Reading Radar

I guess everyone who blogs about SL or otherwise knows that Flickr is a great way to go to store your images for your blog. It automagically creates sizes for you, so you can put a smaller version in the blog while having it link to the larger ones, etc. And it makes it easier to manage them and share them as well, compared to uploading them directly to your wordpress blog or whatever flavor of blogging software you happen to use on your server.

If you have an iphone or ipod touch, I’d like to toss another cool flickr related fact your way, and that is that there exists a really fun and handy flickr photo app for you called Mobile Fotos that you owe it to yourself to check out. It’s $2.99, not quite free, but it’s worth the three bones, IMO.

Mobile Fotos has all the standard flickr browsing tools you could want - your own photostream, all your contacts, search, keywords, groups… the whole 9. Plus it also lets you upload pictures from your iphone or ipod touch to your flickr account, setting the title, description, tags, set, etc. For the iphone, with a built in camera, this is obviously very cool, but even for the ipod touch it comes in handy. I took screenshots of mobile fotos and uploaded them to flickr right from the ipod. Check it out.

On the left is the list of some of my flickr sets I used to categorize things, as viewed in Mobile Fotos, and on the right is a screen of photos from the Second Life Ancient Japan group. Naturally you can tap a photo to see it full screen and get more info about it.

Below left is my contact list, and below right is what I see after tapping on Arminasx Saiman’s name in the list.

On the left below, I’m looking at a list of tags used in my photos, and then on the right is the upload screen as I’m preparing to upload one of the pictures used for this blog post.

The cool thing about uploads is that, while there’s no way to batch info edit to prepare to upload, you can do each photo individually, and then it will hold them to upload them in the background, while you do other stuff in Mobile Fotos, or you can then tell it, ok, upload all the queued photos now, please.

It’s a cool little app for $3, I think. Now I just need to find a blogging app for the ipod touch that has flickr integration. I’m currently using the Wordpress app which only handles images that are already uploaded to your blog in the normal location that Wordpress uploads to.

There’s no possible way that anyone reads this blog but not Crap Mariner’s, but that’s ok, I want to talk about how his iTunes isfullofcrap anyway. Actually, it’s riaa.isfullofcrap.com, but it’s REALLY called the Tunes inSL Gallery Project. And no matter what you call it, it’s really a good idea.

At some point, Crap was thinking about Christmas giving and realized that the ubiquitous iTunes cards that people get and give could have a really good purpose in life if SL musicians were in iTunes, and if people knew about it. At some other point, he expanded that to Amazon where everything is DRM free (on iTunes, get the iTunes Plus option for the album if it exists to get DRM free music).

Please take a look at the project, and if you are going to give out iTunes cards or Amazon gift cards, send the URL to Crap’s list of musicians along with the gift. And if you are the recipient of such a gift, blow it all on one or more of the musicians on the list. It’s the right thing to do, and you know you want to! If you don’t know you want to, that’s even better - I’m telling you that you do! Clearly you don’t know what’s best for yourself. Well, a guy named Crap does, at least when it comes to what to stick in your ears.

There are locations in-world at Selby and in the Edloe clocktower for more information about everyone involved in the project.

I was mentioning to Itazura the other day that it really is kind of depressing to do something a little different in the Podcast and get feedback questioning whether I have the right to deviate from “rant and make fun of myself” mode.

I’ve noticed also that my blog posts that get the most traffic are the ones where I take issue with something and go off on it. A couple notable exceptions are my video and audio how-to posts, which keep getting read, thankfully.

I guess all I’m saying is that no one should keep up the same approach to any podcast, blog, or other creative endeavor just because they are expected to. Do what you enjoy and can be satisfied with, and if someone listens or reads, great. If not, you’re probably a talentless hack like me.

I subscribed to a new podcast this week after seeing it mentioned on twitter. Voices in the Machine, a podcast by Caledon residents. Their self-description:

Voices in the Machine is a podcast by, for, and about Steampunk explorers in the virtual world of Second Life®, published biweekly by Radio Riel: Real Radio, Your Reality.

I listened to episode one partly last night and finished it up on the way to work today. I like it. They did a good job of explaining some of their basic background as relates to Caledon, and did some discussion of the Openspace nonsense. They were professional and well spoken on the matter. They’d done some testing on Openspaces themselves and they put forth their assertion that LL is definitely not lying about seeing performance issues with heavily loaded openspaces. FINALLY, SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THIS!! I’d recommend them for that alone!!

