Have a good weekend in North Wales Ruth. My parents used to have a house in the next door village of Rhiwlas (birthplace of Manon Steffan Ros but otherwise fairly nondescript), and I also have fond childhood memories of sitting in the car in Llanberis carpark watching as the rain lashed down over Llyn Padarn. Also Pete’s Eats for mugs of tea and hearty food but I suppose you’ll have to stay out of cafés at the moment…
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As for meetup times I’m happy with the current ones. If I’m on an early shift then 3:30 pm would also work some day, but I imagine that might not be convenient for others. Mornings/middayish are probably better on the whole for me.
I’d better install Slack and get myself an account so I’m all ready!
PS I should be available on Friday 27th to try a virtual meetup if others are around.
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Yes, have a great weekend Ruth! I’ll be in Trefor (Pen Llŷn) over the weekend so hoping there’ll be some reasonable weather for both of us 
Seems to be a popular place - I met a couple from Rhiwlas on the Patagonia tour and, coincidentally, the owner of the guest house where we stayed in Gaiman told us her grandparents had come over to Patagonia from Rhiwlas - and their house was only a couple of doors away from where Donna and Gweu live now (although maybe none of the houses in Rhiwlas are more than a couple of doors apart )
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bore da,
is someone able to explain how i would join the Oxford group chats on Slack please? I have Slack installed although have not used it yet but i could only see the generic group video sessions.
hopefully i’ll be able to join one soon 
Diolch yn fawr
Brian.
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Hi Brian - have you already joined the WelshSpeakingPractice Slack group? If you have you should see #oxford-rhydychen-ssiw listed. I tried to add you as @Brian-15 but it coudn’t find you, which makes me think that maybe you’re not listed as a member yet. I’m a bit rusty myself on Slack but if you’re still having trouble let me know and I’ll see if I can sort it out
Cofion gorau, John
thanks John, I am signed up to the ‘free’ version of Slack which is called SSiW 6/6 support I can access group chats through this but cant see the oxford group listed anywhere.
I’m wondering if I need to access a different workspace??? Is your Slack workspace called the same or is this specific to the 6 month course i signed up too??
I think maybe it is different. The login I’ve used via the web browser is at
https://slack.com/signin and you just need to use WelshSpeakingPractice as the group, i.e. it’s WelshSpeakingPractice.slack.com
my password wont allow me to access that Slack group 
I have posted on the Slack forum to see if anyone has any ideas. do you remember if you had to receive an invite to join it or how you got your password?
Hi Brian. To access Welsh Speaking Practice section of Slack you need to email admin@saysomethingin.com with WSP in the subject and ask if they can grant you access. It should hopefully pop in there for you then.
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Having a bit of a virtual day today 
After some Slack dabbling for Brian, the GoToMeeting virtual choir practice worked quite well in its own terms, i.e. under the control of our conductor singing to demonstrate/playing tracks for each voice, but seemed to be a gobbledegook problem if we all had our microphones switched on, so they were muted with us individually singing along with Steff or the pre-recorded track - enough to go away with to practise at home but not ideal for SSiW meetups.
Earlier I was in a virtual college meeting with Zoom. That worked well and seemed more intuitive than GoToMeeting and more flexible, though we had to turn off mikes and video unless saying something to avoid crashing the system - they were expecting a lot of people to “attend” though with 160 in the end people so the concern was understandable,
So I’m thinking if Slack doesn’t work for all of us, maybe Zoom
would be a better alternative than GoToMeeting
?
Hwyl, John
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Well, I’m glad that the virtual choir had some success even if you were not able to sing together properly.
From Monday, I shall be attempting to attend Pilates classes via Zoom. If that works then I shall have some experience to contribute. From a quick preliminary look, I think that you can have small groups free for up to about 40 minutes or so.
Sue
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… or Zumba via Zoom 
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Is anyone planning to be on Slack at 12:00 today?
