Mesh: A fabulous, freebie, full-perm office

Mesh: A fabulous, freebie, full-perm office

OK peeps. I said I would only be blogging mesh items here if I found an absolutely incredible offer, and I’ve done just that. This utterly fantabulous offer from Meli Imako is something you simply cannot pass up on, whether you’re a builder or not.

Full-perm mesh – Modern Office Desk Set

I don’t use a mesh-capable viewer, so I’m pinching Meli’s Marketplace image for this post (hope you don’t mind, Meli!)

This item is not only free, it’s full permission. That means you can pull it apart, examine it, rebuild it, change the colours; whatever you like. Builders, you can use it in your own creations (although, as with all full-perm stuff, you mustn’t re-sell the item as-is, as though it were entirely your own creation).

Please remember: you MUST be using a viewer capable of rendering mesh in order to see this as it’s meant to be in-world.

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Sunday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Sunday

Okay, so I’m a slacker and haven’t been doing these every day. Sue me! :p

(I need an excuse! Um… er… oh! Well, we all have more time at the weekends, right? So I’ll do these for the weekend. That’s a good enough excuse!)

Anyway, on with the show! Today we’re going to think about your inventory filing system, and we’re going to start putting together a mirror of it on your hard drive (or you can put it onto a flash drive). Read the post and you’ll see why.

For those with a lot of time to spare:
– Log into SL and open up your inventory. Then, alongside it, open up your Documents folder (sorry, I’m a Windows user, so Mac and Linux peeps just open up whatever your equivalent is!) and create a new folder there. Call it something like Second Life Inventory Mirror.

– Inside that mirror folder, re-create the basic SL Inventory folders, like this:

(Don’t bother with the folders for Calling Cards, Current Outfit, or Lost and Found.)

– If you already have sub-folders in your SL inventory, then recreate those folders inside the hard drive/flash drive folders.

This is going to be where you organise your inventory and eventually keep pictures of your outfits and various other items. Today we’re just going to start with your My Outfits folder.

– Make a simple white photo background (or grab the dollarbie one I put on Marketplace, here) and try on all your saved outfits, one-by-one. Take a screenshot of each one and use whatever photo editing software you have (Gimp, Paint.net, Photoshop, etc) to crop each one down. Save them into the My Outfits folder you created on your hard drive/flash drive, using the same name you gave them in your inventory.

You now have a very quick way of seeing exactly what each outfit looks like, without having to upload photos (which will take a while to rez, anyway) to their relevant inventory folders!

UPDATE: Libera has a great tip in comments that will save you from having to resize the snapshots in an external graphics program. Scroll down to read it!

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Create the folders, as above, and whenever you get some spare time start taking and filing those outfit screenshots. Or you can begin to think about sub-folders for things like your Clothing or Objects folders, and working out a new inventory filing system. The reasoning behind putting this offline (on your hard drive/a flash drive), as opposed to working on your inventory in-world, is that you can begin to organise your inventory when you’re not logged in (because when you’re logged in you often want to do other stuff, right?)

For those with less time:
– Create the folders, as above, and whenever you get a few minutes to think about it, start working in those folders to create a new filing system that you’ll eventually transfer to your in-world inventory.

“You lookin’ at me?”

“You lookin’ at me?”

Something rather odd has been happening in the search terms of the old blog (which I still check for the Those Little Questions series). There seems to be a strange and sudden increase in people wanting to know… well, see for yourselves:

– sl viewer 2 how to know someone looks at me
– how to find out if someone is looking at your profile second life
– second life know what others are looking at
– can people in second life know if your seeing them?
– can you tell if people look at your profile in sl
– how to know if someone is camming you on secondlife
– can someone tell if i look at their profile on sl

And that’s just in the last week. Usually a plethora of sudden and new search terms like this is indicative of something happening somewhere (for example: when Linden Lab introduced Basic Mode as the default mode for new viewer downloads the blog received an unprecedented flurry of people wanting to know where their inventory had gone and how to get it back). I don’t know if the old rumour that “omg people can tell if you’re reading their profile!” has been sent out in a large group, or if something to do with avatar privacy has been blogged about or asked on the official Forums or SL Answers. But something is up, because I don’t usually get a sudden increase in specific questions like that without a reason.

