Rambling

OK, it's been a while and I know Jay doesn't like it when guest writers don't write. So, here's some random stuff.

Temp rezzers. Good or bad, I just saved a bunch of prims using temp rezzers. My house is normally 120 prims. I've been doing a bit of work on it, added an extension to the back main floor, dropped in some short walls, prettied up the porch and fixed all the misalignments, skewed prims and short-cuts the builder included, and it went to 149 prims. Woo hoo. But after popping it into a temp rezzer, which replaces the house every 59 seconds, it uses one prim. I don't know about you, but I like that. There is a learning curve, so don't quit from frustration right away. I've been fiddling with them for a couple months and it finally clicked, as it were, a few days ago.

Align Prims. OK, if I'd known about this 3 months ago I'd have not wasted days of manually incrementing X Y and Z parameters at the millimeter level. Edit a prim, Ctrl-Click the one you want to align it with, then select Align in your build window. Click one of the colored cones to align in that direction. It will push all the prims so they line up on the OPPOSITE face - clicking the down cones pushes them all down and aligns them along the bottom. Shift click, and they butt against each other. Downside to this is if you torture your prim, the align tool will line up the prim's untortured parameters - line up a sliced prim and you will have a gap the size of the slice.

Align Textures. Now this is a neat trick. Ever built a wall and you had to use several prims, and the textures made it oh so obvious where the prim seams were? There are free scripts that, when dropped into all the prims of a linkset, will line up all those textures, properly setting the offsets so that the prim seams disappear. Very cool. Like everything else, the downside is that the one I tried doesn't turn a corner very well, so corners will still look kind of wonky. But if you've got a massive wall, like the outside of a house with lots of prims, it is a massive timesaver.

Linux sound. OK, Jay went off on Phoenix because they pulled the 373 release. Many Linux users have found that media doesn't work and hasn't since the 725 release. I'm not sure why, I'm sure Phoenix knows but hasn't fixed it (or can't?). The solution is to grab the llplugins from a 373 build and drop them into your 725 or newer build, and then you get media. Well, Phoenix did indeed pull 373 off its list of supported viewers. But, if you're on the page where you'd get that build, just scroll down a little more and you'll find it. It's listed as an additional download to fix problems. It's the full download, all 40MB, but I don't recommend running it as there have been tons of changes since then.

Unable to connect to a simulator. I fell victim to this the other day. Turns out it's LL's systems that cause it because it allows users to put characters into group tags that other LL servers can't recognize. In fact, those other servers tend to barf, and the user cannot log in. The fix is to not use those characters. Easy way to tell if a character can be used is to add it to a role that no one uses, then close the group window and relog. Then look at that role again. If the character is replaced with a question mark, it will bar anyone wearing that tag from logging on. Why LL decided to allow unrecognized characters in the first place, I don't know. But there you go.

Let's see *rifles through his notes* I don't see anything else to report.

Oh yes, there is one thing

Viewer2 sucks rocks.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled ranting.