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I was getting ready to log off, but then saw a small school bus driving along the road. I figured why not go on and adventure and have a chat. I sat down and oddly enough, no one was there. I thought at first maybe the bus itself was an avatar... nope. The bus is actually a prim that runs on it's own along the SL roads. It claims that you can copy/transfer the bus itself, but it's permissions were not set to do so. During the little excursion, I was offered to purchase the script itself for 100 L$. This one was called SL Transportation Bus V#1803 by AnnMarie Otoole who is also the founder for the SL Transit Authority group.

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Here you can see how Crash Perfect had laid out each "smaller" texture. The texture mapping program allows you to select the smaller texture and tells you the settings that you need to apply to each face to show only the selected area as an individual texture. You can see where some of the textures were used in various places in the interior of the building.

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A picture of the interior view of the DarkLife upgrade shop. All textures are composed of one texture. Only a portion of the texture is displayed on each face.

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Crash Perfect contacted me about his use of my Texture Mapper software (with free demo). He co-owns a game called DarkLife. The first thing that they used my texture mapper for was an upgrade shop. The shop uses only one texture (512x512), but is very detailed and composed of many prims. Even the logs inside the shop use the texture as well as a chair and a rug with showdows. The only thing that uses a separate texture appears to be a pile of hay. It's impressive, and exactly the sort of thing that I intended the software to be used for to help cut down bandwidth, lag, and upload fees.

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I assembled my SFG box yesterday and created enough Mel's Mix to top it off. I even painted the wood white (except for the inside). After work today, I created the grid and attached it to the top. My lower back and the arches of my feet are very sore. I am deciding what I should plant. I'm a little confused if I should plant this week, or wait until after a short vacation. I will not be around to water the plants. Thunderstorms are predicted on the day that I leave, but after that it's sunny all weekend.

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I called ahead to find that Medows Farms Nurseries had the Vermiculite (24.99) in a large bag. I got there and the thing looked extreamly heavy. I tried to lift a corner and was shocked at how light it was. It's like a big paper bag of styrofoam. Looking for compost materials, I felt very confused. I wasn't sure what was considered as compost materials. Nothing appeared like the products displayed in the SFG book. I asked someone outside to help show me where the stuff was. I picked up a bag of leaf compost (4.99), compost manuer (2.69) and compro (5.99). In all, I spent 38.66 today. I now have everything needed to start my SFG for a total of 89.59.

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I started gathering supplies for the Square Foot Gardening (SFG) method. I spent about 45 dollars so far. Here is what I found: 2"x6"x8' studs (2 * 4.72 = 9.44), 1"x1/4"x4' popular wood (6 * 1.72 = 10.32), 3CF pete moss (8.96), Cow manure (5.77), Premium manure (2.47), and 3'x50' Weed Free Premium Fabric (13.97). I still need to find some Vermiculite and three other types of compost before I can start on Mels Mix. I ran around four different stores looking for materials, but came up a bit short. I think I'll start looking up local nursaries and make a few calls this comming week. At least I will not have to hunt down soil in the future unless I want to make a few more gardens.

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My wife is interested in gardening this year, so I started looking up information about it. I found tips on greenhouses, raised garden beds, and all sorts of stuff. It appears that many people are using a square foot gardening (SFG) method by Mel Bartholomew. I ordered a book about it and received it in the mail today. It seems pretty simple. I don't know how green our thumbs are. If this thing is as simple as he claims it is, the color of our thumbs will not make much of a difference.

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I haven't been blogging much. For one, I have been "away" playing Final Fantasy XIII. My laptop was also paying a visit to the Geek Squad again at BestBuy. Today, I received a new laptop because it met the "Bad Lemon" clause (turned in old laptop with same problem four times). I've also been working with SL at my day job, so comming into SL during the evenings isn't something I was looking forward to. I can see why some Lindens may choose not to log in during their off ours, as they too need a place other than "work" to relax. Still playing Final Fantasy XIII, so I may not be posting as much over the next few days.

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I have a need for some outfits that are business friendly for male and female. This is for a corporate environment. I am looking for fashion designers that already have clothing available - nothing custom made. Clothing needs to be copyable and transferable. Must not be business in a box (BIB). Please send images of outfits and price.

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I'm debating if I should submit photos of myself and my avatar for the advertising campaign with Linden Lab. I've been seeing quite a few of these around the internet and now the Lab is asking residents to submit their own pictures. I have an avatar, but I don't have a suitable background.

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When I first joined second life, folks often mentioned There.com. I checked it out for myself every now and then, but today I received an email stating that it is closing down Tuesday.

Some people have welcome areas setup for people migrating from There. Just searching the groups in Second Life search returns the following:

• there.com Survivors
• We Were THERE
• Forever There
• From There to here
• Thereians of SL
• Blue Flame Mafia
• CLUB 420

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I got a notice from Flickr today that someone added my FilterCam contest entry to a gallery. I took a look and it led me to FilterCam Contest - Judges Selections. I didn't rank in the top, but I did get an honerable mention for the desert scene.