Sue
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Sorry, I’d like to @Betterlatethan but I’m afraid I won’t be available at that time
Cofion gorau, John
I should be able to
Does anyone know how to start a hangout session? I am trying to find out at the moment.
Sue
Edited to add -
Just found this
- Click the down arrow next to your Slack team name
- From the menu select “Apps & Custom Integrations”
- Use the search bar to find “Google+ Hangouts”
- Select the team you would like to which you would like to add the integration
- Click “Add Google+ Hangouts integration”
- When in Slack just type /hangout to prompt the Hangouts bot to generate the link to the Hangout
- Once in the Hangout enter a channel name on the right sidebar to send them the link to join
Forget the first part of that - it seems that you go to the Hangouts channel and take it from there.
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Setting up the hangout on the laptop seemed OK. I could hear Brian but he couldn’t hear me. Having failed to get microphone working, I decided to switch off and on again. What do you know? Windows is now doing a lengthy update.
Possibility - I have no camera on my PC but I do have a microphone attached. I shall attempt to join the hangout sound only. May take a while.
Sue
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We have another couple of virtual meetups scheduled this week
- 10:30am tomorrow, Wednesday 25 March (Cafe Home-brew maybe? ) via Slack
- 12:00 Friday 27 March (in your lounge bar? ) via Slack or Zoom t.b.c.
We’ll persist with Slack for tomorrow’s meeting and see how that experience goes before deciding on what to use on Friday being guided by which may be easiest for anyone who may be less confident in using technology for video meetups. Let me have any views/thoughts/fears/ suggestions you may have - via PM if you prefer - don’t be shy!
Hwyl a chadw’n iach, John
PS 
Bee-in-bonnet Why do companies persist in giving their own name to apps/software with essentially the same basic function? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way ) I’m thinking of e.g. Google’s “hangout”, MS Teams etc - shall we just call them all video meetup tools?
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Re-posted, this time in the right place.
First you need to be on Welsh Speaking Practice on Slack.
Here is an extract from Catrin’s post.
"So here is an explanation of what it is and some instructions on how to get involved…
Slack / WSP (Welsh Speaking Practice)
Slack is an online communications platform and SSiW have a group on there called Welsh Speaking Practice (WSP). The group is open to anyone of any level who want to practice their Welsh with other learners and members of the SSiW team either via audio, or audio and video links.
You can get slack here .
If you would like to become a member of the Slack WSP community, you need to be ‘invited’ to the group - to do this you simply send an email to admin@saysomethingin.com with WSP in the title and you’ll be sent an invite."
Once you have Slack/WSP open on your device, down the left hand side, purple coloured navigation bar, you’ll see a list of headings/places you can go to called Channels . When you click on the headings you’ll find yourselves in different channels of conversation. One of them is called Hangouts and this is where you’ll get news of pending video chat sessions and how to get involved in them. If you don’t want to get involved with group chats, you can personally set up one to one video/audio chats. As with the SSiW forum you can also direct/private message other members through Slack."
(End of Catrin’s extract)
How do you get back there after you have signed out? A sensible person would bookmark it, but I didn’t… I think this URL: welshspeakingpractice.slack.com gets you back.
One of these headings on the left is oxford-rhydychen-ssiw. @johnwilliams_6 set this up, and we can exchange messages there.
Attempting to start the hangout, I went the the hangouts heading on the left. In the message area at the bottom I typed /hangout
After that I’m not at all sure what happened. I probably clicked everything in sight. I suspect that I was trying to join the hangout when I was already there and I got in a complete muddle. Anyway, I made contact with Brian, though I am not sure if we were in a hangout or just talking to each other. It was a failure because my microphone didn’t work although we could see each other. Sorry if @owen-mcknight was trying to join - we didn’t see you. I then moved to a different PC and managed to reconnect to Brian. We talked but he couldn’t see me. Unsurprising - no camera.
I can’t really explain better than that, being a novice at such things, and still with no working microphone on the laptop.
Sue
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