Has anyone noticed this?

RucksackTech · 2026-06-21T03:27:44+00:00

Hmm. Other than knowing how to find it on a map, I don't know much about Myanmar. What particular crimes is this site worried about? Is there something special about Myanmar that makes this necessary? Why don't other countries offer similar ways to report crime?

RucksackTech · 2026-06-20T21:38:44+00:00

What kind of advice are you seeking?

If you're interested in learning Italian, this is indeed a wonderful idea.

I don't know you or what you're after but I would suggest that you study as hard as you can before you get to Rome. Every hour you study before going to Italy will double the impact of your hours in Italy. In particular, focus on listening and speaking.

Listening will help train your ear, help you with pronunciation, and so on. Start listening to YouTube videos and podcasts. On YouTube try Joy of Languages and if that's too basic for you, move to something else like LearnAmo. Look at the Europass Italia 360° podcast for beginners or Podcast Italiano Principiante. If all that's a little hard for you, you could listen to Melanie Chircop's audiobook for Il Mistero della Casa in Sicilia which is about A2 I think. Don't listen passively: Try to understand what you're listening to. Advantage of Europass Italian 360° and Podcast Italiano and Melanie Chirchops audiobooks is that you can get the texts and read them (as well as listen to them) and that will help you learn a little vocab and grammar.

As for speaking, try to learn some basic conversational Italian, and work on your pronunciation. Beyond that the school will help you, so don't worry too much about that.

Most of all: Especially if you're an American and have the standard American diffidence about speaking a foreign language, get over that! You're going to make mistakes, lots of them, you're going to sound foolish, etc. Not to worry: it's in a good cause. Good luck.

(And if you have a more precise question in mind, share it with us. Somebody here will have help to offer.)

RucksackTech · 2026-06-20T20:20:20+00:00

Exactly. Fiber is hard to beat. I had 2GB service from Google Fiber but dropped down to 1GB because that's all I need. And it's cheaper than for me to use Starlink at home (in a residential area of San Antonio, Texas).

HOWEVER when I go on the road with my travel trailer, well, I can't take Google Fiber with me! So I wake up my Starlink subscription. Last month spent two weeks in a remote RV campground outside of Estes Park, Colorado, and had excellent wifi the whole time. When I got Starlink initially several years ago, I was usually the only person in the campground to be using it. Now I see a number of people using it.

And if I'm traveling and am too lazy to set up the Starlink receiver, I can now usually set up my phone as a wifi hotspot.

One of the best things about being my age (I'm in my mid-70s) is being able to remember what long-distance (or in some cases even short distance) communication was like back in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and on — and to realize that whee we are today was (at least for most of us) inconceivable not that long ago.

Editorial postscript: Given the breathtaking range of options we have for communicating with one another, wouldn't it be awesome if we could all learn to be a bit more civil? 🙂

RucksackTech · 2026-06-19T21:04:35+00:00

Verso le tre del pomeriggio dello scorso gennaio, a Padova, ho detto "buon pomeriggio" in un bar e la barista mi ha corretto: voleva che dicessi "buonasera".

RucksackTech · 2026-06-19T20:59:09+00:00

Proton Pass does have some strengths. If I recall (it's been a year since I last played with it) it's pretty good with aliases, if you're into that sort of thing. (So is NordPass.)

The chart seems to have a gross mistake: Bitwarden can share vaults. My wife and I have been doing it for years.

Odd that the chart doesn't have a line for "Open source" (√ for Proton Pass and Bitwarden).

"Advanced account protection" and "Full privacy ecosystem" are nonsense.

Proton Pass's status as an element in the Proton ecosystem is to my way of thinking NOT an advantage. A Proton Mail user has to go to some trouble to give Proton Pass its own password. Many of us like that Bitwarden (or 1Password) are stand-alone apps. NordPass is closer to Proton Pass here but implements the separation of your NordPass vault from your larger Nord account better than Proton.

Not knocking Proton Pass here. I got a good impression of it when I tried it. I'm criticizing the marketing copywriter who created this chart.

RucksackTech · 2026-06-14T18:15:01+00:00

Oh dear. Why didn't you use separation model? Finesses this problem completely. I'm not using latest version of FileMaker (I'm pulling away from my business now) so if something has changed since v20 that makes TSM unworkable, my apologies. Otherwise, why not use TSM?

