SL on Xbox?
Earlier this week I came across this blog entry by Dusan Writer which talks about a placeholder found on the official Second Life website at the URL - http://search.secondlife.com/.
placeholder page for XBOX, PS3, and iPhone versions of client when they launch next real soon now
However if you visit the site now it says
placeholder for search
So, what’s the deal? Well here’s what I think what happened
- LL is working on an XBOX 360, PS3 and iPhone version of Second Life and someone in the departments placed the wrong placeholder at the URL instead of a placeholder for an offline search engine for Second Life
- A PR Stunt
- An employee who was bored and decided to have some fun without realising that it would be noticed
However if LL is working on a client for the Xbox, PS3 and iPhone then I will be happy for two reasons. I Have an Xbox AND an iPod touch. For those who don’t know the iPhone/iPod touch has the same operating system and hardware (minus the phone, camera and soon to be GPS) meaning it would work on the iPod as well.
On the Xbox and PS3 you can talk via a microphone or keyboard (at least on the 360 you can). Also the whole Flycam features that are coming soon could in theory work well with Second Life. Not to mention that they are dedicated systems for gaming making Second Life be smooth and free of system lag (sim lag will probably still occur).
Although this may never happen I think it would be awesome if it did. Here’s to hoping that the almighty lindens are working on it 
What the Plurk?
Since Yxes wrote a post about Plurk…I will too.
Plurk is a Twitter-like webapp that in my opinion is brilliant. Why do I like Plurk so much that I have mentioned it on Podmafia two times and blogging about it now? It’s because Plurk is simply better than Twitter.
To me Twitter is a chaotic mess that you can’t really catchup on without going through pages and pages of tweets and adding people more and more to see what was replied to and by who. Not to mention that it is intertwined with the Fail Whale.
Plurk makes it easier for me to catchup on what’s been happening with people and also to read the threads of conversations. It also seems to be a good way of getting traffic fast. Case and Point, Yesterday I was flying around Second Life when I got an IM asking if I wanted to try out the PlurkHUD. Since I am a sucker for BETA I tried it out and gave my location away with the tool. Then GoSpeed turned up and GoSpeed told people where she was. After a while a whole crowd of people came and was just having fun and while Plurk is currently small in size of community it is seemingly quicker to get traffic.
Am I a plurk fanboy? Yes. Do I think people should leave Twitter. Yes. Will it happen. I don’t know.
But if you want to add me…well add me!
…I wouldn’t mind Creative Commons either
I was checking out the feeds on Google Reader today when I noticed that the popular blog, Not Possible in RL, asked this of Linden Lab.
The Not Possible in Real Life group hereby requests that Linden Lab add a Creative Commons tab in the object editor, as well as a Creative Commons option in the right click pie menu, so that everyone can see, with a simple right mouse click, what the rights are on an object.
I personally second this motions because I am a supporter of Creative Commons. Even though I don’t make it painfully clear on my podcasts I pretty much grant people to use and mashup anything inside of it because it is a good thing.
So, will the guys in charge pay attention and accept Creative Commons into Second Life?
Finally Declared Dead…to iTunes
A long time ago in the summer of 2006 I tried to start a weekly podcast called "The Weekly Warf Show" but it was kinda…really…boring. So it went into my archive of Podfade.
It was of course submitted to iTunes, but I deleted the show and its feed last year. However iTunes has only just caught up with this revelation
Dear Podcast Owner
The podcast located at the URL shown below has been blocked or removed from the iTunes directory as a result of technical problems with the feed.
Name: The Weekly Warf Show
Feed URL: http://www.podshow.com/feeds/warf.xml
I wonder how many dead podcast feeds still lie on the surface of the iTunes store…
Mobile Second Life
So, a while ago a company called Vollee announced that they were working on a mobile version of Second Life that works over 3G. Now I would try it out but my phone (the Skypephone on the ‘3′ network) is likely not up to the job for it.
But I hear that they are working on a version for the iPhone. Now, my assumption is that if it will work for the iPhone…then it will work for the iPod touch. I would pay for that app for sure because I would love to just log onto Second Life on my iPod.
We will most likely talk about it for the 50th episode of Podmafia.
How do you solve a problem like Podmafia 50?
Hey Guys
I am currently in the process of uploading Podmafia Podcast Episode 49 and I have just started to think…
WHAT THE HELL ARE WE ACTUALLY GONNA DO FOR EPISODE 50?
