Category Archives: NEWS

Music Mondays: An Interview With Holly Giles

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Pictured above: Holly Giles at ~No Strings~

 

This week’s featured artist is Holly Giles (pronounced ‘Jiles’), a smooth crooner with an eclectic style hailing from Australia. She likes to sing country, rock, and pop from classic to contemporary and can be found at her venue ~No Strings~ each Tuesday and Saturday at 8pm SLT. (slurl for venue: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Areumdeuli/226/27/80)

Please check out her music on her website as well as this video.

Q: When/how did you hear about Second Life?
A: In 2011 I joined an online chat platform called IMVU due to some personal stuff that forced me to be at home and unable to work. I ended up staying for 5 years. I heard about SL from some people at IMVU who were trying to convert some of us over, haha. I created an SL account in 2015 and kinda used both IMVU and SL for about a year until I decided that SL was more to my liking, with people around my own age. I was in SL for about 2 years before I even KNEW there was a Live Music Community lol, so once i discovered that, I gave away my IMVU account to a friend and I have never looked back.
 
Q: I really enjoyed your renditions of classic country songs. What drew you to that genre?
A: My music is actually very mixed genre, with country music only taking up about one third of my song list. I was raised on classic country music with my mum having her own band in my childhood, so I learnt my love of country from her and I always say that classic country is my soul music lol. But I do love all music so I tend to sing what I love, from classic country, classic rock, 90’s pop and country, through to modern pop like Lady Gaga.
 
Q: As with any artistic style, country music has evolved so much over the last century. Which decade/era is your favorite, and why?
A: Oh that’s easy. I love the old country. The Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn era of country. These country legends are like storytellers. Every song has a story. Every song has a purpose to it. I don’t know how else to explain it. I can have my heart broken and find my story in a classic country song. I can feel overjoyed about something and find my happiness echoed in a classic country song. While I love all music and listen to even the most modernist of pop music, I personally just don’t get that feeling from it. I get the happiness of an awesome beat, or well-written lyrics but yeah, not that feeling.
 
Q: If you could open for any musician (alive or deceased), who would it be?
A:I think a lot of people who follow my music would expect me to say Dolly Parton right now, and I thought I would too, but you know, I think I would LOVE to open for Bette Midler. Wow, what a musician she is. I think if I opened for Bette Midler, I could sing anything I wanted to before she took the stage. I could sing some James Brown, followed by a Dolly Parton song, followed by some Credence lol. I wouldn’t be restricted to one genre, like I would be if I opened for Dolly, I feel.
 
Q: Do you ever get stage fright before performing in SL? Describe your pre show ritual.
A: OMG. I only started singing, I mean really singing in Second Life AND real life 2 years ago. The reason I never sang before is that I suffered MASSIVE stage fright. I would freeze up and my voice would go shaky if I tried to sing in front of anyone. It took a lot of help and compliments from online friends for me to get the courage to sing in Second Life. My very first show I was so nervous that I felt sick. But by halfway through I suddenly forgot that I was nervous and I just sang. I found the talking part a lot harder than the singing part lol. Now, I don’t feel any nerves in Second Life, but am working on my nerves in RL lol.
 
Q: What is the most meaningful aspect of the SL music community to you?
A: Without a doubt, the part I enjoy the most is singing a song and seeing in local things like “OMG I love this song!” or “Oh wow, I haven’t heard this song in years!” I love getting requests, I love sharing my love of music with others. I love talking about how my mum used to sing this song or that song in her band while I slept under tables at the local pub. I love that 2 years ago I couldn’t sing this song or that song, but that now with some practice under my belt, I can blast that song out like it’s nothing. I love just being able to sing and the fact that people want to hear me sing still blows me away every time I open my mouth.

 

Thank you, Holly!

Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands

Tech Worker Quarantined At Home

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Tech Worker Quarantined at Home Builds Co-Working Space in Second Life

SL remote work space

“I built an office for those of us working from home during the pandemic,” Annabelle Chimpton recently announced on Reddit, “complete with music, coffee, and a TV for breaks.” Replete with a fire pit, garden, and Koi pond, it’s very much the kind of cool and casual co-working space that tech workers in Santa Monica and other hubs are missing nowadays — except that this one only exists in Second Life: Chimptonck Click here to teleport.

Working from home herself, Annabelle  wanted a place that recaptured her pre-pandemic office environment. “I think the big thing I’ve missed is the random moments of ‘water cooler’ talk throughout the day so hopefully this can help replicate that,” as she explains.

Unveiled just a few days ago, people also working from home have been showing up to work in her virtual space from all over, she tells me:

 
“From everyone I’ve met so far, it tends to be mostly tech workers who have all had to go remote at the beginning of the pandemic,” Annabelle tells me. “I think most are from the USA, but at least one other person is European. It’s been really awesome meeting everyone! Truly it almost feels like an office at times.”

Second Life isn’t an ideal co-working space for everyone, of course, but if you’re already familiar with the interface and have a powerful enough computer so that you can multitask between it and your other work programs, it could be a lovely respite from your home office. 

Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands

Lab Gab Streams-The Dive Shop

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“Lab Gab” is a live-streamed variety show that showcases events, destinations, and different talents across Second Life. 

Join our host, Strawberry Linden, as she speaks with Cilian McCullough, who runs The Dive Shop in Second Life, which is a platform for training scuba divers in the physical world. Cilian and his team have created scuba equipment, fully functional dive computers, and oxygen analyzers. They have been approved by PADI, the world’s largest diver training organization, to use these simulations in Second Life to meet the practical application part of the PADI Enriched Air Diver course. Watch as he gives Strawberry a one-on-one lesson in diving!

Aired Friday August,21st

For full episodes of Lab Gab, click over to the Lab Gab YouTube Playlist. 