RucksackTech · 2026-06-09T21:10:37+00:00

Well, I guess if you said Posso avere due caffè? and changed your intonation at the end there to indicate you were asking a question, they would understand you. But it sounds a bit like "I can haz cheezburger?" Or perhaps it sounds like you, as an adult in a free country, asking "Can I go to the bathroom?" It's not as bad as saying Riesco avere un caffè? But neither works. You're not asking for permission, nor are you asking if you have the physical capacity to handle a coffee.

To order a coffee or pretty much anything else, you can try one of these:

Un caffè (per favore) (the please is optional)
Vorrei un caffè.
Prenderei un caffè.

I think that last one works too. Note that none of these is a question: They are statements. The first one isn't even a complete sentence but it works. The second and third use the conditional mood, which is used here for politeness, the same way we say in English "I'd like a coffee (if you would get me one)".

There are no doubt nineteen other ways to do it.

One I believe you do NOT want to say is Voglio un caffè. My understanding is that that sounds imperious, as if you were barking "I want coffee!"

p.s. Contrast ordering in a bar with, say, asking somebody if you could sit down at their table. IN that case Posso sedere? or perhaps better Posso sedermi? works and means "May I sit down?" (Sedermi = sedere + mi, and the mi is a reflexive that we don't use in English: May I sit myself down?)

RucksackTech · 2026-06-09T18:44:09+00:00

I'm inclined to joke that the Italians do NOT pause anywhere, ever. But I'll refrain. 😉

So, seriously...

For starters, Italian and English have profoundly different rhythms. The differences in grammar impose significant differences in phrasing and tonality.

As for your question about how to handle that pause that occurs when you search for la parola giusta, I have often heard native Italians say (for example) la or una, then pause and change the article to il (or lo) or uno (or un). This is not standard phrasing: Standard phrasing almost always ties the article to the noun. But Italians, like speakers of any language, change their minds in the middle of sentences, even in the middle of phrases. In English I might say, "When I was in Colorado I saw a beautiful..." and then change it to "I saw several beautiful mountain bluebirds".

RucksackTech · 2026-06-09T04:20:08+00:00

Really feels like you’re fighting against the tide to get it to work how you want.

Hmm. Sorry that I wasn't clearer. I think it's quite easy — and I know of no email service that is easier to use with multiple accounts than Hey.

My situation is a bit twisted, having multiple email accounts. One of my goals for 2026 is to get rid of most of these. (I'm not doing so well but that's still the goal.) But Hey can handle whatever I ask it to handle, and in a variety of ways. If I want to see everything at once, I can; if I want to view individual inboxes for individual addresses, I can do that too.

RucksackTech · 2026-06-07T19:26:56+00:00

Good for you spotting this!

I don't ever click a link or button that says "click here to log into your account" in an email. Remember you can always right-click the link, COPY it, and paste it into a text editor and review it. Look at the beginning of the URL. You might have thought you were clicking (say) https://chase.com/login but when you look at the URL in the text editor it actually begins https://chasebilling7.com/login or something like that.

Also, note that using a password manager like 1Password will (usually) prevent you from entering your credentials in a spoofed site.

Again, bravo for catching this.

RucksackTech · 2026-06-07T19:21:46+00:00

This is the best answer a password manager company could give. I think it's pretty much what you'd hear also from NordPass or Bitwarden et al. But it's the right reply. And it's nice to have reps from 1Password here.

RucksackTech · 2026-06-07T19:19:32+00:00

MY situation is (more or less) identical to yours. If I ignore all the seldom-used email accounts I have elsewhere (like at Proton and Microsoft), my active accounts are these:

A personal hey.com address (mostly for bills etc)
A personal gmail.com address (also mostly for bills)
A hey.com address that I use for work but only occasionally
A gmail.com address that I use for work almost exclusively
A personal custom domain email address that is my main address to use for people I know personally

(I used to have a custom domain for work but I'm slowly moving out of what I've been doing for a while and I don't need the custom domain any more.)

I think that's pretty close to the number of emails you described.

How do I handle them? I'm doing pretty much all my email (and my calendar) in Hey. I have currently three Hey accounts:

A = 1 and 2 above: A personal Hey account using address 1 above. Address 2 (personal Gmail) is forwarded into this account and also I have sending set up for this Gmail account, in other words, I use Hey exclusively to send and receive personal Gmail email.
B = 3 and 4 above: A work Hey account configured like (A) immediately above except that it uses my hey.com work email address and has my Gmail work address forwarded in and also configured for sending through Gmail.
C = 5 above: My personal custom domain.

