DollyRock is … CLOSING???

I got an email from SecondLife telling me I had a new inventory note from Cherry Cheevers at DollyRock so I popped over to the DollyRock website to see what’s probably in the update. My heart immediately dropped when I saw the headline that DollyRock is saying goodbye.

Wow, this is a hard one to write. {deep breath} I’ve decided to close DollyRock. After almost 4 years, I think it’s time to move on, although, no doubt it’s going to leave a gaping hole in my life. There are going to be some big changes to Second Life over the coming months, so I’m going to take some time out and learn new skills and maybe return with something new and fresh. Alternatively I might get to finish the book I’m writing or just blog and twitter 

DollyRock is where I got some of my all-time favorite outfits and even though I didn’t get a chance to buy some of the new things that I liked it’s still one of the locations I always make a point of visiting on those rare occasions that I actually fire up SecondLife.

With the exception of items in the 50L store everything has been marked down to $75L so if there’s something from Cherry that you’ve been meaning to buy you’d better get over to DollyRock and buy it while you can. Her blog post doesn’t say when the store will close if you wait too long you may miss out completely.

For all the details read the announcement on the DollyRock website. Then fire up your SecondLife viewer and head on over to DollyRock while it’s still there.

Now I have to look at the budget for this week to see just how much money I can turn into $L to buy outfits with. Then I think I’m going to cry because I know it won’t be nearly as much as I need it to be.

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.

Do you still build in SecondLife? Crystal Gadgets has a cool tool you’ll want

I haven’t been on SecondLife much lately (although I do want to get on more) but I still keep up with the blog for Crystal Gadgets, makers of some of our favorite gadgets like the Radar HUD, Prim Finder and Texture Organizer. Today I read a post from their RSS feed which is making me jump on SecondLife today so I can grab their newest tool for builders.

They’ve come out with a tool called the Relative Mover. What does it do? Here’s what they say on the product announcement.

Relative Mover is a tool which moves a collection of objects from one location to another while preserving their relative positions/rotations.

Sounds pretty nice, right? It sounds like something I’d definitely consider buying because I’d use it so often, and the price makes me want to fire up my SL viewer even faster: L$ FREE.

You can visit their product page and click the BUY button to use a landmark to launch SecondLife and visit their inworld store. I’m going to hit that button as soon as I publish this post. Perhaps I’ll see some of you there?

Is your avatar ready for Christmas?

The holidays can be a fun time in SecondLife with so many areas being so nicely decorated, but you should make sure your avatar is ready for the holidays as well.

I’m afraid I missed the holiday hair at Gurl 6 (SLURL), but they have a great sale through the month of December so get on down there and pick up some great hair styles at some really good prices.

Of course what’s the use of having a great hair style without some new clothes? Cherry Cheevers over at DollyRock (SLURL) has brought out some adorable new outfits lately and they even have a Christmas Cutie that may just be your must have holiday outfit.

While you’re in SecondLife you should check the Lost & Found folder in your inventory. You may find some things there that you thought were gone for good.

I’ll see about getting my tees back on sale in case you missed last year’s holiday tees. I may even bring out a new tee or two to add to your collection so watch this space for more news.

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Did you notice the new icon for this site? WordPress has finally allowed us bloggers to create our own icon for our sites, and Peng and I talked about what to put there. I had suggested maybe putting his hackergotchi (the pics you see on his posts on Ubuntu Weblogs), or maybe the Mac4Lin tux since he does so much writing about Mac4Lin, but he said it wasn’t his blog and if anyone’s picture deserved to be up there it’s mine seeing it was my blog before it was ours. (Don’t you think I have a nice big brother?) Anywho, now you will see my avatar’s pic up there as well as in your bookmarks if you’ve bookmarked our blog. You do have us bookmarked, right? If not just press Ctrl-D (Cmd-D for our Mac using readers) and we’ll be just a few mouse clicks away the next time you want to read our blog.

Happy Halloween!

Peng and I want to join basement cat in…

There are a ton of events going on in SecondLife today that I’ll have to check out now that Peng showed me how to get on SL from Intrepid. And Gurl 6 has some free hair for the occasion, in addition to the daily special, so get out there and celebrate like it’s 2008! Just don’t take any plastic (or wooden) candy apples.

SecondLife has another security fix

A little over a week ago I posted about a security update from SecondLife that made it harder for hackers to access your inventory and Linden Dollar balance. It turns out that they have another oopsie that was pushed out Monday evening.

If you tried to log into SecondLife since Monday evening you already know that you need to get the new viewer to log in, whether you use the officially released viewer or the release candidate viewer. You now need version 1.20.17 of the viewer or release candidate five of viewer version 1.21 to be able to log in.

Exactly what wet wrong this time? This is what they said on the SL Grid Status Report blog:

We recently updated the Second Life server and viewers to enhance the communications code. All transfer operations are now restricted to files that the user has expressly chosen, and specific directories that the viewer uses for transferring data. For the safety of all Second Life users, we are releasing this updated viewer to all Residents.