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I decided to have a little jam session between a few people to work on creating a picture together. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun with poor planning. A couple people showed up, but were not there for the event.

A couple people looked, and one other dabbled other than myself. So here is the drawing.

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I did more experimenting with Colorillo and found a way to line up the canvas to cover a full prims face (1260x635, 0.39x0.488, -0.24x-0.162). With this, I was able to then change the prim into a sphere. Unfortunately, I couldn't change the color of the brush since the palette was not in view. I colored the whole texture blue, and then I was able to start writing directly on the sphere. The 2D version of the texture made it appear that my text was warped and curved as I wrote letters around the object. There were a few problems when the text wrapped to the other side of the texture that resulted in some horizontal lines in the image, or rings on the sphere. I saved the final image and uploaded it in-world. What a fun little experiment.

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Do you have a large list of machinima or other videos on YouTube? How about a movie broken up into multiple parts? With Vide2Gether, you can watch those movies with your friends and stay in synch. You can even vote for individual movies, or skip them to move onto the next. With the new Shared Media (tm) feature, everyone can watch the movie in Second Life, and even chat about it.

Do you have multiple viewing locations? Well, set up a prim to show the same channel at each location. No matter where people are, everyone stays in synch and can read the conversation in the lounge.

For an example of how a lounge works, visit The Blue Lounge

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With the new features of Shared Media, we now have something that Teleplace (Qwaq) offers. An interactive white board. There are plenty of websites that offer white boards that allow multiple people to draw at once. There is Colorillo and Twiddla. Although Twiddla gives you more powerful features such as embedding content, text and images, I prefer Colorillo due to it's simplistic nature. For those of you who can not draw, Timeless Prototype had introduced me to Your world of text some time ago that lets you write text.

One thing to be mindful of is that websites are able to pick up on where you are from based on your IP address, and may display that information to others. Colorillo displays each persons city/country information. In addition, white boards such as these could introduce mature or adult content without you being aware of it if you are not tending to it.

The picture that I drew here can be found at http://colorillo.com/ax2x.

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I started playing around with more of the social media capabilities. I'm starting to be a bit overwealmed with all the different sites I have available. I'm gong to narrow it down to just showing one site instead of many.

As for YouTube, it seems you can adjust the vertical and horizontal offset/scale so that you are only viewing the video instead of the entire web page. This is great for showing movies in-world on a big screen. (Repeats: 0.625x0.37, Offset: -0.164x0.203)

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Started to speak with Hamlet Au about some of the new things that I see with the 2.0 Viewer, and how it may change the culture of residents in Second Life. I showed him a few things I had worked on as well regarding my adventures in augmented reality and a mosaic of me made by pictures from Second Life.

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Interesting spin on how things work. Like how many things are more accessible and easier to understand.

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Shadows are impressive. I feel like I am rediscovering Second Life. This is even bigger than Windlight. I can not wait until this is supported in the official viewer. I found that I could also increase a setting for SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion). It adds to the realism of the shadows to be darker in certain areas.

Windlight adds to the realism of specific sceens, but the shadows have been desired long before there was mention of windlight. The shadows are not "perfect", and SSAO seems to kinda bleed a bit. But it just adds so much to the experience.

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Matthew Kidomen helped me out a bit with getting shadows to show up in snapshots. He recommended Kirstens 18s (215) viewer

http://www.armyof4.com/Kirstenlee/Public%20Viewers/Windows/

At first, I tried 19 (379), since it was the latest version. I couldn't get the shadows to show up though. I later downloaded the version that Matthew recommended and shadows did show up.

It's interesting to see the shadows change as the sun moves accross the sky. In addition, the framerate is better than the official viewer with shadows turned on. One thing that I did notice though is teleporting seems to freeze up the viewer. I'm still getting used to this. Impressive.

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Demonstrating how to make complex videos within Second Life, without using a parcels media url. For this example, I preload eight separate textures by putting a different texture on each face of a prim. These are colored black except for the face that actually shos the video. Each image represents 10 seconds of video frames. While they are playing, a 10 second sound clip plays at the same time. Animated textures and sound clips introduces the capability of displaying prim-based videos. You could essentially walk around with a television set on your head with commercials about WTF blankets.

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My original attempt to view shadows in Second Life failed about a year ago. I figured that I needed to use a special viewer such as Kirstens viewer to do so. I've been noticing that my friend, Matthew Kidomen has been taking lots of photos for a while with Shadows. I looked up some instructions and found even the Alphaville Herald reported how to enable shadows in the Second Life viewer with the same steps that I previously took.

I decided to try it again, and it was like magic. I saw shadows everywhere. It seemed to slow my computer down quite a bit through. My FPS is down between seven and eight when standing still and goes down to a solid six when walking. Removing the settings had my FPS jumping back up in the thirties.

One interesting thing is that snapshot previews don't seem to show the shadows. I'm doubting if I'll see them in my blog post either when I send the final image. I'm hoping it will be available though. The place looks much better with shadows, even if it's just for photo shoots.

Matthew Kidomens reproduction: http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?ID=436847