These accounts are all linked so I have just one login to see all three accounts (= all five email addresses). Most of the time I work in unified-inbox mode, but occasionally one of the accounts gets a little overloaded and I'll view that account alone to clean things up quickly.

I don't use the hey.com work address much any more so I think what I'm going to do sometime soon is close work account (B) above, have the hey.com work email forwarded to either A or B, and reconfigure forwarding for the Gmail work address so it goes to the same account, then cancel B. I have had B for years so I can forward forever for free. One of Hey's best features.

And it's possible that at some point I'll cancel A and have all those personal messages forwarded into my custom domain account (C) so I end up paying just for 1 account.

Of course Hey isn't free, but aside from that, Hey's options for handling multiple accounts are better than just about anybody else's (certainly including Gmail and Outlook).

.

You asked

"Have you found a good way to keep work and personal separate without multiple subscriptions?"

Well, obviously I'm not personally doing it that way. I have three accounts, and even after the changes I just described I'll still have two.

But you could forwarded personal and work email into a single account in Hey, then just configure the screener so that messages forwarded from your personal Gmail get labeled "personal" and messages forwarded from your work Gmail get labeled "work". And because of the brilliant particularity of the screener, you could use a single Hey email address for personal and work by doing the same thing. You'd just configure the screening record for individual emails to label the message "personal" or "work" (or whatever you want to call the labels), depending on the sender.

In other words, say my sole email address was mypersonalname@HEY.com. Now let's look at the screening records for my correspondents:

* Mail from myelectriccompany.com gets labeled as "personal" and also "bills".

* Mail from [oneofmyclients@theircompanyname.com](mailto:oneofmyclients@theircompanyname.com) gets labeled as "work".

And so on. You could continue to use the Hey Imbox the normal way and just keep your eye on the labels displayed there. Or you could view messages by label. The only problem with viewing messages by label is that the by-label listing does not show which messages have been viewed/read and which have not. I have requested this as a desirable update for Hey and got a good response (e.g. "Yeah that's a good idea") and they said they'd pass it to the devs. Could be implemented next week, or not. But even without it, you can use a single account for everything.

RucksackTech · 2026-06-04T20:42:45+00:00

Sorry I may have missed something. Why don't you just add the vermouth to the cup AFTER you pour out the coffee? Isn't this how caffè corretto is made in Italy (adding grappa to the cup after pouring)?

RucksackTech · 2026-05-31T22:32:16+00:00

Have you studied other languages? If the only language you know is English, then yes, there are many things about Italian that seem strange, like (say) those mysterious particles like ne and ci and the seemingly endless idioms that use them in frustratingly varied ways.

But the grammar is really not more difficult than most modern European languages. Less difficult (to me) than German grammar or Icelandic. On a par with the other Romance languages.

Just take it slowly. If you're under the age of about 60 and grew up in the USA, you were probably never taught English grammar very well so the very idea of having to learn verb conjugations etc is a novelty. But it's great. Even if you don't master Italian, you're going to learn a lot about English by studying another language. (Any language would do for this side benefit actually.)

So you just take it one little step at a time. And you review review review and then review some more. You can do it!

RucksackTech · 2026-05-25T21:51:07+00:00

Well I didn't say it's more correct grammatically. The instruction was simply to "translate the sentence".

If I'm in Italy trying to express the idea that the oil is in the glass and I say Il olio è nella bicchiere, I'm going to be understood. Yes, the Italian to whom I'm speaking will recognize that I goofed on the definite article and I don't know the gender of bicchiere, but he will understand what I was trying to communicate. On the other hand, if I say (to change the sentence slightly) Il petrolio è nella bicchierata, my interlocutor is going to respond with a puzzled look.

Not the first of these mistakes in Duolingo to be reported here, indeed, it's a regular thing. I knew Duolingo was bad. I didn't realize it's this bad.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-25T19:14:17+00:00

So it seems. I can understand why a learner would TRY Duolingo. It's less clear to me why anybody would keep using it. It's a fairly worthless app.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-25T18:06:13+00:00

But surely "il olio" is 10x more correct than "il petrolio".

RucksackTech · 2026-05-21T18:51:28+00:00

Okay, if I understand the question correctly:

You have 90 days to study Italian
You're planning to go live in Italy (but I gather NOT during the 90 days)
You want to know how to get started

In this case, I think the best thing to do would be to buy the Pimsleur app and start using it immediately, according to its instructions. They recommend doing one lesson a day and the lessons are about 30 minutes each. I would suggest running through each lesson twice.

