The first Happy Hour at the Rose & Thorn in its new location, across the canal in Rosehaven Laudanum. 3PM SLT, which for First Lifers is Pacific Time.

Snail racing

Giant snail racing! Some good scenic shots of the Realm of Rosehaven. My castle is the one with the round tower in the opening shots.

Holiday Ball 2017

 Some photos of our Holiday Ball 2017  from Patty Poppy. It was held in a big icy structure up on the sky platform.

Luncheon at Trikassi

An al fresco luncheon at Chateau Trikassi.with friends.

Some of our guests live in Aislinn castle, top left.

Dame Litta and Oriella with tomato soup:

The last Windows...

...installed today. From now on, continuous small updates.

It was painless, just one "this is taking longer than expected" message. Subsystems then rushed in to do this, that and the other and it's been a slow day. I'm now down to the system using about 5% CPU but a lot more memory.

Runtime broker.exe is apparently a major offender, a W8 housekeeper that looks after Metro but grabs lots of CPU. Google for it.

Microsoft depreciates Gadgets now, but there are third party clones that will display them such as Gadget Installer

Nothing has refused to run yet! My test program here is WebEdit a Win95 HTML editor and it's fine.

EVE Online FPS was dreadful, but I knew the answer to this - run as Admin to allow it to access files in protected folders. It is now running amazingly fast, even at extra shiny spaceship setting. Second Life was unaffected, just lost its password file.

Buried under the new interface is unchanged W7 stuff, Backup for example which just ran out of schedule without asking.

Where did my Libraries go? W10 doesn't display them in Explorer by default, but I managed to find them.

[added]
After several weeks memory use is back to W7 levels and background stuff is only running when I'm AFK, I suspect Microsoft are still tweaking this not quite out of Beta system.

Visible clothes

AMD graphics drivers have for some time had a bug that makes rigged mesh clothes in Second life invisible. This has been fixed in the latest 15.7 driver which is now out of beta testing, I updated today and so far all is good. Yay!

Second Life uses Open GL which AMD don't support that well, though fortunately I've never had the problems others struggle with. The biggest visual glitch is with visually overlapping alpha textures which are often displayed the wrong way round.

Another boring committee meeting!

Monthly Moot in Winterfell: Her Bunnyness Miss Eilidh, Beware Hax the CEO of Haxworks a Cosplay costume store and a faun with a waffle.

Another world

Recently I was persuaded by some Second Life friends to take a look at Inworldz. It uses the same Open Source coding as SL to the point where third party viewers such as Firestorm run OK with it, and indeed it looks much like SL did a few years ago. At present it is in Beta so land is much cheaper - $75 monthly for a Region as opposed to $295 and there are other advantages, uploading is free for example. The devs seem to be making some sensible decisions based on SL hindsight - not renting out small land plots themselves for example which should cut down on land blight.
The obvious snag right now is content, but SL merchants and creators are starting to open up stores ready for the official startup next year. Here's an example of what is being done already, sunrise at the Waking Edge, Castle of Lar.

Ascot

Ascot 2014

One of our Relay for Life Events - a day at the races! From the left Professor and Countess Eldemar, Admiral Beaumont, the Duchess of Trikassi and Lady Oriella. A fine build by Countess Cassie, except for the green starting gate which my own creation. More pictures at Ascot slideshow

Maps of nowhere

A map exhibition at New Kadath lighthouse.

Squareworld

Another wonderful Aley creation, it's Squareworld! Anyone who can identify the maps on the walls gets bonus points.

Privateers Ball

The nearest Saturday to Pirate Day is the Privateers Ball, and here we are on Nepenthe Bridge again.

Castle in the Cloud

A fairytale castle in Second Life, built for the Relay For Life charity weekend. We all walk round a big course and do silly things - just like in Real Life!

Tall Ships Race

Today was the Tall Ships Race, one of the Privateers Weekend Events for Second Life's RFL charity drive. Here the winner receives her Trophy on Nepenthe Bridge in Winterfell, the map shows the course around our islands.

