PSA: Accessing your inventory on Second Life’s Viewer 2

PSA: Accessing your inventory on Second Life’s Viewer 2

UPDATE: Since Viewer 2 is now no longer available, Basic Mode is no longer an issue (unless you’re using a very old viewer install, in which case it’s time to update!)

OK, peeps. I’m seeing a lot of search terms on the blog from people who are completely bamboozled as to where their inventory is on the new Viewer 2 for Second Life.

This is just a handful of the search terms I’m seeing:

– viewer 2 how do i look at inventory?
– access inventory sl viewer 2
– new viewer 2 no inventory
– how to go to inventory in sl
– opening inventory in viewer 2 sl
– second life 2 new inventory
– where is inventory in viewer 2
– sl new viewer inventory
– viewer 2 inventory
– inventory in viewer 2
– access inventory in sl viewer 2?
– inventory viewer 2
– inventory in sl
– viewer 2 inventory window
– access inventory with second life viewer 2
– sl viewer 2 no inventory

OK, I’m going to shout a bit here, in the hope of being heard. Non-Linden peeps might want to cover their ears…

LINDEN LAB, YOU HAVE A BIG PROBLEM HERE! BASIC MODE IS CONFUSING RESIDENTS!

Phew. Okay, now that’s over, here’s what’s happened and why you can’t access your inventory in the new Viewer 2. This new viewer starts you off in a mode called BASIC, by default. You have to change this, manually, in order to get to ADVANCED, which is where you can access your inventory.

Fire up your viewer and look near the bottom, where you log in. You’ll see this:

This shows you are in BASIC mode. Basic mode is pretty much nothing more than a glorified, visual chatroom. You are very limited in what you can do, and you cannot access your inventory. What you need to do is switch to ADVANCED mode. You do this by clicking that little arrow beside ‘Basic’ and selecting ‘Advanced’ from the dropdown menu, like this:

Now you have to re-start your viewer, so close it down and fire it up again. Check that little button. If it still says ‘Advanced’ then you’re good to go. You can log in and be able to access both inventory and all program preferences.

I realise that this is something of a reiteration of my post The Absolute Basics – Beginners – Preferences of the other day, but this is OLDER residents being confused, not just newbies! Older residents probably won’t even think to check a blog post that is aimed primarily at newbies, hence I’ve re-stated this section of that post on its own, here.

An open letter to Linden Lab

You really need to make things like this more clear, LL. We’re not just talking about newbies having problems; older residents are being completely confused by this new default Basic Mode – especially since it’s enabled by default and many people on updating their viewer would expect it to work as closely as possible to their old viewer. A change as big as this one MUST be highlighted visibly in the viewer!

For me to receive so many search terms for the same thing, in just a few weeks… well, I’ve been blogging for over three years and helping new and old alike for the same time, and I have never seen so many search terms for one thing. You clearly have a BIG problem here, and it needs to be addressed swiftly. It shouldn’t be up to bloggers like me to help newbies understand a big change you’ve made to your viewer, when you have the ability to highlight that change right there in the viewer so that they can check it. Also, not everybody reads blogs and forums – official or not – so there are a lot of people in the dark over this.

Also, calling it ‘Advanced Mode’ is a BAD idea. ‘Advanced’ makes people think it’s difficult, that maybe they need to know techy or dev. stuff in order to access it. By calling it ‘Advanced’ you could be scaring off some people who will never venture beyond Basic to find out the world’s true potential. Why didn’t you call the two modes ‘Beginner’ and ‘Experienced’, or even ‘Basic World’ and ‘Full World’?

Regards,

Mar

he Absolute Basics: Beginners – Preferences

Quick tip: Cataloguing skins

Quick tip: Cataloguing skins

Ladies, do you ever find yourselves trying on skin after skin in the same designer’s line, because you can’t remember which one had that lovely greenish-blue eye makeup? Sometimes it can take several minutes for each skin to load, and then it rebakes, and you’re sitting there for simply ages, while you try to find that one makeup you need right now!

Here’s a quick tip to help you out.

Hop behind the cut!

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Admin post: Downtime

Admin post: Downtime

I want to apologise for the downtime that the blog has experienced over the past day. Apparently, my webhost suffered a series of sophisticated network attacks that just kept on coming. They thought they had the attacks blocked, then they started again in another area, hence the blog was up and down quite a lot overnight. Hopefully, things have stabilised now, and the blog should be available to everyone now.

The Absolute Basics: Beginners – Preferences

The Absolute Basics: Beginners – Preferences

This is the second in my series of Second Life Basics for Absolute Beginners. In this post we’re going to examine some of the preferences in the official Second Life viewer (which I’ll shorten hereafter to ‘viewer’ or ‘V2’ – as this is known as ‘Viewer 2’). Please note that, for this tutorial, I was using version 2.6.3 of the official viewer. This viewer is, as I write this, still undergoing a lot of changes, so some of the menu items may change around, but hopefully you should be able to find them relatively easily in any future V2-based viewers.

Please note, also, that this post should not be taken as gospel. Behind the cut I’m just going to explain to you some important settings you need to be aware of, go through some of the things you do need to know (as a newbie) and what you don’t need to have enabled just yet, and explain what some of the settings do. The longer that you’re in Second Life, the more you’re going to want to do with it, so that will be the time to explore the menus again and see what stuff does: when you’re less afraid of breaking things!

Hop behind the cut, because we’re going to get started before we even log in :)

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Rambly thoughts: The dynamics of trolling

Rambly thoughts: The dynamics of trolling

There is a breathtaking case of trolling currently underway on the official SL forums which has held me jaw-droppingly enthralled to the point of my mug of tea going cold as I read it this morning. It’s almost applaudable as a classic of its type.

