Google Docs are pretty powerful and thanks to Maria at Hypergrid Business mentioning her use of them, we have been messing around with them for Enclave Harbour. in a post a few weeks back about having information kiosks, i showed an example of pulling in the Google Doc at the very bottom of this post. since [...]

blah blah blah, crane this, power plant that  =p i asked subQuark to create an example of how my nifty tower crane could be used as part of a science field trip dealio and here it is. one funny thing to note is that i thought the counterweights (what his post is about) looked fine [...]

i’ve been taking my time in making a nuclear power plant (after putting it off a year!) and it still needs a lot of work. a week or two ago i mentioned an issue i had in wanting to show the main parts of a nuclear plant which is inside an airtight concrete containment building. [...]

i’ve been putting off building a nuclear power plant for a year and i did not know why until this week up to now, the builds i’ve done have been able to illustrate science concepts as they are (ie, water from a reservoir running through pipes to turn turbines in a hydro-electric dam is easy to [...]

last july 29th, i posted a pic of a hotel room that subQuark built for an eLearning video set (here’s a post he wrote a showing the lobby in a video). his set has been sitting idle and it’s time for me to delete it and start building a nuclear power plant. since i am nuking [...]

OpenSim isn’t as accessible as it could be and that’s one of the stumbling blocks to its adoption. everyone wants web access to everything – the corporate world is all about things in the cloud and what used to be “normal” apps now are becoming web-based like Microsoft Office 365. it does make sense, just like you [...]

i had planned to do a video with the Zen viewer and compare its “feel” to Imprudence 1.3.2 but didn’t realise that it won’t run on my old XP box. so instead here’s a video of the anything-but-graceful Ener bumping along in a build that uses pod condos i built years ago in Second Life and [...]

prims are always important to keep track of and while it isn’t as costly with OpenSim, it is still an important consideration (in Second Life it costs about 2 cents a month per prim) Enclave Harbour is comprised primarily of science field trip locations but there is also the need for a few places for [...]

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 [...]