the Corsair Survivor is still the official sim-on-a-stick stick and i had the chance to test out a brand new 32 gig one. they look identical and the 32 gig is at Amazon for $38 USD (suggested list is $49.99). that’s a great price considering that the 16 gig one was $37 last october so getting [...]

i was deeply flattered when Maria at Hypergrid Business called me a celebrity and that “You can’t buy that kind of publicity.” the true value in me, or anyone else, endorsing something is if you are seen as honest and genuine. i’m really into OpenSim and i blab on and on about it. i am [...]

Synergy is two or more things functioning together to produce a result not independently obtainable. The term synergy comes from the Greek word synergia συνεργία from synergos, συνεργός, meaning “working together”. (wikipedia) one of the top selling points when pitching virtual worlds to decision makers has been the collaborative nature of virtual worlds typically, collaboration means [...]

yesterday’s blog post of NPCs and your avatar name got me wound up about gender again. i’ve written on this many times and today’s political climate in the US is heavily gender charged. that’s hardly new, unfortunately, and the entire world has been caught up in gender for all of humankind. there’s a lot of [...]

back in the media frenzy days of Second Life there was lots of discussion on what it means to be an avatar and about real identity. facebook brings this to a point a few times a year when they delete fakey accounts (like mine with 4,000 friends!), and last year the identity thing came up [...]

the virtual blanket monster, shagging, getting stank on the hang down, or twisting the torus – whatever your slang is for sex might be in jeopardy of being regulated well, at least by anyone wanting to add age verification to their OpenSim grid. the next time you go looking to hizzit the skizzins you might [...]

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 [...]

warning: this is truly a rambling post a few weeks ago Hamlet Au wrote an article about a guy doing store layouts with some version of sim-on-a-stick. i have no idea if it was the pseudo-official sim-on-a-stick (patent pending by SpotON3D – kidding!) or if he built it himself. i did not invent SoaS, i just [...]

102 countries have visited and downloaded sim-on-a-stick with 78% on Windows, 14% Mac, 3% Linux, and 26% of visitors came in from search results 42% came as direct referrals, so that would be links both on this blog and anyone else publishing the link. the remaining 32% was from directly typed URLs, which probably means they read [...]

this video just made me smile and forget the work week. the song is fun and the builds are lovely =)

creating training videos is economical and relatively quick using OpenSim or Second Life. i tend to think in terms of branched scenarios and only two or three people (easy to manage). like one person walking up to another and posing a question or presenting a certain situation. then the video stops and the learner makes [...]

back in January, Maria at Hypergrid Business floated out the idea of a universal hypergate symbol and i threw together the one on the left. since that time, several people have created neat gates (some are available here at OpenSim Creations, including one that uses a fly!) and Diva recently made an easy-to-use hypergate you can get [...]

phew! we’ve been on OpenSim 0.7.1 dev (that’s a pre-official release) for 16 months now and i’ve held off getting an update because we really did not need one and our grid ran smoothly so i figured why mess with it however, there are so many great fixes in 0.7.3.1 that it made sense to have [...]

Ener asked me to write an article on how I have used Sim-on-a-Stick for commercial projects and to illustrate that a USB-based, standalone grid is applicable for usage previously only possible via a solution such as Second Life. In 2008 and 2009 I spoke at conferences and webinars about the use of Second Life for corporate eLearning as an [...]

in my 2012 predictions i stated that SL would lose 2,500 private sims and thought i was being really bold by increasing that from the 1,000 i had initially penned some people say making a prediction that SL will decline (many in the blogosphere do) is not bold (i can agree with that) and also seen as [...]