It's the weekend and you should be feeling good. Relaxed. Smiling. 
Here, enjoy some mellow piano music:
It's from the upcoming solo piano 3.
I find playing piano is a healthy way to destress after a busy week.
Visual yomminess provided courtesy of Mr. Zephos' Filter Forge Sketch Book.
You may've heard, or seen, that the Linden Village has expanded into two new regions: Levenhall and Beaumont, and if you're wondering what the heck Linden Estate Services is, it's our Concierge Team's inworld offices! Cyn Linden, Director of Customer Relations (ooooh titles!), is gonna be building it out. We've already got some new Lindens like metrics master Meta establishing homesteads. And I must take this time to say, Which Linden's avatar makes sad pandas happy.
Lovely to see Torley Textures continuing to inspire Residents to express themselves; Daedalus Young and Melandra Brown have both very nicely let me know what they were up to. Daedalus made his very first texture pack and Melandra applied "Sombra" to a "blue stripe" dress. *big smile*
Also thanxies to Toady Nakamura for applying Torley Textures to a chair and curtains she made:
This is how we learn!
Rez Menoptra + Endira Udal are one of Second Life's foremost building couples. Awwwe. <3 I say that because I can't think of many others who collab (altho venerable greats like Eddie Escher + Fallingwater Cellardoor must be namedropped out of respect!). Together like a gestalt Transformer, [edit: they're working for Electric Sheep], and they breathe life into what is sometimes considered a DULL and BORING part of the year… doing your TAXES.
Yup, that's H&R Block's inworld presence. Click-through for the SLURLs so you can visit, and ride a scooter, and have a… uh, more fun time filling out those forms?
(That last picture is of a transparent shiny SLoundwave… I just hit Ctrl-Alt-Shift-1 and found myself see-through.)
Virgin Island has an eerie atmosphere. Downstairs it was desolate and deserty like one of those post-apocalyptic horror flicks with radioactive mutants and/or males of great height piloting hearses and pocketing souls, but upstairs… a mall. Even the undead can't miss out on a good bargain, and I know this is just my very twisted interpretation of the seretipitous surreptitious. So thar!
(Someone film machinima here!)
I've visited A V Festival island a few times. First glance, some might go "High traffic, it's a club, lalala…" but I hung out and found it fun, because it's outdoors. How does that change things? For me, I've got a point of reference from Burning Life last year, the Second Life version of Burning Man, and it feels like we're all playing on the playa. Also, it felt a lot more open, and the performance was surprisingly speedy for me — 102 avs and 7-9 FPS with my Object Mesh Detail slider set all the way up. Maybe that's the trick: cut down on the prims and have people party in the great (digital) outdoors.
Observations, obSLervations: Bridie Linden's new @ Linden Lab (we're growing so quickly!) and she's going to P*Manage (that asterisk could be Program, Product, or Project — take your pick!) Resident pain points at Studio Blacklight (psst look up the LLB Studio Blacklight group, hehe…), working with me. JOY. She's got great artistic sensibility and has already customized her avatar. I wuz showing her 'round… say "friendly greetings" if you see her!
WE ARE THE ROBOTS. At least I am, and you can be too if you want. Opened a gift package from the other day, and ohhh it's a watermelon ghetto blaster by Luxe Alabaster!
Goes well together, huh? My SLoundwave avatar was originally created by Rogo Gorky and modded by me; Luxe also gave me a new avatar she made, fittingly named Crazy Colourz. She recently moved to Alphanumeric Shores, and no I don't think she could resist the name. Now, she has a tropical island populated with her creations. Unique, funny, ahhhh eclectic — what I love about Second Life!
[UPDATE - 11:44 AM PDT] You can get tFinder inworld @ Wallaroo (250, 11, 304). Look for something like this:
I keep long wishlists of people, places, things I hope to see come true in Second Life: some already have. One that found me in particularly good graces was after Pompo Bombacci (thanks Pompo!) let me know about Cid Vilas' tFinder.
What's it do? First, let's start with some numbers: while I write this, the tFinder is the #1-selling item on SL Exchange. It's also got 130 votes averaging out at 4.5 numbers, and 17 member reviews. Those of you who know me, also know I place context around metrics. In this instance, what makes it so compelling?
One sentence: texture organization is hell.
Another sentence: opportunists in this field will find ample voids to fill.
And Cid Vilas is such — in the parlance du Torley — a chess player.
