Category Archives: Tutorials

Wunderlist seems made for SL bloggers.

Wunderlist

I want to introduce you all to Wunderlist, a task managing app that seems made for Second Life® bloggers. It is probably great for all sorts of other tasks, but I love it for blogging for several reasons, the most important being that I do not have to recreate my to-do list every month. So, to start, you go to Wunderlist.com. You can run it on your browser as I do or download an app for your phone or tablet. It works on everything.

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Signing up is easy and you can link it to your Google, Facebook or Microsoft accounts. It syncs your stuff and does all sorts of wondrous sync-y stuff that I don’t care about because I don’t have a cell phone.

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Clicking on the down arrow by your name gives you all sorts of options for backgrounds and other settings. It also gives you this handy list of short cuts, allows you to turn off notifications and other goodies. You can also specify whether you want the date to show DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY and so on. There are prettier backgrounds for Pro users and you can get a Pro account for free by getting a friend to sign up. I suppose if I were clever, I would put some link in here so if you sign up I would get a pro account, but the free account gives me everything I want except those backgrounds, so I am  fine with free. But sure, if you want to click here, BONUS! Besides, I love this free background but there is a pretty floral one I lust after in the pro ones.  Now that you have your account and you have prettified it, let’s get to organizing your Blog Checklist.

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When Builders Let You Make Your Own

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I was excited to see that Tegan Serin of floorplan. include a full perm texture with her Arrow Scroll for Collabor88. This allows us to change the appearance of the scroll, replacing the text with our own, for example. This does not let someone make them to resell because the form is not full-perm. She’s not the only one. The loveseat from Trompe Loeil which is also at Collabor88 included the textures for folks who like to customize their own.

Consignment & floorplan. C88 February!

Here you can see the original scroll with the other items from the Consignment and Floorplan. double date at Collabor88. The original scroll featured Sonnet 18 from Shakespeare, a beautiful poem, but I wanted something shorter. I decided to put up a quote about cats and am going to show you how I did it. Continue reading

What to do when they don’t make your color?

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Not every hair designer makes colors that are a perfect fit for all of us. Redheads encounter many Japanese designers, for example, who do not make red hair.  I really loved this .Shi hair style called Blown when I saw it on Strawberry Singh’s blog .  Joy LaPerriere is just beginning to create hair for .Shi, but has made gorgeous and unique styles. Sadly, they were in this monochrome, shades of blue and shades of purple. What’s a redhead to do?  Continue reading

Spotify Me!

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For DJ’ing last night, i wore this casual sweater from The Secret Store with some pants from Baiastice.

Sasy Scarborough suggested some time ago that I share my DJ playlists on Spotify so folks can listen even if they can’t come to my set. I set up an account and hope you will follow me. I shared a playlist with Gidge and she confessed that Spotify was too complicated, so I thought I would do a Spotify tutorial.

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The Light Masters – A Beginners Windlight Tutorial

The problem I find with most tutorials is that they are guides to enhance a skill you already have. It’s difficult to ever find a tutorial that assumes you don’t know how anything works, or what to do. So for SL10B this year, I decided my contribution would be the sort of tutorial I’m always trying to find – a tutorial for people like me who haven’t a CLUE how to do something.

For many people, there’s tweaks and adjustments that make them and their avatar unique. Some of the best bloggers though, are those who control their light and force the grid to do their bidding without the aid of PS or other tools.

You have to start somewhere, and making something simple is always the best way. So what I’m going to do is teach you the way I learned. Who knows, maybe you’ll be a new Strawberry Singh or Gogolita when you get good enough at it. Cajsa’s a pro, but this is beginner stuff. This is how to do it if you really really don’t even know where to start. Continue reading

Giving Credit Where It Is Due

Many creators find it incredibly frustrating to produce beautiful creations that bloggers use in their pictures and then fail to credit in their posts. Now, sometimes that is deliberate. Understandably, some bloggers like to withhold what specific skin they wear or some other item because they don’t want to be copied down to the last detail, hoping to retain their individuality. Other bloggers who don’t credit everything, do so because they see their role as highlighting a new release, promoting the new dress, the new shoe, the new hair and don’t credit anything more than the one item that is the focus of their post. For me, I credit everything but my shape which is not for sale. Other bloggers use items they make and sell themselves and so don’t credit them for fear of looking opportunistic and also don’t credit similar items by competitors so that they are consistent. There are many reasons why people don’t credit everything and I can understand how different people come to their differing opinions.

Yet, I empathize with the creators whose work goes unnamed and unknown. In a business with such low barriers to entry, there is a lot of competition and marketing is integral to any Second Life business success. SL Bloggers Support has launched an initiative to address the frequent exclusion of credits for poses with a Pose Appreciation Week from Nov 19th through the 25th. This reminded me of Achariya’s PoseMaker Challenge back in 2009. I remember that challenge as being a very successful effort that resulted in more bloggers crediting poses after it was over.