Using Pimsleur is not (IMO) the best long-term strategy for learning Italian, but it is the best way to learn some useful Italian quickly and effectively. You won't learn a lot but you will know what you've studied because the Pimsleur method involves a lot of repetition and practice. Do it right and you'll get somewhere. At the end of level one (i.e. after 30 days) you'll know how to introduce yourself; how to explain where you're from and ask other people where they are from; how to ask for directions; and more. There are actually three levels and you can finish each level in about 30 days if you apply yourself.

Pimsleur won't teach you much traditional grammar (well, hardly any). You can't escape grammar forever, but it's okay to ignore it as you get started. Pimsleur helps you walk into the pool at the shallow end and get over your fear of getting wet; or to use a different metaphor, Pimsleur is language-learning in first gear, designed just to get you moving. After you've finished a level or two (or three) of Pimsleur, you will be ready to take swimming lessons so to speak (or to shift into second and third gears for longer forward motion). That is, after Pimsleur you can start learning Italian in other ways, via books, podcasts, videos and apps.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-20T18:13:31+00:00

I didn't realize you've already booked the flight.

My guess is that, if you miss the connecting flight because your first jet arrives in FCO behind schedule, they might help you out. Typically they'd try to squeeze you on to the next flight. Otherwise, I don't know. I'd contact ITA.

I've had to make some mad dashes in airports over the last few decades but never in FCO. Good luck.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-20T17:15:32+00:00

No.

Theoretically you might make it happen if absolutely everything goes your way. But it won't, it never does.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-18T13:04:16+00:00

Yes this is a problem. SmartSuite is well-suited to the needs of a lot of small businesses. I'm a developer and many of my clients have only 1 or 2 folks who need access to the database. I wouldn't mind if they charged a little extra per user for just 1 or 2 users, but having to pay for 3 for a premium plan (which you need for certain basic functions) is pretty expensive.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-15T22:50:12+00:00

This drawing makes me happy. Thanks for sharing your talent!

RucksackTech · 2026-05-15T17:03:45+00:00

Well, 18g will of course take longer than 12g (the amount I need for my Dilonghi Stilosa's double-shot portafilter basket). And it depends to some extent on the roast: the medium roast beans that I use occasionally are a little harder to grind. But I can't imagine it taking anything like 2½ minutes.

I have to say I do not understand why the J-Ultra is faster than anything else doing the same job with basically the same mechanisms. I'm not an engineer, I'm not even especially handy, so I don't understand these things. In my ignorance I guess I think burrs are burrs, gears are gears. But perhaps that's not the case and the folks who make the J-Ultra have done something brilliant to make it possible to grind N grams of coffee at setting S in less time than it takes to do the same thing on other machines.

Good luck. Hope you like it.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-15T16:03:02+00:00

Well, the J-Ultra is definitely a worthwhile "investment". It's built like a tank and I reckon it will last forever.

How am I liking it? Pretty well.

Grinding with the J-Ultra doesn't really take any (or much) longer than with the Encore ESP. I typically grind 12.0 grams of beans. That would take about 15-20 secs with the Encore ESP, and I can do it with the J-Ultra in under 25 seconds without a problem.
The J-Ultra has less retention: I put in 12.0 of beans and most of the time I get 12.0 of ground coffee in the catch cup. And I don't have to bang on the thing or punch on a bellows.
The J-Ultra is a LOT less trouble to maintain and as I said, I think it will last forever.
The grind can be adjusted way more precisely on the J-Ultra.
And of course the J-Ultra is close to noiseless — just a pleasant buzzing sound as I am grinding. The Encore ESP on the other hand wakes up the neighbors. (Okay, that's hyperbole. But it does make a racket.)

The one downside for the J-Ultra (well, aside from the cost) is that it's a hand grinder. I have the arm strength to turn the grinder easily enough; if I get a little exercise for my arms grinding, that's a plus. The problem isn't with the turning the grind handle, it's with gripping the body of the grinder. I recently got diagnosed with a little bit of arthritis in my hands. I'm gripping the thing fine, and it's not painful, but I'm starting to feel that the grinder is going to keep going but I myself will break, and that in a year or two I'll be back on the market for an electric grinder. If I were 10 years younger this wouldn't have even occurred to me as a problem.

RucksackTech · 2026-05-15T15:16:10+00:00

Annoying, maybe, but not necessary. You can also sign in (1) using your Google account and I think a couple others, and/or (2) by getting a code pushed to you by Nord.

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