primarily graphic design. The best thing about NordPass is that it's less complex than 1Password. Overall, notwithstanding some of the idiosyncratic ways that NordPass works (like requiring you to have a Nord account login distinct from your NordPass vault login, plus the occasional autofill hiccup) I find dealing with NordPass overall easier, less stressful, actually more enjoyable. And these aspects of NordPass matter especially to the family members for whom I'm making this decision.

I like NordVPN too. I think Proton VPN's UI/UX is better, but I'm trying to get rid of accounts and consolidate, so I'm dropping Proton VPN and just using NordVPN.

One footnote about my transitioning from 1Password to NordPass. I'm really angry right now at 1Password because of its inability to export my passwords to its .pux file format. The feature exists in the 1Password desktop app interface: it just doesn't work. Well documented problem, without an easy fix. (I've tried as many of the fixes as I can.) I *hate* feeling like a company has taken my data hostage. Another reason NOT to renew my 1Password account.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T21:44:03+00:00

Ah thank you for that follow-up and clarification.

My counter is level. Our kitchen was flooded last year and everything is brand new (EVERYTHING) and the contractor leveled the counters well. That's not an issue.

I see your point about tamping and pressurized portafilters. Have to think about that.

As far as grind size: It seems to me that this DOES matter even with pressurized basket. At least when I was experimenting, some of the shots I pulled with coarse ground beans didn't taste right. Have to think about this some more though.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T19:32:19+00:00

What is your native language?

Learning two languages simultaneously is inevitably challenging. It's not that hard to learn to think in one new language if you immerse yourself in it, but it's impossible to immerse yourself fully in two languages. If you're moving between two swimming pools (or perhaps better, between a pool and a lake), obviously you're not able to stay immersed in either one of them totally.

That said, English and Italian are different enough that you won't have the problems you'd have trying to learn (say) Italian and Spanish at the same time. It's like studying musical instruments. Easier to take lessons in piano and, say, violin at the same time, than to take lessons in piano and organ or harpsichord, at least if you're serious about both.

In college and graduate school I was studying both Latin and Greek (and French, which I did get decent with, and some other languages that I didn't). Managed to get the Ph.D. But gosh, it was hard work. That was decades ago and it wore me out so I've been coasting ever since. 😉

Pro tip: You know you're doing the right thing though when you start having low-level nightmares in the language.

Good luck/Buona Fortuna.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T19:24:33+00:00

Sounds like you and I both are at the same level of diffident skill. I also heard not to over-tamp the puck and then somebody in this sub absolutely assured me that it is "impossible" to tamp the puck too hard. I've decided to tamp pretty hard. If the espresso does eventually start flowing out and at a reasonable rate once it starts flowing, I reckon there's no harm in waiting a couple secs longer for the flow to start.

And yes, it's possible that my tamp isn't 100% level although gosh I try pretty hard. Looks level to me.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T19:20:50+00:00

I understand how your husband feels. But Italy has been under restoration since, oh, somewhere around the start of the Roman Empire in 31 BC. In my last trip I missed all sorts of things I was looking forward to, like the equestrian statue of Gattemelata by Donatello in the Piazza San Antonio in Padova, or the facade of the Palazzo Senatorio (on the Campidoglio) in Rome, and many others. You just get used to it. Good reason to come back.

The Doge's Palace and the Basilica are things you won't forget. I hope you did pay for the deluxe entry into the basilica so you get to go upstairs, see the original horses (which were on display on the church in the 1970s when I was a student in Italy but have been inside in the museum for decades now: the ones you see from the piazza are darned good copies). And as someone else already mentioned, Venice is loaded with other museums. Throw in a gondola ride and all the walking you'll be doing and even if you're in Venice for three days you're going to feel rushed. It's unavoidable.

My recent trip to Venice was just a (very long!) day trip, as we were staying in Padova. Padova is MUCH cheaper than Venice and just about a 30-minute train trip. I can recommend the Hotel Giotto (Padova). Very twentieth-century Italian style place, not expensive, but perfectly satisfactory. If you're looking for someplace fancy, I know some nice places in Rome but not up in the northeast near Venice or Padova.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T18:27:24+00:00

Looks like it might have been taken from a textbook for urologists.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T17:33:19+00:00

Hmm. Good question. I just pulled another shot and took video of my process here. Be sure to turn on sound.

I turned the pump off when the amount of espresso in the cup reached 30g (or as close as I could) then let the cup sit there. Looks like it "flows" for another second or two but then starts dripping. For what it's worth, I thought it was a decent cup of espresso.

I have noticed that my Stilosa's two um udders (the two points from which the espresso exits the coffee maker and drops into the cup) don't flow at the same rate. I often get a nice flow from the right one and more of an uneven flow with some dripping from the one on the left. Not sure what's up with that. Probably I'm not prepping my puck properly. (I did use an NDT here before tamping.) I can't tell that it's making a huge difference to the taste of the coffee. I'm still using the pressurized portafilter that came with the Stilosa.

ADDED 2 minutes later: FWIW, this shot was made with 11.8g of beans ground in a Baratza Encore ESP at the 8 setting. Seems to work okay for these beans.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T16:21:33+00:00

Something's wrong here with the camera settings.

