Tag Archives: Second Life

Firestorm Viewer Contact Sets

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Did you know you can sort, list, categorize, organize and colorize your friend list, and even non-friend lists? This is especially helpful for business and region owners, group moderators, people with big friend lists, or just folks with lots of friends! The folks at Firestorm posted this video for their Tool Tip Tuesday this week. The video covers the basics but if you would like to learn more, Firestorm offers a contact sets class! Click on this link for more information on their in-world classes: Firestorm Viewer Classes

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

Inventory Loss Survey

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What is one of the major things we complain about in Second Life? “Grrr I’ve lost inventory AGAIN…. *#&$*#&$ Linden Lab!!!”

Linden Lab has recognized that this is an ongoing problem, and in order to help mitigate or alleviate this, they are asking residents for their help. Here is a cut and paste from their post on the SL website:

“As we continue to improve Second Life, we’re looking into the issue of inventory loss. If you have experienced some form of inventory loss in the past 12 months – whether partial (such as a single object or subfolder), or full – please take a moment to share your answers via this quick survey.

Your answers will help provide our engineering team with information that will assist them as they make improvements to Second Life.
We greatly appreciate your time and want to thank you for responding to the survey.”

Here’s the link to the survey: Inventory Loss Survey

We encourage you to respond to the survey. This is a wonderful way for you to feel like you make a difference, instead of just complaining about it. I took the survey; won’t you?? 🙂

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

One Billion Rising 2015 — Preview

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As a member of the press corps, I was able to get onto the One Billion Rising sims (there are four connected sims) and preview them. It was great to be able to wander around and look at everything without all the lag that comes with lots of avatars on the sims. I took lots of pictures and will post them here. The exhibits are amazingly beautiful and creative, and all bring awareness to the fact that we need to end violence against women and girls all over the world. I think my favorite exhibit was an interactive art exhibit, where you can actually sit and be part of the art!

Here are some photos. You can click to enlarge them. And don’t forget to visit the One Billion Rising sims all day tomorrow!

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The first interactive exhibit. I chose this one first because I LOVE books in RL. :)

The first interactive exhibit. I chose this one first because I LOVE books in RL. 🙂


This one is so joyful! You can't see it here, but this exhibit moves. I am actually dancing around in this field! Fun!

This one is so joyful! You can’t see it here, but this exhibit moves. I am actually dancing around in this field!


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OBR Drum_004
There are free One Billion Rising t-shirts for men and women.

There are free One Billion Rising t-shirts for men and women.


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I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

One Billion Rising Event in SL coming this Saturday, Feb. 14th

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OBR-Logo-2015
In January, I blogged about the annual One Billion Rising event that was coming to SL in February, and the time is nearly here! I am honored to be part of the press corp for this event, and will be invited to preview the sims tomorrow morning. I am looking forward to touring them.

Meanwhile, please plan on attending this meaningful and worthwhile event this Saturday! One Billion Rising in Second Life will run for twenty four hours – from midnight to midnight SLT on Saturday, February 14th.

The regions will open at 11pm SLT on February 13th to allow you to make your way to the event in good time for the opening. There are landing points on all fours regions. If it is difficult to get into one region, try another.

Here are the SLurls: (These are clickable links)

One Billion Rising in SL 2015 — OBR Change
One Billion Rising in SL 2015 — OBR Dance
One Billion Rising in SL 2015 — OBR Drum
One Billion Rising in SL 2015 — OBR Rise

Here is a map of the event:

Map of the OBR regions

Map of the OBR regions

There is a central stage where there will be music and dance balls available throughout the day. In addition, there is a poetry and performance stage on OBR Dance, where there will be special dance performances, poetry readings and a poetry workshop. There will also be a media center in the Sculpture Garden on OBR Change where several TV and radio shows are being recorded and/or broadcast over the course of the weekend.

Check the event schedule page on the website to find out more. Click on the following link: One Billion Rising Event Schedule

The music will continue till 11:59 p.m. SLT. The regions will be open for a further 24 hours (until midnight on Sunday, February 15th) to allow people to explore the art installations at a quieter time.

What is One Billion Rising?
One Billion Rising began in RL as a call to action based on the staggering statistic that 1 in 3 women on the planet will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. With the world population at 7 billion, this adds up to more than one billion women and girls. This calls for a radical shift to end the global epidemic of abuse that women face worldwide.

With the tagline “Drum, Dance & Rise,” women, men and youth will plan, lead, and participate in actions, dance, political and artistic events, and rallies — or Risings — in hundreds of countries on (and around) the date of February 14th to highlight, spark, and mobilize artistic and community-based initiatives to bring in the new revolutionary world of equality, dignity, and freedom for all women and girls.