Ever since my early days of admiring the work of others to crafting my own Torley Textures, I've run into all the common pitfalls of managing textures in my inventory. For example, no built-in way to thumbnail preview a swath of textures: you have to open them up one-by-one, eating up full memory for each, which also reduces performance. Also, since we don't have an actual tagging system, you may have something named:
03Brk.jpg
and not have the damndest idea what that is by name! I resort to "ghetto tags", which is usually inserting keywords after a filename such as:
03Brk.jpg [WOOD TREE OLD]
if not altogether renaming the file into something human-readable like:
Old wooden tree bark
Before I jaunt further with ya, let me preface that tFinder doesn't solve tangles with cryptic filenames, but if you've named textures appropriately before including them in the database — send them to Cid for now; in the future this will be more open — then you can find them.
A brief diversion: when I send SL snapshots to Flickr, in the subject or description, I often put keywords I know will make sense to me later, so I can find something straight outta the archives. On so many instances, a fellow Linden or Resi will ask me about something I've seen on my travels, I need to pull it up — fast!
That's certainly why I've adopted a good habit of taking a few moments beforehand to optimize information retrieval later.
And now, the meat of this story is that I IMed Cid, he sent me the tFinder, we met inworld to discuss. tFinder costs L$10, which is the price of uploading a single texture to begin with, and presently banner ad-supported, which some will find intrusive, but for the price it's cheap & cheery, and ah, context: Cid didn't know this would be so popular! Some of the background behind it is that he likes to choose intriguing projects, and he was thinking about P2P networks. In Second Life, which is decidedly very conducive to social activity, what sort of things are easily swapped? We know freebies are, but looking at it on a more granular level, textures are micro-art — my adherent philosophy. And if they sit in your inventory, they're not doing much else unless you apply them, or share them. Sharing textures augments their usage.
tFinder basically works like this: you click a button, type in a word or two (it does substring matches so searching for "col" may turn up "Colorful Mattress"), and it shows you thumbnail previews (shrunken-down versions of the originals, so they don't conserve graphics card memory, but are easier to visualize). Click on one, the full thing pops up, and you can save it to inventory like any standard texture you receive.
I did several casual searches., and was pleased to find Torley Textures in the current database. Cid clued me in that the collection was drawn from available free packs present at places like sandboxes, newcomer-friendly venues, etc. Looking at some of the prefixes appended to my textures such as "AB -", it was apparent they came from Harbinger's Haven. I spotted some dupes, and then proceeded to engage Cid in dialogue with feature suggestions like:
Clearly, I'm excited about what already exists in the present. When I last checked, Cid didn't have an inworld place to acquire the tFinder yet, but I got a preview of his new prototype. I mused about distro'ing Torley Textures from a tFinder server in the future. And in the process, began to ruminate about a "texture culture" where swarms of textures, like a collective of insects or a flock of geese, congregate together and are distributed over the fattening texture pipelines of Second Life. Need a wood, metal, glass, etc. texture but are too lazy — or simply efficient — to rummage inworld? Call up the tFinder and see what kind of good times are in store for you.
As I often hark towards (this should be disclaimer text appended to just about all I write, albeit not boring), this is but a seed of what's yet to come. I thrill at experiencing what could be the germination of great growths to go — so now is early in the process when I can see the potential, and share it with you, so that we may mutually benefit.
As part of a flourishing open source texture movement, I encourage more Residents of Second Life to take up their tools and imbue the world with a unique beauty that it didn't know before; textures specially inspired by SL, which didn't exist prior to your knowledge of it, which may find their way to the outside, instead of the other way around. Don't know where to start? Give my fave Filter Forge a 90-day trial. Viva les textures!
Gracious thanx to Cid Vilas for taking the time to demo tFinder for me, and heck, inventing it!
If you've ever needed to take a batch of files and rename them a certain way, I recommend using ReNamer, by den4b. As deduced from the generic name, it wasn't easy to search for so I could download it in the first place, but once I learned the mechanics of how to create rules, it was as easy as dragging-and-dropping folders with the files onto it and applying presets. Presets are doubly great for saving you time in the future, when you need to do the same sorts of processes to more files.
ReNamer's rules are extensive, and I haven't personally had a need for some of the more esoteric ones, but what's really nice is you can preview changes rapidly before committing them, saving you from scroo-ups. For example, here's a simple setup that renames "Snapshot_XXX.bmp" (Second Life's saved-to-disk pictures) to a more descriptive "Inworld Exploring - X.bmp", which I then uploaded to Flickr:
It sure beats going through by them one-by-one.
Better filenames definitely help with later searchability too, since I've been finding that even if I don't use keyword tags, sometimes putting important words in the title is good enough. Another project I've recently used ReNamer on is retitling my solo piano 2 recordings sequentially from the original files.
So if you've got series of photos from your digital camera that deserve descriptive filenames, want to uniformly tidy up a collection of text docs, or another usage you can imagine, I suggest giving ReNamer a go.
One more reason to smile: ReNamer's free!
