Reading Radar

I’ve personally owned computers since 1984. Before that, I used computers owned by family members. I’ve built my own computers, many of them over the years, set up small networks, installed operating systems from all three major camps (MS, Apple, various Linux distros). I’ve written web applications and done programming of all kinds to some extent. I work with unix systems all day at work, configuring them, installing updates, debugging them. Etc, etc. I’m not saying this to brag, or show how much I know. I really don’t. The more I know, the more I know I need to know. But I’m not a total rube when it comes to technology, even though there’s lots of people with more in-depth knowledge than mine in any given specific area.

So, I have to wonder… how does the neophyte or the non-technician deal with some of the issues that have been roadblocking me lately? Yesterday was one such frustrating day. And then it was capped off with another bummer on top of it all. Here comes a long, lengthy diatribe, so if you have something better to do, now’s the time.

You might recall my various trials with SL over the months. Awhile back, I bought a Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo with Nvida 8600M GT graphics. At the time, SL would leak memory until it locked up the entire machine on that particular computer. LL admitted there was some OpenGL issue. It appeared to be Apple’s fault. I couldn’t use that computer and I took it back within a week of buying it. Later, the problem appeared to go away with a combination of a Leopard graphics update and something LL did differently in the (then seperate WL build) windlight client. As a result, once the Penryn Macbook Pros came out early this year, I bought one. It has the Nvidia 8600M GT graphics, but it runs. For the most part. Sigh… I do get LONG beachball (application freezes) with it while running any version of the SL client. And 1.20 RC1, 3, and 4 will lock my computer solid within minutes of logging in. Every time. I’m using 1.20 RC2 right now so that I can use my spacenavigator, and praying that LL figures out why that one doesn’t do that except very rarely, and the other ones do. Every @#$@#%@# time. Did I mention every @#$@#$ time?? Anyway, using SL is an exercise in frustration because of the beachballs. Even simple conversations are frustrating. I’ve been saying “bye” to people before and I can’t respond and they are like “ok, well, bye.”

Then yesterday, I uploaded a video to Blip.tv. The video quality beats YouTube hands down, and they don’t have the length restrictions. Well… that’s great, I can embed it in the Podcast Island blog, but not my own blog (this one). Why? Different versions of wordpress, and .. while Wordpress allows embedding the code for the youtube videos, it does not for the Blip.tv videos in current revisions. Okkkkaaay. So off to youtube. But wait.. It’s too long. Now granted, this particular video is on the SLPN In Your Face video podcast feed, but still. I wanted to get it out there to anyone reading the blog. Answer: No, Radar. You can’t. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t embedding until I dug through Blip.tv’s FAQ and read “Wordpress hates us.”

Now for the fun one. Awhile back, I bought a Time Capsule. In theory, wow. This thing is amazing. And maybe even in practice, maybe I got a Lemon. But I’ve been reading of other people having the same issues. What happens is that I’ll be cruising along, and suddenly wireless connectivity breaks. At times, I’ve had to hard reset the Time Capsule to factory settings and re-configure it all over again. Then it will work for a week or two. Well, last night it stopped handling all networking whatsoever. Even wired. It would work for a few minutes, then.. nothing. I’d start losing things - skype, web, then SL would die. Fortunately I have an Airport Express plugged in which is giving me internet connectivity until I get this fixed. But it’s frustrating - I just bought this $500 (it has the 1 gig drive in it) pile of crap not that long ago. And when it works, it’s magic. When it doesn’t work, I’m driven to throwing electronic devices out my window.

On top of it all, I’m kind of at a crossroads with my podcast. I don’t know what direction to go. I do know that they are too long and too infrequent. I don’t want EVERY show to be “hi, okay, feedback, ok, interview, ok, i have no time to talk” or the same thing OVER and OVER and OVER. That’s why I went a different direction this time. I also went that way because I want people to think about technology. Who controls it? Who gets controlled by it? Who understands it? Etc, etc. It’s not all fun and games, right?

Anyway, if you have any thoughts on the direction I should go, what works, what doesn’t, anything encouraging, whatever. Above all, right now I need honest, direct feedback. Pretend I’m your brother or your favorite dog and you’re leveling with me on something I’m doing. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings or being all polite. I don’t need that, or want that. Just level with me on what the podcast does or doesn’t do for you, and what it should or should not do. It’s all up for grabs. Nothing in the podcast is sacred, and anything can be tossed if it’s not of value.

And please understand if I don’t say a lot in response to you in-world until I get through some of these frustrations. I’m probably trying to curtail the swear words flowing through my brain from making it out into public communication.

We met someone at the Destination Station, or someone IMd me… I don’t really remember… but they mentioned they found it because it turned up as the top search result in an SL search for “meet new people.” Hmmm. I wish I could remember who told me that, maybe I could get some insight into what they were actually hoping to find?

