A peek behind the mesh curtain

SLOG has a post about a brief raising of the NDA veil over meshes for SL, and just what was revealed during that interval. Get the details there; I don't want to spread bad data based on a misinterpretation I might make. That said, it sounds very exciting.

UPDATE: Be sure to watch at least the first video there, of the creature playing Paganini. It looks like it's an example of something the blog post mentions, "rigging", which allows actual wearable clothing rather than body paint.

UPDATE: I'm kicking myself, remembering the first mesh demo video which showed a mesh figure of the Hulk. It just begs for a filk... "I was there at Linden Lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie sight... (it was a mesh!) It was a Monster Mesh..."

Not me and my shadow

So I had spare time today... I can wander about the grid to my heart's content, right? Well, sort of.

Early on things worked and I got some nice photos. But then I thought, "Gee, why not try SL on the computer connected to the nifty big LCD TV?" So I did... and I saw something that I've noticed here lately. Try a new client and the first time or two you get Caspered. I signed on again, or rather, the client crashed and I signed on again... and there I was, a swirling white cloud.

Back to my main computer, and still the cloud. Then I noticed something really strange: I was Caspered, but the client (Kirsten's 2.0 flavored client, build 24 I think) was able to correctly render my avatar's shadow--not the attachments, just the avatar. Then I visited with friends, a long overdue and joyous meeting, and I found that everyone else could see me. I was only Casper to myself, and here's the proof:


If it's across multiple clients, it's either code common to the clients or on the server side. I saw one claim that it's a known 2.1 code problem, and that the fix is to load one of the default avatars (do they mean the shapes?) and then switch back. I tried that, with no luck.

I hope this is fixed soon.

UPDATE: It's consistent across Kirsten's client, Emerald, and LL's 2.1 alpha and 2.0 clients, and continues despite cache clears and even "mv ~/.secondlife ~/.secondlife.bak".

UPDATE: If I were an English major, I would probably have worked in a line about how "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Ah, well...

UPDATE: Just after posting that, poof! Back I came. I hope that I'll stay.

Wireless keyboard/pointer for SL?

I have a computer connected to the TV now... a nice 32" LCD HDTV. Download KirstenLee Cinquetti's latest Linux client, install, fire it up, and... OK, well, it seems every time I try out a new client with no cached textures and stuff, I take forever to rez, at least to myself. Then I try to move and look around...

...and have to force myself not to scream with frustration. I have a wireless keyboard/trackball combo; it is essentially the Adesso WKB-3000UB. I ended up having to play Twister with my left hand to hold down ctrl-alt and the left mouse button and fiddle with the trackball with my right, and I don't have a good surface to set the thing on. I ended up apologizing to all and signing off.

It looks like there is a right-hand reachable left mouse button, so I'll give it one more try, but does anyone else use an HTPC for Second Life, and if you do, what do you use for a keyboard and pointing device?

(N+1)st thing I wish I had L$1 for every occurrence of

...flying into the air when I type something in the 2.0 client without giving the chat text entry field focus.

An encounter with old media

Newspapers are fading out, and it's about time. At a local grocery store, the local newspaper has been giving away issues and trying to sell subscriptions. The first time, I accepted a Sunday paper; it sat unexamined for a week until I finally got rid of it. News is available from other sources, including the paper's own web site; store coupons and machine readable versions of their Sunday ads are available online, and I wouldn't be surprised if you can get coupons fed to your smartphone. Physical newspapers are not worth the hassle to recycle them.

That said, I happened upon a stray issue yesterday and looked through it. Alongside the (very shrunken... and Bill Watterson thought newspapers were shrinking comics back when he did Calvin and Hobbes!) comics was "Goren on Bridge". For a second, I misread it as "Gorean on Bridge", and suddenly this mental image of a pseudo-Frazetta portrait of four Goreans sitting around a table studying their cards, kajirae at their feet, went through my head.

Fortunately, it passed quickly.

In honor of Little Orphan Annie...

...and to gently nudge LL about VWR-17063, we're changing the masthead for a day. Wish I could've found Sandy. ("Arf!" Yes, I know, but I didn't have time...)

Voice morphing in 2.1

The 2.1 alpha SL client is out, and it supports voice morphing. With it, you can rent any of several "packs" of five voices, L$750 per month per pack. The packs that exist are "Scary", "Feminine", "Masculine", "Tiny", and "Techie".There's a page with a link to "Voice Island" and a video demonstrating some of the voices. I watched the video; it doesn't demonstrate all of them, just a selection.

I guess there's an "uncanny valley" effect for voice, too; the scary, tiny, and techie voices don't fall in, but the feminine ones in the video certainly do--they sound metallic and phony. I hope the voices improve.

UPDATE: Upon reflection, that metallic sound reminds me of an inexpensive pitch shifter I once played with. If that's all that's being done, it can be easily reversed, and in any case the effect has a distinctive sound, easily recognized. It will carry as much stigma as not using voice does now.

UPDATE: Prad Prathvi put up a post embedding a video that goes through all the voices, and listening to it I realize that people are going to want to stack them. If they've found some voice that they like, they may well wish to modify it further with "radio" or "intercom" to get that effect on their preferred voice. I wonder whether that will be possible.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I've submitted JIRA entry VWR-19885 to request the ability to apply multiple voice modifications. If you'd like that ability, you may wish to vote for it.

Next year, in OpenSim?

LL has laid off 30% of its employees, and some are saying more layoffs are coming. The virtual village idiot is busy gloating, while others mourn.

Some fear the end is near, others look forward to SL access via the web. (If Hamlet's right, that will happen via WebGL, a way for web pages to get to OpenGL, so this does not necessarily mean smartphones and netbooks will be able to get to SL.)

All I can say is, thank goodness for OpenSim. One of the virtues of Open Source is that you're not held hostage by a sole source, and if worse comes to worst I think we'll appreciate that greatly.

Cheyenne and Sweetie get some of the recognition they deserve

Cheyenne and Sweetie's Robot Sanitorium is Editor's Pick on the Linden Showcase. It's long overdue. Visit the Sanitorium, and stay to see Whimsy and its surroundings. You'll be glad you did.

Maybe they were thinking of Raquel Welch?

I see that if you look for "Neolithic" on Google, the quoted blurb for the Wikipedia page reads

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or Sexy Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BCE...

Someone has noticed, and the Neolithic is less sexy than it used to be according to Wikipedia, but it just goes to show: trust but verify.

Appreciation for ancient technology

All I wanted to do was get the sun to shine as it did the last time I took a photo in caLLie cLine's store on the beautiful stairway... and I could not do it! It makes me wonder whether SL mimics the way the sun's path through the sky changes over the year.

So, good work, you folks who built Stonehenge; you have me beat.

Goodbye, Mammatus

I'm very sorry to report that the Mammatus sim will close at the end of June. The stores in the Mall, as far as I know, all have other locations, but I fear for the other businesses and features on the sim.

Long, long overdue thanks to Aspen Normandy for his friendship and all he's done for prim breasts and prim breast users.

P.S. Any resemblance between the title and that of a Philip Roth novella or the movie made from it is purely coincidental.

Hairdressers for avatars?

Check out this post in Technology Review's blog. It deescribes a setup to let one create a virtual hairdo by... hairdressing! I hope that someday SL hairdos can be created with this user interface.

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...