i try to build with as few imported textures as possible. one reason is to lessen the viewer load and speed region rez times and the other is a “lego” approach which subQuark thinks will be fine for our educational endeavor textures can make things look better when they are well done – they elevate [...]

as much as i blab about OpenSim and considering it’s been almost two years that i’ve been out of Second Life, you’d think that my SL-centric perspective would have been reshaped by now today i had to admit that either i have a seating fetish or that i still think in terms of 55 avatars per sim and that [...]

Enclave Harbour’s website will serve up additional content for its workbook such as videos to act as alternatives/supplements to going in-world and current event links for each activity. the site is now set up as a “networked” multisite WordPress blog. up until a few month’s ago, those were called multi-user blogs. sites like the Huffington Post are [...]

it seems pretty odd but makes a lot of sense – harnessing energy from “easy” places before i talk about my “high-dro power” (get it? play on the word “hydro”) i wanted to mention something i ran across while looking up how to do this science activity. i came across this thing for your household faucet – a mini hydro turbine [...]

signage is an art in and of itself and in our increasingly global world, signage that is meaningful to everyone is harder to create than many people think. signage in virtual world builds helps add familiar and expected elements that can add richness to your work. the very nature of many OpenSim regions and grids [...]

i’ve been asked a few times how i come up with “activities” for the science field trip locations i’m building for Enclave Harbour. mostly it’s based on topics found in middle school Earth and Physical Science which are the grades i taught in the past. in Texas, 50% of ninth graders drop out of school which [...]

for some reason i totally suck at making roads – that or i’m too persnickety. hmm, it’s probably a combination of both. the point of diminishing returns would have been also been a good title for this post i seem to have an issue with roads and the iliveisl estate in Second Life had city sims [...]

from time to time, i get asked how many prims and scripts we have at Enclave Harbour currently a fresh boot uses about 4% CPU and 3.1 gig of RAM prims scripts regions 253 52 Abbatia DreamWalker 2750 14 Energon 2495 13 Enclave Harbour Transport 427 6 Enclave Sea 986 13 Namaste Nord 1295 14 [...]

A topic I have discussed in the past is in the use of virtual worlds for creating multimedia assets for eLearning and I have some old tutorials for doing this with Second Life. Creating video from Second Life or OpenSim is fairly easy to do and fairly inexpensive. However, virtual worlds are also an easy [...]

i am slightly (read: highly) biased toward DreamWalker – if it wasn’t for her, i would have dropped out of Second Life before i ever became a junior land baroness wannabe (gee, maybe that’s not such a good thing! that was a bout a $50K tangent!) =p anyway, it’s hard to hold on to friends [...]

Review of the relatively new, LL “approved” SINGULARITY viewer for Second Life (and Open Sim). Singularity looks a lot like the old familiar LL viewers, but has TONS of features from other viewers. Welcome back, pie wheel, and hello new cool stuff!

SoaS w/ moap, omg! sooo r0x! =p what does it all mean? it means Diva kicks big butt and that OpenSimulator 0.7.1 is a masterpiece! =) apart from Simona looking pretty crappy and having no hair, not too bad! this is using Second Life viewer 2.0.1 and enclaveharbour.com this was filmed with the open source [...]

i go batty about matching colours but sometimes that just takes messing around in when dealing with virtual worlds. if you are trying to match something that someone else made sometimes you can export the texture out but not always. now if it is stuff you are making, it becomes much easier. i have been on a [...]