Ciaran Laval

June 7, 2013June 7, 2013

SL10B Bear Takes A Hazardous Journey

I was looking for a place for my SL10B Bear Avatar to visit, so I decided to visit The Destination Guide and check out the Photgenic spots. There are some really nice looking places to explore but I wanted a place out in the open and then I spotted it, a hazardous looking location:

So off I went in search of adventure and found a place that is beautifully presented but has a creepy feeling that something or someone may reach out and grab you if you don’t pay attention. Therefore I was glad to be in my Bear avatar, someone or something is far less likely to attack a bear, but this may not be the right place for child avi’s, there’s a chance you’ll be sold to The Circus!

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June 7, 2013June 7, 2013

Are Flickr Going For Tumblr Intergration?

I’m still using Flickr, despite my serious reservations about the new design, which I think is quite frankly awful. I’m not complaining about change for the sake of it, the new Flickr landing page for signed in accounts is full of too much noise and only offers the justified view. Despite performance improvements, large images and infinite style scrolling are bandiwidth and RAM hogs.

However Flickr is still a good place for storing images and groups are pretty much the same as they ever were, with a variety of views available. The way groups work should be the norm, not the exception. However Flickr, despite the howls of protest from users, have steadfastly refused to allow people to customise their views on the landing page, or when they explore. Why? I have no idea but I’m going to speculate that it’s part of a longer term plan to intergrate with Tumblr, because the idea that they’re annoying so many users just to implement adverts holds little water, if they haven’t got website designers who can incorporate adverts into different views, they should hire some who can. I believe their staff are more than capable of serving adverts in different views.

So my guess is that there is going to be some intergration with Tumblr. Coincidentally enough Tumblr’s homepage has had a revamp this week and one that, according to Mashable’s Samantha Murphy is : “a photo-rich design very reminiscent of its new sister site Flickr”

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June 3, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 7 – Rod Humble

The Drax Files contuinue to impress me and as usual I’ll embed the video at the end of the post, in this edition Draxtor talks to Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab and someone who appears to have been missing in action for a while, although I swear I saw that thief style avatar when I was wandering around Fantasy Faire. The only disappointing aspect of this interview is that Rod doesn’t wear an Aston Villa shirt to work, or even a Villa tie!

The interview opens with Rod Humble saying “Most People at Silicon Valley have no idea that Second Life still exists.” The interview is fascinating with Rod making some extremely encouraging comments (for me anyway) in terms of privacy. Unlike those who think we should all be using our real names everywhere we go, Rod sees the value of people having their own space in different environments.

Rod also talks of how he travels around with alts and that this gives him the chance to engage in different ways, ways that he wouldn’t be able to do if people knew he was Rod Humble. This relates to the previous point about privacy and it’s encouraging to see that Rod seems to get the importance of this.

We see Rod in walking into the Linden Lab offices and some of the staff in pose mode, some pondering, others in catalogue style poses, some typing away and pretending the camera isn’t there whilst keeping one eye on it, as you do! There’s talk of performance improvements, with Server Side Baking making an appearance and talk of improvements that will be rolled out this quarter that apparently we will really like.

We see footage of The Dwarfins cave, hurrah! Rod talks of how Second Life is a great platform for creativity and how the content is user created, which we all know of course but as hopefully people who aren’t yet Second Life users will see this, it’s important that the CEO of Linden Lab makes this point.

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June 3, 2013June 3, 2013

Tips To Ease The Flickr Pain

There’s a hefty thread on the Flickr forums regarding feedback on the new Flickr, you can see it here. I’m sorely tempted to point them in the direction of the Texture Usage Page on the Second Life Wiki for tips on how to optimise their site! The reason people are having performance issues is due to loading lots of large textures.

Anyway amongst the complaints and allegations that even in beta the feedback was negative, there are some tips on how to ease the pain. When it comes to groups this is easy because you have a user preference on how you view the page. However for photostreams you need to type after the URL. I’ll use Strawberry Singh’s photostream as an example because it’s an excellent stream to view.

New annoying Flickr link to the awesome photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberrysingh/

Now to make that less taxing, all I need to do is add ?details=1 after the last slash in the URL so:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberrysingh/?details=1

Now I can view it at my leisure and there’s pagination instead of the silly endless scrolling.

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May 31, 2013May 31, 2013

A Humble Mystery Unfolds

Sighted inworld less often than Magellan Linden in the past twelve months, there have been concerns about the well being of Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble. Had he been kidnapped? Had he been turned into a High Fidelity Voxel? Did he have clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right and was stuck in the middle with you? The search for Rod Humble has been well and truly on.

When you need to find out some information about goings on in Second Life, sometimes you have to go to dark corners, corners filled with fog, hansom carriages, dens of iniquity, places where you have to wave a purse full of gold coins around to get information and being a fearless fighter for truth and justice I have done all of this to try and uncover more about the mystery of the hidden Humble …. and then I turned to Twitter! (dramatic music plays). I’m scarred by it all but I have heard some whispers!

I’m reliably informed that an avatar in an Aston Villa shirt who isn’t Prad Prathivi or me has been known to be roaming inworld. The word on the streets of Bay City is that he has been spotted in Bay City!

Thanks to Daniel Voyager for the snapshot.

There’s also talk that he has time travelled to 1920’s Berlin and allegedly been interviewed by a Barbarian … I mean Bavarian called Drax. However the details of the interview are sketchy, it has been leaked by Frau Yardley that Rod Humble uses alts …. wait, so do I! However this begs the question, who are Rod Humble’s alts?

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