Conservation

Whew! I've saved 15 GB of disk space by converting old .bmp SL photos to .png, and I haven't even gotten through all of them yet!

How to do it? I used Image Magick (in particular the "convert" program) to do the conversion, iterating over the images. I was not smart; I didn't use touch to preserve the time stamp, but I have a backup that I can use for that purpose.

png compresses, and unlike JPEG doesn't use lossy compression, so there's nothing to lose save maybe an excuse to get a bigger hard drive. :)

" It's a wonderful Second Life: Breathe 2"

New World Notes has had a lot of really good items lately... but this machinima, I think, tops them all. (The NWN post includes SLURLs for all the featured sites.)



It's a reminder of what SL can be, and I hope that while LL tries to increase its retention factor and make things easier for new residents, it doesn't forget that.

After you watch the video, be sure to read Cheyenne's latest, at least slightly tongue in cheek (I hope!) commentary about the matter.

UPDATE: The finalists for this year's Linden Prize have been announced. One of them is, I kid you not, Sion Chickens. What a joke, and I fear my aforementioned hope is, if not dashed, near the rocky shore with no functioning lighthouses.

Speaking of new clients...

My sincere apologies to all, as I forgot that going to a new client seems to require setting various preferences again--particularly the one that causes IMs sent to one while one is offline to be emailed. I've gone a long while without SL, and because of my oversight been relatively incommunicado. Please forgive me.

Ruthification

When the SL client started displaying a swirly white mist for unrezzed avatars, some waxed nostalgic for Ruth, the ancient default avatar that the client would use if it couldn't retrieve an avatar's shape, skin, or hair.

They needn't have worried. Something about the 2.0 client makes it Ruthify you the first time around. Each time I've tried a new LL 2.0 client lately, I've started out as the mist, and the client would, one after the other, say "can't load shape, can't load shirt, can't load..." and use a new piece of white clothing, a default shape and skin... and poof! There I stand, Ruthified save for perhaps a hat or hairdo that it managed to load somehow.

It's very frustrating.

NWN must-read by Tabitha Eichel

I did not see this as it originally appeared in NWN, so I am especially grateful to Hamlet Au for seeing it and making sure it receives appropriate notice by making it a post unto itself. Tabitha Eichel makes an eloquent case for SL identity not being tied to RL identity. I strongly urge you to read it.

JIRA entry with landmark proposal

Back in November, I described something I wish SL would support, namely a landmark that really just points at another landmark which the creator could update when the site/store/etc. the landmark points at moves.

Shame on me; I did no more than kvetch in my blog. Ann Otoole, OTOH, has proposed said feature in a JIRA entry, VWR-11679. Thank you, Ms. Otoole, and I hope that all of you reading this will consider voting for it. (Think for a minute about just how many out of date landmarks clutter your inventory... that should motivate you.)

So long, Annie

My sister in eyelessness (at least with the 2.0 SL client), Little Orphan Annie, will disappear from newspapers in June of this year. June 13th is the date of the last strip. Ave et vale, or, to translate from the Latin, "Arf!"

UPDATE: Hey, that's a thought. On June 13th, take a self-portrait using the 2.0 client with shadows activated, dressed up as Little Orphan Annie. (Does anyone have that hairdo?)

UPDATE: Gee whiskers, there is a Little Orphan Annie avatar! Perhaps having a goal and a deadline will induce me to do my first serious texturing; that dress will require a special prim breast texture...

The ongoing popularity of Apollo_009

One of the things flickr lets you see is how many people have viewed each of your photos, along with a graph of total views per day for the past few days. For serious photographers, it's probably useful information. For me, it's just interesting, much as Google Analytics data are interesting... and the photo that seems to be the most viewed of all I've put up, getting views just about every day, is the one above, Apollo_009.

My photo nomenclature is pretty mundane; rarely do I come up with creative titles for them--just the name of the sim and a sequence number, so, as I'm sure you recognize if you've been around SL for very long, you know that this is the ninth photo I took in the Lost Gardens of Apollo. (And if you haven't been there, by all means go. I believe it's one of the longest-lived scenic areas in SL--the New World Notes post about it is over four years old.)

So this photo has been viewed 2,781 times since it was posted in March 2007. It obviously predates Windlight; the background is flat. Why has it been viewed so many times, I wonder? It's probably not that people trip over it while searching for images of the Greek god or the moon missions; I have a bunch of other photos taken on that sim, viewed nowhere near as many times. I know that when I changed the classification of my images, trying to accurately categorize them, viewership plummeted. It's a rare photo since then that has as many as a hundred views. It is a puzzlement.

Crossblogging again...