Oh, well. I’m sure they were only looking for someone to play bingo with. But they got something better - a place with links to some great builds to explore.

Ok, I lied… it’s not that tiny but it is attached to Tiny House on Podcaster Island. I decided to add a deck there where people could hang out, watch video podcasts, listen to music, dance if they feel like it, sit in the pool, and generally have something to do while they wait for the next beachball to come along (Mac owners know what I mean). Note: this is a work in progress.

There’s an upper deck area that I want to make into kind of a DJ platform.

It has a pool on the opposite end of the deck.

It’s pretty much going to be bigger than Tiny House.

There should always be a couple friends hanging around to talk to.

It’s obviously not done yet and I’m debating making it fixed, or rezzable as needed. Either way, adding that to the playground toys in the NW corner of the plot, there should be something to keep wanderers interested for a second or two.

In the last post, I detailed my issues with both 1.19.1.4 and 1.20.. and the issue of 1.20 locking up the Mac really sucks, because this awesome little device needs 1.20 to work. This thing rocks.. I used it for a few minutes this afternoon before 1.20 locked up my Mac again, switching between flycam and avatar movement modes, and enjoying it. And I have to say.. if you’ve never used flycam, wow. The camera go go anywhere without having to alt-click to make something your focal point first. Just use the spacenavigator (or joystick if you wanna go back to 2d movements on a 3d canvas) to move the camera anywhere you want. It’s amazing.

So, in theory, someday they’ll resolve this issue, and then my video recording explorations in SL will be even easier and more fun than ever. In the meantime, I opened a jira issue report on 1.20 for doing mean things to the Mac. If you have similar issues, please vote on it. Let them know you’d like it fixed.

I have a confession. I’ve never really settled for second rate computers. I used to build my own PC’s, and prior to that I upgraded regularly. Now that I have all Macs, I upgrade fairly regularly now too. My primary computer is a Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz (Penryn) with 4 GB of RAM and Nvidia 8600M GT with 512 MB of VRAM. I have a quad-core Mac Pro with 2 2.66 GHz dual core Xeon processors, 4 GB of RAM, and ATI X1900 graphics with 512 MB of VRAM. These machines are not slouches. They may not have the best graphics cards available at any price, but they should be able to handle Second Life without complaining too much. And they do.. kind of. But in some ways it’s getting more painful instead of less painful.

People who don’t have Macs don’t know what we mean when we say “I was having a beachball” (some people call it a pinwheel). It means the App or sometimes the Finder is doing something that causes it to become temporarily non-responsive. It’s kind of like the windows hourglass or the Vista “ring”. I think I got that right - I’ve hardly ever used Vista, so any mistakes there are unintentional. Please no angry emails about how little I know about Vista - I already know how little I know, and I don’t care. Write your own blog post. Anyway.. when you beachball in SL, a lot of fun things can happen. If you are flying, you might wind up at the sim edge, underwater, up at 4000 m, or any combination thereof, when you return from your little vacation. The other night, Chug and I went to Harmony Island for a Jaycatt and Frogg event, and I wound up walking off the venue and into someone’s house. I “came to” in their kitchen. I have no clue how I got in - maybe they have phantom walls? I don’t know.

Here’s me flying along as normal over Podcaster Island…

Here’s me beachballing, sure to wind up at the sim edge or crashing into something when I return to normalcy (NOTE: beachball enlarged for dramatic effect - too bad it’s not spinning like the real thing, eh?)…

During these beachballs, the whole SL UI freezes - the image stops still, you can’t type any chat, nothing updates in the SL window until it’s done. This makes doing anything, including sitting and talking to someone, a real bitch. Forget about flying or driving. And currently, I’m getting these in 1.19.1.4 every 2 - 5 minutes, for sometimes up to a minute long.

Ok, so I was hoping 1.20.0 might bring some relief. And sure enough, I don’t have the beachballs. And it’s compatible with the 3dconnexion SpaceNavigator, which should be arriving this morning, which will make machinima and building better than ever. Only one problem. 1.20.0 locks up my Mac. The whole thing. The Finder becomes non-responsive. I can’t switch to other programs, shut down, restart… nothing. All I can do is press the power button until the puter shuts down. Unix systems don’t like that - actually no modern OS does. They page stuff off or leave it in memory and commit it to disk later. It’s not wise to shut down like that a lot. Plus, even if it was the best thing you could do for your computer, it makes that version of SL even more useless on the Mac than the beachballing one.