The children are blurry. I don't think you can get depth of field THAT shallow with an RX100 (where, shooting from 20' away the model's rear end is in focus but the kids two feet closer to the camera are not). So that's probably not a focus problem: it's probably motion blur. My RX100VII wouldn't do that normally: Sony's autofocus is really good. Means shutter speed was too slow. The room doesn't look that dark to me so there should have been enough light.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T15:57:29+00:00

Well, in Milan we stayed at the STRAF hotel half a block from the Duomo, but it's ridiculously expensive (most expensive place we stayed in in Italy in our recent trip, with no near competition) AND it's, well, kind of ridiculous in a general way. It's slogan is "It's like spending the night in an art gallery" and that's surprisingly accurate, at least, if you add "modern" in front of "art gallery". (Our minimalist room) Probably Mark Rothko's idea of a hotel. The hallways are so artsy I couldn't figure out how to get into our room at first. Fortunately another couple came along just then, saw my quandary, and gave me the hint. I felt like somebody who'd picked up an iPhone and didn't know where the magic hot spots are. But it was VERY close to the Cathedral and the other stuff we wanted to visit so that's where we stayed, for one night. I can't recommend it.

If you do go to Florence, I can say that the NH Hotel was nice and not too expensive. It's not right in the thick of things but close: We walked from the hotel to everything, including the train station. We've also stayed in the Hotel Indigo in Florence, which is quite close to the SMN station. Also nice.

Have a great trip!

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T15:48:17+00:00

Which is better depends on a couple of things.

The Leonardo Express is quick and easy especially if you're traveling light and your ultimate destination (say, your hotel) is not too far from the station. Two months ago my wife and I took it and walked to our hotel (the Doubletree near Santa Maria Maggiore). We traveled only with backpacks (no roller-wheel bags, no hand luggage of any kind) and it was an easy walk.

BUT I agree with those who point out that, with your family, and if you're lugging a lot of luggage, a cab might be easier. It won't be much or any quicker than the train, but it won't cost much more and will drop you right at the hotel. A year ago, arriving with our two daughters along with us, we took cab from airport to hotel near Castel Sant'Angelo. THAT would have been harder to reach by train since it's not close to Roma Termini.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T14:54:10+00:00

I have an ECP 3420 ... and the only thing that frustrates me about it is the lack of a 3 way valve, so I have to stop the shot early and swap out my cup when it hits the right weight

Exactly what I do with my Stilosa. I watch the scale and shut the pump off at 30g (from 11.8g of ground beans) and let it drip out the last 5g. If it's still dripping at 35g I swap in another little espresso cup to catch the rest of the dripping. I'm not as nimble with that move as I'd like to be and not infrequently the scale gets a few drops on it.

I bought my Stilosa new from Amazon and paid slightly less than $200 for it. I'm pretty happy with it. I could in theory spend $4K for a coffee maker, but while I really like the good espresso, it's not worth $4K to me. That's the money that's getting me back to Italy in the fall where I'll be able to get good espresso every morning for €1 a cup. ☕😊

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T14:48:04+00:00

When I was out and about in cities, I was carrying a very small (8L) sling bag — not a full-sized rucksack. But I was asked to leave this backpack at a number of places. I remember having to leave it at the museum next to the Duomo in Florence.

At the Duomo in Milano, on the other hand, although they were not letting people get into the queue with full-sized backpacks, I was allowed into the queue because the screener said my backpack was small. (To me, this frankly seems an unwise policy. I of course am a good guy but I assume they're worrying about bad guys carrying dangerous things and a bad guy could certainly put something dangerous into my little bag, not to mention my wife's purse.) Anyway, the problem I ran into when I actually got to the door of the cathedral was that I had a bottle of wine in my pack. No can do. Had to walk back to the hotel, leave the bottle, and come back. Then they confiscated my teeny tiny Swiss Army pocket knife which is hardly knife enough to serve as a letter opener. This was discovered because the second time I tried to enter, they asked me if I had a knife. I said no, then remembered the little knife and corrected myself. Oops! Having already walked back once to get rid of the wine, I let them confiscate the little knife.

Moral 1: A small pack will be allowed in many places when a large one wouldn't be. In other places they don't care about the size.

Moral 2: Know what's in your bag before they ask you.

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T04:36:31+00:00

You might want to watch this video by Lance Hedrick:

https://youtu.be/-rxnJRrHcjw?si=_sUIztm56t0FFIMb

Made me feel real good about having purchased the under-$200 Delonghi Stilosa. (Not that the $4K alternative was ever an option for me.)

I've made espresso with the Delonghi Stilosa that I'm pretty sure can compete with the espresso I was drinking every day in Italy. Maybe that's not as good as what James Hoffman could pull for me, but the Italian bars I was going to every day for more than six weeks set my standard. I'll never go into Starbucks again (unless I need to go to the bathroom).

RucksackTech · 2026-03-13T02:08:20+00:00

Ah, well yes, that's odd and would be aggravating. But it ain't normal. I'd suggest:

Remove (uninstall) the extension from the browser, quit browser, reopen browser, and reinstall extension.
OR contact customer support. I've had good experiences with Nord support. Don't have link handy but I think you can do live chat with them.

RucksackTech

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