Trikassi in winter

Chateau Trikassi, winter 2012, photo by Wildstar Beaumont. Serra Anansi, Seneshelf of Winterfell, brings snow overnight to her land of dreams.

Second Life Mesh Support

A Brief Look at Second Life Mesh Support is a short explanation of why Second Lifers are so excited about Mesh.

Up to now we've had Prims, polyhedrons which can be manipulated using an inworld editor, and 'sculpts', weird single prim objects that are created offworld. Now, finally, we can import 'mesh' objects of the kind used by other computer generated worlds. There are plenty of free editors out there and a common file format, now they have been thrown into the SL sandbox. This is going to be fun.

There is a new Mesh section in the SL Destination Guide that will no doubt be filling up fast.

Virtual reality scripting

Second Life has its own scripting language, without which nothing could move. Since SL is user created, anyone can write their own scripts using the built in editor and see them go wrong! Here is a library with some free samples.
Below is one what I wrote myself, the controller for a magic bridge. Say the password and the bridge appears!

// say password to activate prims in object
// this script must be in root prim
// activated scripts can be in any prim
// Oriella Charik 2010

// Bridge melts after (freezetime) seconds
float freezetime = 30;

default
{
    state_entry()
    {
        llSetText("Bridge Power", <1.0, 1.0, 1.0>, 1.0);
        // set channel to listen on
        llListen(0, "","","");
    }

    listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string word)
    {  
       if(word=="freeze")
       {
        llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "start", NULL_KEY);
        llSetTimerEvent(freezetime);
        }
       if (word=="melt")
      {
      llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "stop", NULL_KEY); 
      }
    }
  
    timer ()
    {
    llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_CHILDREN, 0, "stop", NULL_KEY);
    }
}

For learning inworld I reccomend the College of Scripting.

Farmville is eating the Internet

The xkcd webcomic has a new edition out of its Map of Online Communities. Go take a look (the map enlarges if you click on it).

What the map does well is to place otherwise unconnected Internet communities into perspective. For example, political bloggers who suppose the wired world reads their every flame may be chastened to find the map needs an enlarged inset to show them. In some regions one group dominates - Warcraft on MMO island, Skype in messaging, and Facebook as the biggest nation.

My (second) life as a film extra

A fortnight ago my Second Life avatar was an extra in a pub scene being shot for a PBS programme that aired last night, online now at Digital Nation.
The programme was wide ranging, the Second Life segment had Philip Linden (creator of SL) showing off both his offices and then switched to a surreal shot of presenter Douglas Rushkoff wandering the corridors of an empty IBM office complex. The staff worked from home now and held meetings in SL, saving Big Blue $1 million last year in travel costs.

Windows 7 arrives

My Vista machine never really recovered from its overheating problem and recently lost contact with its graphics card, defaulting to the onboard graphics. So, an early Yuletide prezzie - a brand new Windows 7 desktop, 64-bit OS, with a Radeon 5750.
Overall I'm happy - as promised it's all rather smoother than Vista. I'm slowly loading in stuff and so far the only program that didn't want to know was PGP, I needed the 64-bit version.

Hiccups:
(1) The speakers by default had inputs off, it took me a while to find out how to connect them to Line-in enabling me to use them for the TV.
(2) My Second Life TV isn't working. This seems to be a streaming glitch with Quicktime, I can see other streams in RL and SL and Liz can see it fine - she spotted a friend of hers being interviewed ("look look it's Amber!") and all I had was a blank screen.
(3) Not a single Blue Screen of Death so far! The graphics card has paniced and reset twice in SL, both times when I was working it hard, so I'm guessing at some minor OpenGL problem.
(4) Today, the screen blanked out. It turned out the HDMI cable had come loose, the 5700s only have HDMI output plus a rather grudging DVI socket which I haven't tried. Fortunately the HDTV has several HDMI inputs since I need another for the satellite box.

HDMI is fine with graphics, not so good with text but then the TV isn't optimised for that. Tweaking text size and Clear Type has made it readable.