When I first got into SL, it was my low end Mac holding me back. I had a mini with integrated graphics. Yuck. Never, never, NEVER run any computer with integrated graphics if you want to have even a passable SL experience. Seriously. I got killed in katana fights every time. I guess 3 fps vs someone getting 24 fps or more is not gonna win. But now… Now SL is holding me back. Or Apple’s OpenGL drivers for Nvidia. Or both. Granted, when Apple first started using the Nvidia 8600M GT in the Macbook Pro laptops, it was worse. The thing would just lose memory until the whole computer locked up - at least now I can run 1.19.1.4 and just deal with the beachballs. 1.20.0 gets kind of “memory laneish” but it’s not due to any memory leaks or anything like it used to be. Something else is going on.

I’m not really sure what the point of this post is, except to say, it sucks being on any of my high-end Macs and being in SL these days. It’s just NOT a good experience. And I really don’t know if I have high hopes for any fixes anytime soon, without some other new problem being introduced. I really don’t. So for now, I’ll avoid driving, flying, any activity that requires the ability to avoid beachballs for long periods of time. Wait, that includes conversations… ok, umm. It was nice talking to you…

Previously, I blogged about how Itazura Radio came up with the concept of the Destination Station on Podcast Island, and how he planned for it to be a home base for the “homeless” to set their Home to, after they’ve joined the group so SL will let them do so. And of course, I mentioned the fact that it would be filled with destination boards to click on to go to a variety of fun and interesting sims and builds to explore. Tonight we started getting some of those boards operational with a few of our recent explorations.

True, there’s only a handful now, but we’ll keep plugging away and adding more. Instead of putting Chug’s explorations for the SL Under the Radar podcast in the podcast suite, we’ll put them on destination boards here instead. It will make it easier and more fun to find and click on something to go to.

When someone clicks on one of the boards, two things happen. First, the map opens with the destination on it, ready for them to TP to should they desire. Secondly, they are asked if they’d like to receive a notecard with information on the destination. If so, they get a notecard explaining more about the location (and typically an embedded LM for future use as well).

Hopefully this will be a fun place to hang out and watch video podcasts upstairs or find places to explore downstairs, and maybe set as home for those who don’t have a real place they call home or feel comfortable using to rez in or rez out.

Keeme and Nika have been blaming me in their podcast, Diamonds and Rust, for starting some kind of war with them. The truth is, they just like to fight… even with each other. But I’m glad they do, because it shows who the instigators are.

Looks like Nika’s emasculated Keeme’s copter. Baaaaaaad Nika. And then she even blogged about it, just to humiliate him. Wow… if I were him, I think I’d have no choice at all but to get even. Let’s see.. if only he had something more combat worthy than that totally ineffective robot…

(Pictures taken without permission)

As Chug posted on the Podcast Island blog, Dexter Ihnen (RL Dexter Moore) is recording a live album and streaming it live into Second Life, with proceeds from the even to benefit the Diabetes Australia organization. Better yet, he’s doing this in his new, still under-contruction Turquoise Planet venue that’s temporarily located above Podcast Island. Get on over to the event if you can… He’ll be there for probably another couple hours as of this posting.

What a fun event, watching Dexter at work half a world away, recording live and letting his fans in on the action. Dexter’s truly a man who knows how to entertain and excite the listeners.

If you hang around Podcast Island enough, you’ll soon realize that Itazura Radio has a history of coming up with nice builds and interesting ideas. Recently he came up with the idea of kind of a hub for people without home locations in SL to set their home to, provided they just join the group. He’s calling it the Destination Station, and that’s really what it’s going to become.

Inside, there’s a fire and a cozy roundabout couch for sitting around and yakking (there’s that word again) it up with friends.

Upstairs he’s got some video podcast screens, and woohoo! They point to the SLPN In Your Face! video podcast.

Okay, so what about the Destination part of this? On the walls are boards that we are going to start filling up with links/images to various locations around the grid. Chug’s explorations, stuff we’ve seen, locations of interest that our friends have come up with, etc. The idea is they can tp directly to the location of choice from the Station.

I like it. It’s got a nice open, comfortable feel and it will be nice once we start filling up the place with destinations.

This month’s podcaster meetup on Podcast Island featured Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.tv. She drew quite a crowd too, far more than this picture shows.

Unfortunately for me, the podcaster meetup was brief in a number of ways, my router (Apple, fix your #$@#$@# Time Capsule’s connectivity issues, you @#$@#% @#$#@$@’s of @$@#%@#%) decided it was not time for me to do my job and record it for the Podcast Island Podcast, so I missed pretty much all of it. When I finally gave up, Cali was talking about making a living at podcasting and I had wanted to get her thoughts on how it is that while some people make a living at it, 99% of the population, including at the tech company I work for, seems to have little or no idea what a podcast is.

Oh, well. Maybe by next month Apple will have a new, tastes great, less buggy firmware for the Time Capsule.

Thanks, Cali. Sorry I missed it.