If you’re here to find out the answers to those questions, then it used to be possible to see if someone was looking at you (aka: camming onto you) by enabling Show Look At in the Advanced menu of your viewer. I think (don’t quote me, because I don’t run that viewer) that this ability was removed from Viewer 2. However, also, many third party viewers have settings that allow you to not show your avatar’s “looking at” crosshairs, so there’s no guarantee that the avatar halfway across the store from you isn’t checking you out anyway. They’re probably admiring your outfit or maybe inspecting your hair to find out where you got it from, because they like it so much. Please don’t get defensive and send accusing IMs to them, demanding that they stop looking at you. Take it as a compliment instead!

To the best of my knowledge, though, there is no way for any avatar to tell if you’re reading their profile, either in-world or on the website.

True Blue

True Blue

It’s Kunglers group gift time again! This month in group notices you’ll find this lovely blue print dress with a dark blue sash belt:

If you’re not already in the Kunglers group, paste this link into open chat and click it to join (there’s a L$50 join fee, but you get a gift like this one every month). Check group notices and the dress will be in there until approximately 9th October.

Mar’s teamed it with two offers from today’s Fifty5 Thursday series. The Tamra hair by Calico Ingmann comes in a fatpack of “Calico’s Picks” (40 colours total: 20 plain and 20 highlighted, covering a wide spectrum of colours). Also from the Fifty5 Thursday series is this lovely Bubbles necklace (the set includes earrings, too) from PurpleMoon Creations. Remember: These are only available for L$55 today (September 29th 2011).

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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Boho chic at The Wash’s Cart Sale

Boho chic at The Wash’s Cart Sale

UPDATE: The Cart Sale is now over.

The huge L$10 cart sale at The Wash is ongoing, and ends on September 28th. There are loads of little carts all rezzed in the road, with nothing on them costing over L$10. Mar’s put together a great boho look for just L$60 in total. Guys, there’s quite a bit of male stuff on the carts, too, so head over to check it out! (And, boys, don’t forget that things like the Sn@tch jeans in this post can be worn by male avatars, too. Just because the model on the ad is a girl that doesn’t mean you can’t try the clothing out!)

The pants are from the Sn@tch cart, which is full of Ivey’s usual gorgeous goodies (and you can’t sniff at those prices, either). The skin is one of several offered on the Style by Kira cart. The top and jacket are from the Allusions cart (L$10 per item) which also has lots of other lovely stuff. And the boots and necklace are L$10 each from the Battle Fairy cart (the necklace is on one side and the brown boots are on the other side). Mar’s hair is from the huge freebie Adena fatpack at Amacci.

Hop behind the cut for more Amacci freebies, and a pic of an even more boho (but sadly not free) hair that Mar wore to complete this look!

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Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Sunday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Sunday

Since I woke up super-early today (and it’s a glorious day, so I’m feeling rather chipper) you’re getting your Sunday task on what’s probably still Saturday night for you :p And, since it’s a weekend many of us will have a bit more time free, so there’s an extra task for those that have a lot of time to dedicate to their inventory today.

For those with a lot of time to spare:
– Open up your Body Parts folder and make several new folders inside it, each with an exclamation mark and a space before the folder name (to push it to the top of the list). Make these folders for: Eyes, Hair, Shapes, Skins. If you feel they also belong in here you might want folders for prim hands and feet, hairbase tattoos, and eyebrow shapers, as well as physics layers (if you use them).

– Open up a second inventory window and begin to sort relevant folders into your new body parts folders. Run quick searches (‘eyes’, ‘skin’, etc) to catch the bulk of items first, then start to look for stragglers that you missed. This may seem like a big task, but you’ll be surprised how well you know your inventory (after all, you scroll through it a lot, muttering as you look for something, right?) and you’ll probably catch most items within half an hour or so.

– Sort each new body parts folder as it makes sense to you. This could be by store name, by colour (hair, eyes, and maybe even skins), or by type (hairstyles, shapes, skins, etc). Then sort and file the contents of at least one folder into those sub-folders.

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Create the folders, as above, and run the same searches to grab as much as you can and stuff it into the relevant folder, but don’t worry overmuch for now about the stragglers. However, if – when you’re logged in at a later date and looking for something – you come across a straggler that belongs in the new folders, put it in there when you see it. Make that a new habit!

For those with less time:
– Create the folders, as above, and do as many of the searches as you can. Try to keep doing this, little and often, whenever you log in. Even five minutes now and then will have everything sorted within a week!

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Saturday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Saturday

Here’s your Saturday de-cluttering task!

