Google Meet as an alternative to Zoom

Google Meet as an alternative to Zoom

Due to political and other reasons many people are weaning away from using Zoom as the preferred platform for video conferences and online meetings. Google Meet is emerging as an alternative. Here are some details.

Google Meet is actually a part of Gsuite, a fee based service for educational institutions and companies. Others who are having just Google accounts, say gmail, are also allowed to use free basic version of Google Meet with some limitations.

Google Meet is free for an hour long meeting for basic plan where no payment is involved.

You need to have a google account, say gmail if you want to join a meeting. You need a laptop or a PC, smartphone, OR ipad  with internet connection. Microphone and speakers and camera are essential. It will be a video meeting where all participants  can be seen. Smartphone is convenient as it has audio and video built in.  Persons using Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari browsers will have no problems. If you are using Internet Explorer, please download “Google Video Support plugin or App” from Play Store.  If using smartphone, downloading Google Meet APP will be useful but not essential. Headphone with in built microphone  is also very useful. If speakers on your pc or laptop are of low sound you may attach external speakers.

Even Gmail only users can also start or host a meeting. Such a host has certain advantages. He has to send the meeting ID to all whom he wants to participate. This may be done via WhatsApp, SMS, Email etc. Anyone so invited can join the meeting by clicking the link having meeting ID. 

Meeting participants may speak, chat using text messages among themselves and share their screen. The last one is very useful. You can share a tab from your browser. For instance you may run a short video from YouTube so that everyone can watch it. From your computer you can make a PowerPoint presentation.   Sharing a tab from your browser automatically turns on the audio playing if any.  One might turn captions on: this makes a running narration of the speech in text format on the screen. Those having hearing problem may benefit by this.

To get started go to https://meet.google.com Click Start a meeting. Then invite friends who are free. Learn by exploring options on the screen one by one. Happy online meetings!

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knowledge Nugget - Copy paste from websites

How to copy / paste from difficult web pages?

Generally when I spot an interesting story or news item to be circulated among friends in my groups, I do a select, copy & paste job. Before sending an email of the story, I prefer removing pictures, advertisements and giving a clean "text only" copy in a comfortable font size. I make sure that the complete URL linking to the original source is always included. Some websites will prevent you from doing a select, copy and paste operation. For example when you try Times of India newspaper, it will allow you to do 'copy and paste' but the end result will be just a link to the web page! This is frustrating. 

To circumvent TOI from preventing me copy / paste, I have a browser plugin called "Enable Right Click". On any page where websites prevent me from copy paste I use this plugin. 

Often a website may present advertisements that will obscure the main text. In order to remove all unwanted extras and read only the main text I use another browser plugin called "Just Read". Plain text is presented to you in a new window. You can do a select copy and paste operation from here. 

In the case of images / photos / pdf files copy / paste may not work. Selecting the text part may be difficult. In such cases I use "Snipping tool" to select a portion of the screen to be converted to an image (jpg) and saved on my disk. 

Most tricky and treacherous to handle web pages come from the Express group of publications.   I am calling them treacherous because, even a careless mouse over some unwanted space on your screen will lead you to some useless advertiser. There are still a few websites that I haven't figured out how to tackle them. More, as I learn. For now, bye. 

Dr P Vyasamoorthy
30 Gruhalakshmi colony Secunderabad 500015
040-29552016 / 09490804278 / 8179386472

Confidence and stupidity are a very dangerous combination, but they often go together.