Real Soon we will be working to get some of this rolling in Fruit Islands I will be personally working on this and many more programs like Sailing Instruction ,Pylon Air Racing, Flight Instruction and so much more.

Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands

 

Linden Lab Confirms SL Sim Crossing Improved

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Due to Code, Not Cloud

SL Sim crossing update Linden Lab

Linden Lab has a blog post that almost seems like a direct response to the one New World Notes posted yesterday, wondering whether the improvements to SL sim crossings in the test grid were a temporary, unintentional side effect. But as April Linden writes, they are real, and a result of changing some code in order to optimize how SL worked once it’s deployed to the Amazon cloud:

When you crossed from one region to another, the regions were putting a lot of information into large packets and sending them across our network. This was usually okay because our network was purposefully built to run Second Life. Then, as soon we tried to do this on someone else’s network (in the cloud), things didn’t work quite right. The problem was most noticeable when crossing from a region in our data center to one in the cloud…

[O]ur engineering team decided to use another way to send the data across the network, using the same protocol and method we use for other types of data. Most importantly, it is faster and more reliable. That did the trick! We’re still collecting statistics on the impact this change has, but things are looking very positive.

Once this new code was written, the performance when going  from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week.

More intensely geeky details here. So the improvements are based not so much on cloud deployment itself, so much as they are based on improvements made to the code base in order run well on the cloud.

Have a great week from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands.

Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale!

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Lab Gab Streams this Friday at 10:30am PT/SLT – Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale!

 
 
Strawberry Linden

Entry posted by Strawberry Linden

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“Lab Gab” is a live-streamed variety show that showcases events, destinations, and different talents across Second Life. 

Join our host, Strawberry Linden, as she speaks with the founder of Second Life and co-Founder of High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale! Strawberry will be asking Philip questions about the origins of Second Life, what he’s up to now, and what he sees in the future for virtual worlds.

Tune in on Friday, August 7th at 10:30am PT/SLT. Watch us live on YouTube, Facebook, or Periscope!

For full episodes of Lab Gab, click over to the Lab Gab YouTube Playlist. 

Have a great weekend from all of us at Zoha Islands and Fruit Islands.

Firestorm 6.4.5—EEP Public Beta!

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It’s Here Folks Finally! But In Public Beta Release..

EEP—Linden Lab’s Environmental Enhancement Project—is here.  The EEP Firestorm viewer is now available as a public beta viewer. Linden Lab is hoping to get feedback from our user community and the Firestorm team highly encourages you to file bug reports on LL’s Jira here.

Before you ask, this is NOT a required update. It is a beta viewer and will not count against Firestorm’s 3-available-versions rule. You do NOT have to uninstall your current Firestorm, and in fact we suggest that you keep it. The beta viewer will install alongside your existing Firestorm on a separate channel (on Windows).

Download the viewer here: Firestorm EEP! Beta Downloads.

About EEP

As many of you know, Linden Lab’s Environmental Enhancement Project has been in the works for a long time and reached the grid in 2019. While the official SL viewer has had EEP for a few months, Firestorm has been working to eliminate bugs in our own implementation and streamline/improve the interface. While we don’t feel that EEP is ready for full release—in fact, it has not passed our QA yet—Linden Lab wants all SL users to have access to it, and many of you have been clamoring to use it.

EEP is a new environmental lighting system, a change from the previous Windlight system. Sky, Water, and Day Cycle settings are now saved as inventory items (assets), and can be created, copied, transferred, or sold the same as other inventory assets.  EEP settings can be applied to the land by parcel or region owners, or to yourself as personal settings visible only to you. 

With EEP,  

  • You can use your own sun, moon, and cloud textures.
  • You can customize the length of the day (yes—you can now have 24-hour day cycles!).
  • You can set different skies at various levels on your land. 
  • Visitors to your parcel will be able to see all your customized settings.
  • You can import your old Windlights as EEP settings (many have already been imported).

Note: Windlight still works in viewers 6.3.9 and older, with a few bugs due to server changes.

For additional information:

Additional Viewer Features

 This viewer also includes

  • LL’s new cam controls with the ability to create camera presets.
  • Updated viewer translations in many languages

See https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_645_prerelease for the full list of new features.

Bug Fixes

Even though it hasn’t been long since we released Firestorm 6.3.9, this one comes with a lot of bug fixes. Below is a list of just a few key things we feel folks will appreciate. For a more thorough list, please see our 6.4.5 PRE-RELEASE NOTES.

  • A fix for the AO crash in Firestorm 6.3.9.
  • A fix for Macs affected by MacOS – Blur When HiDPI Support Option Not Used https://jira.firestormviewer.org/browse/FIRE-24311.
  • A fix for skin failing to load for Bakes on Mesh while editing shape.
  • A fix for attachments to dismissed notices going to trash.

Known Issues

As an entirely new environmental system, EEP still has bugs to be worked out. You may see strange lighting glitches. Some have experienced reduced FPS. We hope that everyone trying this beta viewer will review the list of known issues and file bug reports to help us improve the viewer for you.

Downloads

Download the viewer here: Firestorm EEP! Beta Downloads.

OpenSim

For OpenSim users, there are 3 key points:

  • The viewer incorporates Windlight <—> EEP interoperability, allowing EEP viewer users to visit legacy Windlight regions.
  • The viewer supports the new OpenSim 0.9.2 with EEP—code-named “Ugly Sky.”
  • There is now a fast-entry grid feature on the login screen—simply enter a URI to add a new grid.

In addition, our last OpenSim Release had a bug that caused crashes when rezzing items. This bug was responsible for 70% of all reported FS OpenSim crashes on the 6.3.9 version, and it has been fixed.

Have a good one from all of us at Zoha Islands And Fruit Islands