Saturday

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Search for ‘pose’, ‘posing’, and ‘adjustment’ and get rid of all those extraneous pose stands cluttering up your inventory. Then, use my tutorial to make a simple one-prim, one-script Pose HUD to use in future. And keep on top of deleting all those pose stands! Make it something you do before logging off each day: check your Recent Items tab, look in every folder, and get rid of the pose stands!

For those with less time:
– Do the search listed above and ditch the pose stands. Leave the Pose HUD for another time, but remember to keep on top of deleting pose stands!

And, because I’ll never ask you to do something I won’t do myself, here’s the result of yesterday’s task: the 25 oldest objects in Mar’s inventory:

That little lot contains a surprisingly large amount of salvagable items. In order of purchase, they run from the bottom row, on the left (bought at Free Dove on the very first day Mar rezzed). That skirt and sweater set has stood the test of time and still looks great, as does the “70s Chick” outfit near the right, and all the items by S.Y.D and all-but-one of the Layniewear dresses. The camo capris in the “freebie 0L$ yellow box on the middle row are perfectly wearable, as is the red cardigan by Deka. The full-perm boxes in the centre of the middle row had to go, though ;)

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Friday

Inventory De-cluttering Schedule: Friday

I’ve been doing these occasionally on Twitter, but it seemed like a fun thing to start on the blog, too: little daily prompts to do a small bit of inventory-sorting. Think of it like cleaning your virtual clutter, Flylady-style!

I’m going to create a schedule of ‘little and often’ things to do each day. While it’s still in the planning stage it’ll just be one thing per day, but I hope to expand it so that there are options for everyone, no matter the state of their inventory.

So we begin with today, which is Friday (at least, for most of the world; those of you in Australia and the like get a free pass!)

Friday

For those with a bit of time to spare:
– Rez the 25 oldest items in your Objects folder and unpack them. Take a good look at them. If it’s clothing, try it on to see what it’s like. Some of it may be salvageble (a great top with an iffy pair of pants; you can keep the top!) and some of it may be instantly trashable. File what you want to keep (don’t just let it sit in the unpacked folder; put it somewhere!) and ditch the stuff you don’t want. If it has sentimental value or you might want it in future, rez out a prim into which you’re going to put things you want to keep, and use that as an archive box.

For those with less time:
– Rez the five oldest items in your Objects folder and treat as above.

PSA: Mar’s Freebie Kits

PSA: Mar’s Freebie Kits

Hi peeps,

It was brought to my attention today that there are stores selling my freebie kits for non-free prices!

These kits were put together by me from some of the best of the old, full-permission items that I found from the huge freebie walls at the NCI locations (which, in turn, were supported by Linden Lab themselves when they were placed at every one of the old Welcome Island points where newbies first rezzed in-world). To that end, they should always be free, and you can still find all of the items in their original boxes on the freebie wall at any NCI location (although they won’t be weeded down to the best of them, like my kits were).

NOTE: The Ladies Starter Kit, while not containing any clothing/skins/etc created by me, does contain many notecards of my own writing, so I do consider those my own intellectual property, the same as all text and images on this blog (and my other blogs) are also my own IP.

I took down my Marketplace store and my little in-world stall some time ago because I wasn’t in-world enough to maintain them, but these items are still floating around out there, and you may run across them in a store selling other full-perm and Business in a Box items. The people who sell this kind of thing rarely think to put the items into a new box of their own creation. Either they’re unaware that it’s very easy to find out the name of any creator, or they just don’t realise that someone buying the items might contact the original creator instead of them (the most common scenario).

While, in this case, it appears to have been a genuine mistake and the person who contacted me about their purchase was refunded their full payment and the store owner was very apologetic (both to them and to me, bless her heart!) I do just want to make my readers aware that these boxes should always be free, and if you’re ever charged any money for them you need to contact the owner of the store where you bought them, because it’s out of my hands to do anything other than send them a notecard about the items. Feel free to link them to this post if you need to.

Here’s a quick composite image of what will probably be on the outside of the boxes:

Store owners, if you’ve bought these items in good faith from a full-perm or Business in a Box store, then you should educate yourselves about why it’s never a good idea to sell these free items. This post on my old blog explains it all: Newbie Notes – Don’t get ripped off! (Full Perm/Businesses in a Box)

No harm done in this case, since it was a genuine mistake on the store owner’s part, but there are less scrupulous people out there who will happily rip you off by selling freebie content. Just keep your eye on the price you’re expected to pay before you hit ‘ok’ on any purchases!