Dolly’s got a brand new bag

One of the stores I love in SecondLife is DollyRock. Cherry Cheevers has so much clothes for us girls that you could easily spend every Linden you have (and then some) just getting great things to wear. Some of my favorite outfits come from here, and it seems every week Cherry adds new clothes to make me drool over. Luckily the new outfits are always L$100 until midnight SLT the day they’re released.

While I haven’t actually had a chance to get on SL much lately I get my inworld messages in my email so I always see when Cherry sends a notice of some great new clothes, and when I see a new notice it waiting for me I head over to the DollyRock website to see what she’s released. Today not only did I see the beautiful Fuchsia that I want to get (I love the disclaimer that “No fuchsia’s were harmed in the making of this outfit”) and I may also get her new Aiko but I also see that she has a brand new store for us to visit!

The new store is bigger than the old one with two levels of great clothes including some great freebie bags, but you also have to check out the DollyRock Bottom bargain basement where everything is L$50! Plus, for the animal lovers there are bunnies!

Get more information on the DollyRock website, and then log on into SecondLife and visit the new DollyRock store. Although you may want to make sure you have some Linden dollars to spend. You’ll need them.

The shortest day of the year is this Sunday

As the good people in the WBZ weather office have pointed out, this Sunday is the shortest day of the year here in the States because Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

Don’t forget to set your clocks forward one hour (Spring forward, Fall back) before going to bed Saturday night. Your computers and cell phones shouldn’t need resetting, but your watches, alarm clocks, microwave ovens, automatic coffee makers and other devices with a clock (your portable media player, Peng?) will need to be reset or else you may find yourself an hour late for things Sunday and perhaps even Monday.

Now that I tweet, do I have the best client?

Late last week I finally set up an account on Twitter so I can post share-worthy items I find without waiting to write a links post. Sharing things via Twitter has it’s pros and cons, including the fact that I spend so much time in the am getting caught up on the tweets from the 15+ hours I’ve been away from my comp that it leaves me with even less time for writing links posts. Just today it took well over 2 hours just getting caught up on tweets and re-tweeting that I’m seriously wondering if I have the best Twitter client. I know I can simply use the web-based front end for Twitter, and I do use it for some of the really old(-ish) tweets I haven’t seen, but I really prefer not to tie up my browser like that.

I looked through the Ubuntu Software Center and through both Uboontu and CrunchBang’s Ubuntu Search tools and settled on Gwibber for my primary Twitter client. I really like the fact that it can be themed, although the daily builds doesn’t like the older themes. I also like the fact that I can pull up the tweets from a single user pretty easily, which is extra handy for getting caught up after being AFK for a while. You can’t clear the users you isolate but it comes in handy first thing in the am for obvious reasons.

But Gwibber isn’t prefect, even in the current stable release. To get back to a user you previously isolated tweets from you have to hover your mouse over each icon (the simian heads on the left in my screenshot) to see which user is which, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason in the order the icons appear. Plus every time you do much of anything with a tweet it wants to refresh the list, even if you just mark a tweet as “liked”, as I do for each tweet I retweet so I can find them more easily. It makes doing multiple operations, such as marking as liked and responding to or retweeting, a real pain in the rear because it may want to refresh your list, taking the tweet you’re looking for out of the current view. If you’re looking at older tweets and retweet something you have to scroll back down, even if you’ve got the refresh frequency to 10 minutes.

I also finding Gwibber lagging my arse off so getting back to where I was just before retweeting can take quite a bit of time. I know it may be due to memory requirements of Chromium, with it’s failure to clear the cache after closing tabs, but even without Chromium open, or even freshly started before starting a Twitter session, Gwibber seems to flow through molasses.  Thanks to the lag I checked out the Pino client when I saw it mentioned on Twitter. It takes it’s look from the current active theme so it doesn’t always look as nice as Gwibber does, and it does seem to have a little more flexibility than Gwibber has in terms of interacting with each tweet, but I keep going back to Gwibber, despite the immense lag.

Does anyone know of a better Twitter client I should check out? It needs to work on GNU/Linux without WINE, so Windows apps are useless for this task, and I’d prefer an app that has packages for Ubuntu 9.10 so I don’t have to compile it. If it can use the lists I’ve set up in Twitter it’s all the better.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions, and feel free to let me know @BostonPeng on Twitter. I love getting tweets that mention me, as well as getting direct messages in Twitter. What can I say? I’m already a bit of a Twitter addict.

How did that happen over just a few days and why wasn’t I warned that this would happen?