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The Blog

This blog focuses on Google products and technologies, living in the cloud, astronomy, and space. It also covers some of my other interests such as Python, digital publishing and self-publishing, blogging, content creation and monetization. What I’m not going to cover: politics.

My blogging journey started with the demise of Google+.

Paolo Amoroso

I’m an Italian astronomy and space popularizer, a Google expert, and a podcaster.

Paolo Amoroso at the Planetarium of Milan, Italy
Paolo Amoroso at the Planetarium of Milan, Italy.


I have been doing astronomy and space outreach and education since the early 1980s, working at the Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium as well as the Brera Astronomical Museum in Milan. The activities I did range from lectures, observing sessions of the sky with Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli’s historical 8” Merz telescope, guided tours of astronomical facilities and space exhibitions, to teaching astronomy at a Prada Foundation art exhibition.

I wrote the official Italian translation of the training and mission Logbook of ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and the glossary of her autobiography, Diario di un’apprendista astronauta.

As part of my space outreach activities I have been a co-host of AstronautiCAST, the first Italian space podcast, since its beginning in 2007 and I’m a board member of AstronautiCAST’s parent organization ISAA, the Italian Space and Astronautics Association.

I have been a member of the Google Top Contributor Program and later the Product Experts Program since 2014. In 2016 Google invited me as a founding member of the Google+ Create program.

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Popular posts from this blog

Using a Bluetooth Keyboard on Android

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Two years ago I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard from Amazon.it. At €14, it was mostly an impulse buy for exploring mobile typing on the go and in similar settings , such as workstations with reduced desk space. My FREALL 7INKEYBD-BK Bluetooth keyboard. I initially used the keyboard with the Android tablet and smartphone I had, a 7” Lenovo Tab E7 and a Pixel 2 XL. I later repurposed the keyboard for the devices I replaced those with, a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8” tablet and a Pixel 4 XL smartphone. Despite the simplicity of operation, it took me some trial and error to figure out how to pair the keyboard with an Android device and what keystrokes insert the characters I need, such as accented letters when writing in Italian. Moreover, I realized I never blogged about my experience with the unit. So I’m posting these notes in case you come across the same or similar keyboards. The keyboard The keyboard is a cheap, compact, plastic chiclet unit that comes with a small foldable stand for a ta...
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Lenovo Tab M8 HD Review

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I bought a Lenovo Tab M8 HD , an 8” Android tablet. It comes with a MediaTek Helio A22 SoC, an IPS panel, 2 GB of RAM, and 32 GB of storage. I ordered the device from Lenovo’s Italian online store for €134. In this post I’ll share my early impressions on the device. The packaging box of the Lenovo Tab M8 HD tablet. Motivation The Lenovo Tab M8 HD replaces the Lenovo Tab E7 7” tablet I bought almost a year and a half earlier. After enjoying the Google Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 tablets I left Android slates for several years. My return to tablets with the November 2019 purchase of the cheap Lenovo Tab E7 was a sort of impulse buy. I wanted an affordable Android slate small enough to be compact but with a large enough screen to help productivity . I also figured it would double as an ebook reading device and let me explore the Android ecosystem. The Tab E7 was nice but limited. The screen didn’t have good touch sensitivity, performance was poor, there was a lot of lag, and the screen was no...
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How to Add Code Syntax Highlighting to Blogger

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On my blog I always wanted to format source code in Python and a couple more languages, but couldn’t find a convenient way. Until I read a tutorial on adding syntax highlighting to Blogger blogs like mine. The Blogger post composer actually provides the monospace Courier font that may be used for source code, but it works well only for inline text . If I apply the Courier font to a block of code, the composer renders each line as a separate paragraph. This leaves too much vertical space that makes the code look ugly. A workaround is to switch to the HTML view in the composer and wrap the block within <pre> ... </pre> tags, which insert the correct line spacing. However, the code doesn’t stand out on the page and there’s room for improving its scannability and visual impact. Fortunately, Blogger is an old dog I can teach new tricks to, like the setup the tutorial I found presents. A Python code snippet with syntax highlighting rendered by highlights.js in a post of the Moo...
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