Fortunately, that’s not the only reason to recommend them. I still have a couple episodes to go to get caught up. The only noticeable need for improvement was on audio quality, but it wasn’t that bad. All new podcasts start off needing a little work there, and look, I’m still messing with mine. A couple sections had me struggling to hear Gabrielle Riel compared to the others, otherwise it was an immaterial fact.

Really looking forward to getting caught up and hearing new episodes come out. It may be a fairly targeted podcast, but I think even non-residents of Caledon and those who don’t particularly get into Victorian era roleplay will find it interesting. I really like new podcasts in and about SL that have something to say, and not just a need to speak.

Just in case you thought the previous RezzedNecks episodes were a little odd… the next one promises to be a whole new level of weird.

It’s not what you think… well, not EXACTLY. Let’s just say that aliens look for information in all the wrong places. And I’ll bet Elvis wishes he was performing some lazy lounge act in Vegas right now.

Poke your eyes out now, and avoid the pain when it’s finally released! Speaking of released… something’s definitely in the air in this one.

I mentioned earlier that I invited RightAsRain Rimbaud of Rezzable and Catherine Linden of…. well, Linden Lab, to come on the podcast and talk to me basically about openspaces.

UPDATE: RightAsRain got back to me and is willing to come on the podcast. Awesome. He’s got a wealth of interesting information from his experiences with Rezzable, I have no doubt it will be a fun one.

Catherine I still haven’t heard from.

I pulled my post because I wanted to rethink exactly what I want to ask RightAsRain about, and how, etc.

I do want to ask him about Rezzable’s business plan, how much of what a lot of business owners in SL see as a downturn is due to LL and how much is just due to the economy, RL worries, and the fact that making money in the metaverse is currently just very hard with a limited pool of people willing to spend much on virtual goods.

Arminasx is clearly no dummy, but this post on Openspaces proves why he’s a shrewd businessman.  This is one of the best posts on the issue to date.  It’s exactly the type of thinking that a lot of the people getting upset at the Lindens now should have been doing before things got to where they are now.

I put out a note to Jack Linden asking if he’d be willing to appear on SL Under the Radar so I could get his side of the openspaces. After all, well known companies like Rezzable are publicly questioning LL over the Openspace policy changes. Jack promptly responded to me and directed me to Catherine. I just now sent her a request so she hasn’t really had time to respond yet. I’m hoping to find out some of the technical issues involved and why supporting loaded OS sims at the current price levels wasn’t making sense, and maybe some reasoning behind the original prim count increase on the OSes that people use as their excuse for believing that LL wanted them to use them as normal sims.

I also invited Rightasrain Rimbaud of said Rezzables to find out why they insinuate on their post that the reason they’re getting rid of 6 full sims by the end of Nov has anything to do with Openspaces - if in fact I’m correct and that’s what they are insinuating. After all, the price of full sims hasn’t changed, and if they aren’t making money on them, that’s hardly LL’s fault. I honestly suspect something else, which is that making money in anyone’s metaverse right now is just damn difficult. Oh, well… Rightasrain got my notecard, but no response. I’ll do the episode either way, with or without official response. I can speculate on them the same way they speculate on the Lindens “evil” motives.

I guess what it boils down to is that after watching Rezzables at work since they first appeared in-world, it doesn’t seem to me they’ve ever had a solid way of generating consistent, bill-paying type revenue, and now it also appears that they’re kind of thanking LL for that fact. Which, if I’m correct on both those points, seems both disingenuous and a little silly, frankly.

Ok, now this is cool. Dusan Writer points out the horribly named Viwogeo, from a link provided by Pais Kidd.

Basically the premise is that if you have a build in SL that mirrors a RL location, it can go on this map so that the RL map location links to the SLurl of the SL build location.

Got all that? Yeah, confusing in words, but simple and really cool in practice. Check it out.

What? Nothing in Kazakhstan? Or even CANADA!?! Come on, I know those crazy Canucks have something in SL. Come on… add the SLurl to the Viwogeo map… you know you want to! I mean, come on, Wichita, KANSAS has one for crying out loud.

Yay, it’s back!

That was the easiest episode ever, I let Itazura Radio and Stuart Warf do all the talking. So thanks! And umm. Where’s the clips for next time? Anyone?