Potential vulnerabilities had been identified in those message communications directed at a Second Life viewer over the previous protocol. By taking advantage of this vulnerability, while extremely difficult technically, a malicious user could potentially use the viewer to access files on the victim’s computer. We currently have no evidence of this vulnerability ever being exploited.

I apologize for not posting this sooner but I was away from my computer for most of yesterday. It works out well, though, because yesterday they notified the readers of the grid status blog that there is currently problems rezzing objects, and they’re still working on getting the problem fixed. So if you try to rez something and can’t, they already know about the problem and they’re on the case.

The JIRA Public Issues Tracker was offline this morning, but they’ve managed to get it back online so you can once again report bugs in SecondLife and see the bugs others have reported.

While you’re in SecondLife make sure you stop by DollyRock and pick up a set of their very cool Halloween Stockings as well as their Halloween Freebie. The freebie is a very cute, and very sexy, Halloween outfit, complete with a hat. The hat does come with some straight black hair, but if the hair doesn’t work for your avatar (it doesn’t for me) at least you’ll get a sexy outfit to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve in.

Did you see SecondLife had to push out a Security Update on Friday?

Some time back SecondLife decided they would peel the grid status messages (updates, rolling restarts, login issues, etc.) off of their main blog an put them on a stats blog under the Second Life Grid domain. While I haven’t been on SL nearly as much as I used to be, I totally missed the fact that there was a “potential security issue” that could have left malicious users able to act as if they were you, right down to stealing your Linden dollars.

I kind of have to laugh at the way the Lindens described the potential for stealing your Linden dollars.

In the case of L$ transactions, this action would be visible to you: if this were to occur, the viewer would report the transaction after it occurred in the normal blue dialog box. Also, you are always able to inspect the transaction log to see recent transactions. This would allow you to notice and report these actions for violating the Second Life Terms of Service.

This type of malicious action would constitute a violation of the Terms of Service, and would be against the law in some locations. At this time we have no evidence that this vulnerability was ever exploited.

Wow, both a violation of the ToS and against the law? I bet those meal old malicious users didn’t even think that may be the case.

Anywho, If you haven’t fired up SecondLife since Friday you may not be aware that you’re strongly advised, although not required for some odd reason, to download new viewers, whether you’re running the main viewer (version1.20.15, released 24 July) or the Release Candidate Viewer (1.21 RC2, and please don’t get me started on beta software being called RC’s).

You can get more on the SecondLife Grid Status blog. Personally I think this is just one more reason why I’m looking at the open source Meerkat viewer, although downloads are currently disabled due to SL’s security issue. I saw about the security issue on the Meerkat site, so big thanks to them for letting me know abut it.

Get ready to override all those annoying facelights in SecondLife

If you’ve been in SecondLife when the lights go down you know what I mean. Sometimes they’re nice and subtle, but other times they’re so fricking bright that they light up an entire room. The problem is that they can mess up a sim owner’s carefully designed lighting, as if you forced the sun to noon when the sim owner recommends that you force the sun to midnight to enjoy the full effect.

Our hero Torley Linden has ridden to the rescue once again, telling us about a new setting in the new 1.21 Release Candidate will let you completely disable facelights, as well as “particle-emitting attachments.”

Thank you, Torley!

/me hopes Torley’s wife won’t mind my walking up and placing a big, wet kiss on his avatar.

Torley rolls out a new Tip of the Week, but not to the SL blog

I love Torley Linden’s Second Life Tip of the Week videos, but the devs are working on the site so he can’t post to it yet. Here’s Torley’s explanation of why it’s on his blog rather than on the SL blog.

If you’re wondering why this is on my personal blog instead of the official Second Life Blog and why you haven’t seen the KB Article of the Week lately either, it’s because Linden Lab is undergoing changes in communication policy and preparing for future improvements.

As much as that doesn’t seem to make sense, I can’t go into details now, and I would’ve let you know earlier were it not for events beyond my control. Please pardon me, I promise to share more if/when I can do so. In the meantime, if you have ideas for how I can better help you by making video tutorials broadly visible in places I’ve missed, let me know!

Awww! But this week’s video tip is a cool one, so I wanted to make sure you guys knew about it. This week’s video tip is about Custom Collision Sounds in SecondLife. That’s so cool I’m going to have to play with it one day.

In case you missed last week’s tip on reporting abuse, you should definitely check it out. I meant to blog it but RL got in the way.

Don’t forget, if you miss any of Torley’s tip videos you can see them again in the SL wiki, and you can always download high quality versions of the tips so you can always have them on your hard drive for the next time you want to refer to them.

Like Torley’s SecondLife textures? Now you can use them outside of SecondLife

Torley Linden has made over 600 textures, not to be confused with his amazing Windlight settings, that people have long enjoyed in building within SecondLife. Now you can create things to be uploaded into SecondLife using his textures. Torley has created a ZIP file will all of his textures to date that you can download and use until you’re heart’s content. He does have one caveat:

… you can use them freely on commercial products & services, just don’t sell them as-is (that’s foolish, because I’m giving them away for free right here).

Now if I only had enough RAM to use Globus to check out the textures a little more quickly.