So… I decided to throw something up on the blog and see if anything comes of it…
Here are a couple of ideas for shows we could do…
- Top 5 Moments of Podmafia 1-50
- A show where we reminisce on the past
- Same old show
I am quite drawn to the whole Top 5 moments…but what exactly are the top 5 moments of the podcast.
Downtime Sucks
OK so Stuart Warf has not been in Second Life a lot recently…
So, in this blog entry I am going to be clearing things up with reasons (or excuses) to my disappearance.
- XBox 360 + GTA 4…
It is a good game and it is quite addictive…apart from the annoying 12 year olds who use voice and scream down your earhole and grief the games… - My PC is Broke’d
Well…this really is the main reason why the disappearance of Warf happened.So, on Friday 9th of May 2008 my motherboard (after some other difficulties) practically died. After days of trying to diagnose the problem I pretty much figured out that it was a brick. But just in case, I contacted the MSI technical support via my laptop. It took them 6 days to reply… and the advice was pretty much useless.
So…where do I stand now?
Well I am looking for the reciept so the motherboard can be returned and I am hopefully going to be back online with my awesome machine by the end of the week.
So… While I wait for the conclusion to this chapter in my PC’s life, I will probably be doing some blogging and get some SLPN stuff sorted out.
More on the Dazzle
OK, so a previous post of mine about Dazzle got some traffic and I was informed that the idea of Dazzle is that it can indeed be skinned. Thats great. Infact Itazura Radio even linked me to some skins that are already being shown on the Second Life wiki.
After some prodding around on what it can do I’ve come to some conclusions and formed an opinion.
The current methodology of skinning is far too complicated for newbies and people who aren’t fans of editing code. I personally don’t mind getting around the code and copying & pasting stuff but some people just may not want to touch it.
Secondly, there appears to be no menu in the preferences that allows the changing of skins on the fly.
Also, there are no tools currently that could help people create and customise their own skins.
So here is my proposal on what I think needs to happen. Firstly, the Linden’s need to get their act together and bring in an easier system of importing GUI skins. They should do this by adding a new tab on the preferences called “Interface” or “Skins” (or anything else that describes it. Calling it just a Skin could confuse some people because of the avatar skins).
Next they need to implement a new structure on how skins can be stored. IE. SecondLife\Skins\* (* being the name of the interface)
Then the lindens should make a program that makes it easy for people to create GUI’s as easily as possible. If the lindens don’t do this then it should be fairly easy for someone to make a GUI application in something like Visual Basic .NET or whatever the tools are for the Macintosh. Preferably an open source tool since then its free for all and people can contribute and improve the code and stuff.
Thats my opinions for the designing. I personally don’t mind editing code but I would trade it any day for a simple little tool that can help me easily make a GUI for the new Dazzle interface.
SecondLie?
Anyone suddenly notice this new twitterer called SecondLie?
As far as I can tell it started on Thursday this week and has since made about 300 tweets (as of the time of writing) and has almost 200 followers.
So far the twitterer (whoever it is) has entertained me quite a lot.
Check it out, Whoever it is…
Strike Time?
OK, I am going to discuss this whole SL Blogger strike thing. I myself a blogger am blogging about a blogging strike. Yay Oxymoron’s!
So, Gwyneth is leading a protest about the whole copyright and licensing thing about the lack of a clarification. Even though there was a clarification.
Why didn’t the linden’s address the bloggers?
Pretty much because they aren’t going to go after the frickin bloggers. The bloggers help promote Second Life so why the hell would they go after the bloggers?
It’s like saying that Apple sues all the blogs for talking about the iPhone. It’s crazy. They didn’t even take down Fake Steve. So why the hell would Linden Lab even take them down.
The copyright thing goes after people who are profiting by infringing on the Second Life copyrights. SLPN was sorta affected in a sense because we may in the future recieve cash sponsorship to help out the costs of running the network. Hence why I did some changes like just branding it as SLPN, Podcasts for the Metaverse
My blog will not change UNLESS Linden Lab says, you gotta change this. Because lets be honest, they will only give you a written warning about the content if its deemed to violate in a way they don’t like it.
And just remember…theres only 49 days left if your super-paranoid that the Lab’s is out to get you
-
Plurk