One Billion Rising in Second Life 2015
The Second Life event will feature a four-region stage where 200 people can come together to dance, surrounded by an area of art installations, an arena for poetry and dramatic productions, and informational exhibits. A variety of performers will play over the 24-hour period and poetry and dramatic events will be held at different times, enabling people all over the world to attend this virtual event no matter their timezone. The regions will have a General maturity rating to allow all residents an opportunity to participate. Pictures are welcome on the event’s Flickr group.

The objective of the event is to raise awareness, not to raise funds; however, information about real-world organizations will be available for those wishing to donate. If you’d like to join the group, search for OBR’s Second Life Group: One Billion Rising.

Here are some clickable links:

OBR’s Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/pages/One-Billion-Rising/493344827375934
OBR’s Twitter Stream
OBR’s Flickr Group
Main One Billion Rising for Justice page

OBR 2015 in SL Artistic Uprising

OBR 2015 in SL Music events

OBR 2015 in SL Poetry and Performance

I hope you will come out and support this worthwhile cause. See you there!

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

Linden Lab’s Improvements to Second Life

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LL Logo
Linden Lab announced today in their latest blog post that they are on the cusp of launching improvements to Second Life, and detailed some of the new things you’ll soon be able to enjoy. These changes include improving the way your avatar interacts with surfaces inworld, giving you more tools for managing your preferences for notifications and graphics settings, as well as improvements to make life easier for mesh creators and merchants. They offer links to download Project Viewers that will let you get an early look at some of these improvements.

Hover Height
As we all have experienced, sometimes our avatar doesn’t interact quite right in a virtual environment. Sometimes your body parts stick through furniture, your feet hover over or sink into the ground. Fixing this can be computationally very expensive, so Linden Lab has been working hard to find a workable solution, and the result is the Project HoverHeight Viewer. (Anything in orange is a clickable link). Between the introduction of this viewer plus some server changes, this new viewer will improve things in two ways: the order in which adjustments are made to your vertical position has been made more stable, and even if it’s not perfect, it will at least be predictable. Linden Lab also introduces a new final adjustment that is directly under your control: a new avatar right-click selection allows you to tweak your vertical position. Linden Lab states “This final adjustment is shared with everyone around you so that they too will see you correctly, and is saved locally by your viewer so that it persists between sessions. This new feature was inspired by a proposal from the Firestorm viewer team, and they’ve been helping with testing it.”

Notifications
One of the ongoing complaints and suggestions received through the JIRA by residents to Linden Lab was the need to have better ways to control and organize the many notices they receive: inventory offers, group notices, event invites, and money transactions all result in the same kind of pop-ups and notice chiclets and are all listed together. The blog states: “An upcoming Viewer release will add a new floater that provides separate displays for different notice types, and the ability to sort them. You can prioritize and organize what’s important to you.”

Mesh Import
Important to content creators, Linden Lab is upgrading the support for mesh import. An upcoming Viewer update will allow uploading models that have more than eight unique faces, and improved association of physics representations and LODs by name.

Viewer Managed Marketplace
Merchants will be delighted to hear that you’ll be able to manage the inventory in your Second Life Marketplace store directly from the viewer. Items no longer need to be loaded into the Merchant Outbox or a Magic Box; instead you’ll designate items to be sold directly from your personal inventory.

Graphics Settings
Linden Lab is introducing an open source contribution that allows you to save named sets of graphics settings, with a drop-down menu that allows you to quickly change between them. For instance, when you attend a performance in your favorite club, you can save settings optimized for rich display of your companions and environment, and you can save a set for exploring that trades off longer draw distances and better lighting effects for simpler rendering of details – whatever you think is important.

You can click on the following link for the blog post in its entirety: Check Out The Latest Improvements to Second Life.

Hopefully all of these changes and improvements will make for a better Second Life experience. It shows that Linden Lab is still invested in the technology for Second Life. And it is encouraging to know that the folks at Firestorm are continuing to work hand in hand with Linden Lab, which should result in the same improvements to the Firestorm Viewer, as well.

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media

Firestorm Viewer’s Auto Replace Feature

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For Tool Tip Tuesday, the folks at Firestorm have created this video on how to best use the Auto Replace feature in the preferences for the viewer. This is a great tip, and I had absolutely no idea that the viewer could do this. This tip is especially useful for club or venue owners or hosts, or anyone who has to type the same information over and over. And the cool thing is, once you customize your auto replace, you can download it to an Excel spreadsheet and share it with others, and they can import it into their viewer! There is a lot of great information on the Firestorm website. You can find it by clicking here: Firestorm Viewer

Watch and learn!

I remain respectfully yours,
~ Suzanne Piers, ZI Social Media