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Category: Tutorials

Useful gadgets #2: The Eternity Teleporter Pad

Useful gadgets #2: The Eternity Teleporter Pad

It’s been a long time since I wrote my first Useful Gadgets post (in fact, it was so long ago that it was on the old blog!) but I’m back with another in the series, and this time it’s for something many of us use: teleporters.

This particular teleporter is not only completely free, it’s modifiable and very easy to customise. I use it at my home location, and I can set up each pad in a matter of two minutes. While it’s not as fancy as some of the pricey, networked pad systems you can buy, it’s still great for moving between levels in a store or between your land-based home and skybox(es)!

Hop behind the cut!

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Mar’s Guide to: Making a little hideaway for yourself

Mar’s Guide to: Making a little hideaway for yourself

If there’s one thing a lot of us want in SL, it’s a little place to call our own. Previously, I’ve given you a tutorial to make a very simple little 10m skybox to get changed in (and live in, if you want!) but that method doesn’t give you much leeway for decorating the walls; it’s more of a one-texture-all-over kind of thing.

To that end, here is a slightly more detailed tutorial for building a small skybox home of your own. This one is adaptable to any size, although I’ve only worked with a 10m box. It allows much greater texture customisation of the walls, and I’ve included a really nifty little hint about how to save prims, which is something we all want to do when we own land. Every land parcel only allows you so many prims, so every few you can shave off here and there gives you more to put towards something else, like furniture :)

Today’s guide will show you how to make a bright spring hideaway, full of gorgeous colour. I’m also going to show you a few cheap (and free) decor items that go nicely with this spring hideaway, and over the next few months I hope to be able to re-use this hideaway, re-texturing and re-furnishing it to show you different ideas.

Hop behind the cut, and let’s get stuck in to building!

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Inventory Management: Textures (a tutorial for using tx Oh’s YATO-BF)

Inventory Management: Textures (a tutorial for using tx Oh’s YATO-BF)

If you’ve ever built anything in Second Life, then chances are that your inventory is heaving with textures. Once you start obtaining textures in SL it can lead your inventory to spiral rapidly out of control. You start with a few freebies from the NCI Freebie Wall packs, and before you know it you’ve spent thousands at some of the big texture stores in-world.

Thing is, you need to be able to access those textures quickly the next time you’re building something, and it helps if you can see them displayed, rather than clicking one texture after another in your inventory and waiting for them to load. But if you have lots of textures sitting in your inventory so you can access them easily, then you’ll never get that inventory size down.

So what can you do about it?

Well, naturally, the answer is some form of texture organiser, and you’ll find a whole bunch of them on SL Marketplace, from free to not-so-free. Some have a gazillion bells and whistles and some are very simple. In this post I’m going to give you a quick guide to using a dollarbie texture organiser that comes with a HUD (most of the cheapies and freebies don’t include a HUD version, but this one does) – tx Oh’s YATO-BF (aka: Yet Another Texture Organiser- But Free!)

Hop behind the cut!

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Tutorial: Make your own pose HUD

Tutorial: Make your own pose HUD

Have you ever wished you could adjust prim items on your avatar on-the-fly, but you can’t seem to grab hold of them to do so? (I know that some third party viewers have a great ‘edit’ option direct from inventory, but other viewers don’t have that.) Invariably, it’s in a place that doesn’t allow rezzing, so you end up having to teleport home where you have your pose stand rezzed, or you teleport to a sandbox so you can rez a stand.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could go into the classic ‘star jump’ adjustment pose without all that hassle? Well you can, and to that end here’s a little illustrated tutorial showing you how to make your own wearable Pose HUD.

Hop behind the cut!

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Tutorial: Make your own facelights

Tutorial: Make your own facelights

As I’ve mentioned before, both on this blog and on Mar’s Ponderings, I often travel through Second Life with Caliah Lyon’s Avatar Optimising Windlight Preset open. This changes the world’s lighting for the duration of my login session, and gives a very flattering light to my avatar. I use it for all of the blog pics, too. If you don’t mind having the same ultra-blue sky wherever you go, that preset will always make you look great.

But what if ultra-blue sky’s not your thing? What if you want to use some of the other presets, or you like to visit always-night sims? Of course, you can always have a shadowed face, but if you want to let people actually see you, then you need some facelights. There are some great ones available both in-world and on XstreetSL/SL Marketplace, but most of them tend to be scripted. With the potential script limits that may be enforced in SL, anything that reduces the amount of scripts you’re wearing is a good thing. So that leads us to traditional ‘local lights’ facelights.

Trouble is, we’ve all seen people in-world wearing facelights that look like aliens have landed, washing out everything around them, rendering our own facelights and any ambient lighting around us completely useless. I’ve even seen avatars wearing twelve facelights (the SL viewer can only render six!).

So you can buy one, or you can do what I do: make your own. Hop behind the cut, because I’ve got another little building tutorial for you :)

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Tutorial: How to send someone a gift from SL Marketplace

Tutorial: How to send someone a gift from SL Marketplace

UPDATE: Gifting is now much easier, so I’ve updated the post. However, I’ve left the old info after it, because I think it’s interesting to keep a record of how convoluted it used to be, compared to how easy it is now. If only Linden Lab had thought of the Now version Then ;)

I was browsing the search terms that led people to the blog, and I came across this one: why cant i send a gift to someone from the sl marketplace?

Good point! On the old XstreetSL site, before Linden Lab changed the code and it became SL Marketplace, the ‘send as gift’ option was right there on the item’s page, but now it seems to have gone. Well, it’s not gone; it’s just hidden a little bit and slightly more convoluted to get to (ie: more mouse-clicking!).

NOTE: You can’t gift a freebie item. Only items that cost L$1 or more can be gifted.

Hop behind the cut for a quick tutorial on sending a gift to someone via SL Marketplace.

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Tutorial: Make your own Landmarks HUD

Tutorial: Make your own Landmarks HUD

A while back, I made an inventory-management post in which I urged you to chuck out all of your old landmarks. At the beginning of that post I tried to find some free or cheap landmark HUDs that would hold the LMs you wanted to keep, because while storing them in notecards is an excellent idea it can take a while to dig out the relevant notecard, find the relevant LM inside it, click to open the window, and then finally teleport there.

Today, thanks to a fabby free landmark-giver script that I’ve found, I can give you this tutorial to make your own Landmarks HUD. It’s not the most perfect thing, nor will it rival any of the paid-for HUDs that are out there. The menu buttons where your landmarks are filed will not, for instance, be in alphabetical order (or, indeed, even in the same place each time you open it) but it’s free, and if you don’t want to fork over several hundred L$ for a professional HUD then it’s a good enough alternative!

Hop behind the cut for the tutorial :)

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