...because I want to make sure the word is spread: a new magazine, BUSTed, is coming out. It will be of interest to all those who use prim breasts, and those who appreciate them. More info at Pectoral Virtual Fashion.

Failure? Not entirely.

Back when the whole CSI:NY/Second Life crossover happened, the general opinion was that it fizzled out.

Perhaps it didn't result in a huge influx of people into SL, but I respectfully submit that any action that has the results that Sarra Foggerty describes is in an important sense as far from failure as you can get.

Many thanks to Hamlet Au; NWN today has an article on the Two Three Six Five blog, whence comes Ms. Foggerty's post.

Whew!

I upgraded to Lucid Lynx, and was afraid I'd broken something... but it was not the case. It's fine now, and well worth your checking out.

SL client frustration

Sigh. Kirsten's SL client doesn't have the SL 2.0 client bug in which enabling shadows stops your eyes from rendering... but it's become unusable for another reason. A minute or so after I start it, it consumes all available RAM and slows to a crawl. I hope that's fixed soon.

snapshot metadata

If you use Linux (and GNOME), open up a directory you have RL photos in and right click on one of them. Choose the "Image" tab, and there you will see a lot of information: I was taken on a Mumbleflex BS9000, so and so f-stop, 1/120th second exposure, ISO 400, on March 25th 2009 at 3:15 p.m., and I'm X pixels wide and Y pixels high I bet that someday there will be cameras with GPSs that record where you were when the photo was taken..

Right click on an SL snapshot. You'll see the image size.

Many are the times that I wish I could remember where I took a picture in SL , the camera's orientation, what Windlight preset I was using, what my graphics settings were, the draw distance, the pseudo-time of day on the sim... but that data isn't there. I expect that just about anybody who's taken a picture in SL has wished that as well.

Please consider voting for VWR-19178, which asks that such information be stored in the metadata for SL snapshots.

UPDATE: Sorry! I fixed the link to the JIRA entry; it now takes you directly there.

UPDATE: I rummaged around my cell phone's settings, and it can store the location as determined by GPS with the pictures it takes. How much easier it would be to do in SL!

Photographing again

I had to go back to caLLiefornia to take a picture now that Kirsten's SL client exists for Linux and renders both shadows and eyes. What a relief!

Thank you, Cheyenne, and SL bloggers

I just crashed out of a dance held by the SL Bloggers group for the second time. I had a wonderful time, and met lots of great people. Thank you, Cheyenne, for inviting me there, and I apologize to everyone for dropping out so unceremoniously.

FarmVille

So, FarmVille is a "casual game", Flash-based, that has drawn in a huge number of players. It has a system of rewards and levels, something that Hamlet Au really, really thinks that SL should have in order to cut down SL's high initial attrition rate. It's casual because it doesn't require great skill to advance, just grinding away. One can, though, select crops and fit the varying rates of crop ripening around one's schedule to optimize one's rate of advancement, or take advantage of game features, e.g. confining one's avatar in a tiny space so that you can harvest and plow without waiting for your avatar to walk around.

I have friends who play FarmVille. (I can't play it--to really play it requires a Facebook account, and we all know Facebook's attitude towards avatars.) What do they talk about? About FarmVille forgetting about their last however many minutes of work, having difficulty signing on, ignoring one's attempts to purchase items, not being able to rotate buildings, and so forth. Sounds kind of like complaints about Second Life, only more so... and in FarmVille, all you have is a square plot of ground in not particularly realistic isometric projection. There's a half-hearted attempt to show "neighbors'" farms as being next to yours, but each farm is really like a "room" that one teleports to or from. No notion of geography at all.

I think I'll stay with SL, thanks.

Only a week to go!

Ubuntu 10.04 is getting very close. The Release Candidate version is now downloadable. Give it a try; you can do it without touching your computer's hard drive.

Boobquake for Second Life?

Recently an Iranian cleric has asserted that women dressing immodestly increases earthquakes. Jen McCreight of Blag Hag proposes an experiment: Boobquake.

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that's your preferred form of immodesty.

Perhaps we in Second Life should join in the experiment—or would that introduce an extra variable that might skew the results? Perhaps it's the reaction of the viewer that moves those tectonic plates, in which case virtual immodesty should add to the effect, or perhaps not.

Blog burnout?

SL Fashion Police and What the Fug? seem to be fading out. The former hasn't had a new article since mid-December 2009 (enough to get it on Cheyenne's list of "Dead (and Missed) Blogs"), and the latter has only run four articles this year.

Perhaps there's only so many things one can make fun of.

Apple Shoots Itself in the Foot

Details here; I think that this will pretty well assure that developers will prefer Android/Chrome OS.

P.S. Ironically, I appreciate Apple's thumbs down to Flash, because I hope it hastens Flash's demise in favor of an open standard.