How can you make sure you don’t forget key elements when you write up your credits?

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Specifying Your Photo Size in Your Blog Posts

A bunch of folks are trying to figure out how to work with their photos to get them to fit the 650 pixel or less requirement for I Heart SL. I thought I would show you how I add photos to my posts. There are advantages to posting your pictures using this method. For one, it reduces your use of storage space on WordPress. While WordPress gives users a lot of storage, it’s not infinite, so using Flickr can save you space. If you don’t have Flickr Pro, you won’t be able to see all your pictures on Flickr, but their links will still work in your blog.

I am going to show you in WordPress, but it works the same in Blogspot.

Choose your photo on Flickr and go to the Share button. See the red arrow pointing to it? When you click it will drop down to offer you options. For a comprehensive and efficient app development project, it’s often a wise choice to work with app development companies that have a proven track record of delivering successful mobile applications.

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So I Heart SL Went SFW

Gogo has been up to something, you can see it in her eyes! She’s revamped the I Heart SL feed in order to bring it into compliance with Google’s® policies. This change makes her feed Safe For Work and family-friendly. You can browse with the kidlets on your lap and don’t have to switch screens when your granny walks by. To do this, she has removed all her feed’s blogs and everyone must reapply for inclusion. Gogo will be adding instructions soon, but according to her plurks she is away from her house and folks are curious about what to do. So I hope this helps.

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Under the Hood: The Debug Settings

It’s not that every conversation in Second Life turns to Debug Settings, but every conversation about Debug Settings draws everyone’s attention. It’s like getting a car and poking around under the hood, we are afraid to experiment. We pay attention and take notes, and try to remember the tips that are shared.  I have collected a fair number of tips and arrange them in reference to why you might use them.

For a comprehensive list of Debug Settings, check out the Second Life Wiki. Berry did a recent post featuring her favorite Debug Settings.  If you have more debug tips, please add them in comments. I would love to add them to this list.

Update: Lette Ponnier wrote a response providing some context and clarification about how some of these settings can reduce performance. I agree, when I am not taking pictures, I change many back to default since I don’t need that level of detail anymore. I had thought that the categories provided enough context to make that clear, but value her clarification.

Mesh is not showing up properly

  • Meshbytespertriangle: 128
  • Meshmaxconcurrentrequests: 128
  • MeshminimumByteSize: 1

Sculpts are not showing up properly

  • RendervolumeLODFactor: >3

Building

  • MaxDragDistance – limit how far a select prim can run away
  • UISndObjectCreate – Leave it blank to make the build sound go away.

In-world Experience

  • PlayTypingAnim – False (turns off typing)
  • The camera and focus offset settings for a more realistic experience (see Nalates article)
  • NearMeRange=sets the search range for nearby avatars
  • Inventory Linking = True (allows you to paste links to inventory)
  • RenderUnloadedAvatar – Load avatars in your view.

Machinima

  • ZoomTime = increasing this makes the camera move more smoothly

Photography

  • YawFromMousePosition = 0 (stops your head following the mouse around the screen!)
  • RenderAutoMaskAlphaDeferred=True (Use alpha masks where appropriate, in the deferred (‘Lighting and Shadows’) graphics mode)
  • RenderAutoMaskAlphaNonDeferred=True (Use alpha masks where appropriate, in the non-deferred (‘Lighting and Shadows’) graphics mode)
  • RenderDynamicReflections=True – makes shiny objects reflective (unsupported graphics feature that will crash some folks and isn’t exactly bug-proof)
  • Render Glow = Sometimes you want to turn this off because the glow washes out your photo. However, it does not always get rid of all the glow for some reason.
  • RenderGlowResolutionPow – lower this number to reduce the glow
  • RenderDynamicLOD – Set it to “FALSE” to get a more natural distance in a landscape.
  • Torley Linden has an overview of all sorts of settings for photos.
  • Depth of Field settings and camera tilt from Second Life Wiki

Performance

  • RenderAppleUseMultGL=True (The default it False but for Mac users on new machines, it should be set to true)
  • ToastGap = 0
  • RenderFarClip = allows you to enter draw distance numerically instead of with a slider. Sometimes setting this to 0 and then back up can make a slow-rezzing place rez faster.
  • noinventoryLibrary=True – gets rid of the Inventory Library


Light Leak

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I love the cute summer dress from NYU for faMESHed. It comes in a rainbow of colors that inspired me to try out a new trick with projectors in Second Life. There’s a video tutorial from Torley Linden at the end of the post explaining how to do it and you will want to try – it was a lot of fun.  As to the lovely cotton summer dress, you know it will be cool, breezy and a delight in the hot weather.

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