It began, as epic trolling usually does, with another poster asking a question that could and should provoke an interesting discussion among the forum members. But, after a few pages, the troll discovers the thread and sets to work. The thread then devolves into three pages of interesting posts, fifty pages of argument and counter-argument. Or, in other words: “three pages about all of you and fifty pages all about ME!”

Of course, the main aims of a forum troll are to keep the thread off-track, and to keep the focus on their own entertainment. Some trolls have their fun and then drop away, some find a good thread that they can take down for page after page of never-ending ‘fun’, and some trolls actually aren’t trolls at all: they really are that obtuse/dense/rude/nasty in real life. Some trolls are blatant and obvious, and some are stealth trolls, going undercover for weeks or months to pose as a ‘normal’ member of the forums and getting people on their side before they begin to take potshots at the one or two people they have decided to target.

The victory of a troll comes when yet another person is so incensed or upset at what they’re saying that they simply have to join the debate. When you click that ‘reply’ button, the troll has won. When you log into a forum you usually only ever read and never post on, the troll has won. When you create a new account just to post your response, the troll has won. It doesn’t matter if your comment is sincere or witty, a reasoned response or a scathing put-down; the fact is that you responded at all. The troll has won. In a sense, even my blogpost here is a small victory for the troll, because their behaviour has prompted me to make it. However, since I’ve been online for quite a number of years and seen trolling of all kinds in many an online environment, this post is more of a generic one about the phenomenon, rather than a specific response. I don’t count this post as a win for the troll.

I have, in the past, responded. Many of us have, to some degree. I don’t really ‘do’ forums much. I tend to read rather than respond. But, on occasion, I’ve been provoked enough to log in or click ‘reply’. Looking back on that now, I know that it was a futile thing to do. I played right into the troll’s game, as did everyone else who responded. The troll had a nasty, biting response to me, clearly intended to draw me further in and provoke me into the infinity loop of their game. Their response was what made me look at the screen and say to myself, “Nope, I fell for it once but I see through it now. You’re not going to beat me a second time”.

Buddha was well known for his ability to respond to evil with good.  There was a man who knew about his reputation and he traveled miles and miles and miles to test Buddha. When he arrived and stood before Buddha, he verbally abused him constantly, he insulted him, he challenged him, he did everything he could to offend Buddha.

Buddha was unmoved, he simply turned to the man and said, “May I ask you a question?”

The man responded with “Well, what?”

Buddha said, “If someone offers you a gift and you decline to accept it to whom then does it belong?”

The man said, “Then it belongs to the person who offered it”

Buddha smiled, “That is correct.  So if I decline to accept your abuse does it not then still belong to you?”

The man was speechless and walked away.

So how do you win? Simple: you don’t respond. It’s painfully obvious when you see it in black and white, but the troll knows that at some point he will say something that will get you so wound up that you simply have to reply. The moment when you can recognise him for what he’s trying to do, when you can step back and say, “Ahaha, I don’t think so, sunshine,” and when you resist that urge to respond… that’s when you have won and the troll has lost.

It takes a lot of strength to do that. Really, it does. But the satisfaction you’ll get in realising you’ve beaten the troll is far greater for its rarity than their satisfaction is in goading yet another person to join the fray.

ETA: Comments to this post are now disabled, as it was attracting a lot of spam comments.

Kunglers’ April group gift

Kunglers’ April group gift

Ladies, the new April group gift from Kunglers is gorgeous! Join the Kunglers Fashion Design group (L$50 join fee, but you get a freebie every month!) and check group notices for this lovely belted green dress with an accompanying necklace in old gold and teal:

Other styling: Mar’s hair is from LoQ, shoes are an old limited-edition group gift from LeLutka (and they match perfectly!), earrings are from Ticky Tacky (and I can’t currently find an in-world store location for them *sadface*) and skin and eyes are by Tuli. Poses are by Glitterati :)

Inventory: Hair we go…

Inventory: Hair we go…

Okay. I’ll be honest with you. This is the inventory-management post that I’ve procrastinated over the most, and I think you know why. Hair is one of those inventory things that we all accumulate at a frightening rate, and usually in such massive fatpacks that it’s easy to add thousands of items to your inventory in a single freebie hair spree. And then just the thought of sorting it all… well…

You’re with me on that, right? I hope so, because this post has now – finally! – gone into my draft post queue so that I can work on it. By the time you eventually read it, it will probably have been sitting there for a month or two while I polish it (or I may have been brave and just bitten the bullet in one go).

So anyway! Onward! Today we’re going to delve into the horrifying, tangled miasma of our hair folders.

Bear with me. Out of necessity this post will contain a lot of text, but I’ll try to put enough images in that your eyes won’t glaze over ;)

Hop behind the cut!

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Awww

Awww

sl4nowt.com has just had its first spam comment! The old WordPress blog regularly got tons of them, but this is my first one here!

*wipes away a tear and sniffs* I feel like a proud mama ;)

(Um, it goes without saying, because I know my readers aren’t dumb, but please don’t go trying to check out those links…)

One year of TDR Blue!

One year of TDR Blue!

Ladies, the one year anniversary collection is about to go out at The Dressing Room Blue (and, although I didn’t blog it, the main Dressing Room location is also celebrating one year). In both locations, each designer is offering not only an item at the usual price (nothing above L$75) but also one very discounted item (on average just L$40!) Mar headed over there and the banlines were up around the store because the collection was not completely in-situ, but she managed to cam in and buy some of the new items to showcase in the blog for you. Please note: the collection will not open officially until later today, so keep an eye on your group notices!


omg why do my hands look humungous in this picture?!?!

Hop behind the cut!

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