ArtZine 2.0

You have not heard a lot of me lately, have you? True. But I did not sit still. Over the past few months I have been working hard though! Together with a great group of volunteers, I have set up a magazine on Virtual Arts by the name of ArtZine 2.0. And I can now present to you: The first issue of our magazine!

ArtZine 2.0 Website
ArtZine 2.0 Issue 1 on Issuu

Recycler for Proteggtors

Here is another product in the category "something I needed for myself":

A recycler for expired proteggtors!

Now that we have been living with sionChickens V12 for some months, some eggs are beginning to expire.
You may have found out already, that the proteggtors can be re-used? But there is a small problem: It is quite a lot of work to make them ready to be used again.

If your proteggtors have been boxed by my EggBoxer, they are in a neat box that displays the age of your egg when clicked. If the egg is older than 60 days, the proteggtor can be recycled.

To do that, you would need to open the box and get the proteggtor into your inventory. Then you have to delete the -- now empty -- box. Then you have to rez the proteggtor and click it, to make it free again. And finally, you have to take the -- now empty -- proteggtor back into your inventory.

If you have done that ten times, you know it is easy, but tedious and messy!

To make this process easier, I have developed the Proteggtor Recycler.
It works as follows:

Drop a bunch of boxed proteggtors into the recycler. Click the recycler. Now all the boxes are rezzed in a neat row, opened automatically, and the proteggtors are rezzed above them. The boxes are automatically deleted.

So you are left with a row of proteggtors, ready to be clicked for recycling. Click the proteggtors in the row one by one. Then taken them back into your inventory one by one.
(By the way: It is also possible to drop in "bare" proteggtors; without a box; these will be lined up together with the proteggtors from your boxes.)

It saves you a whole lot of work!

A Weekend full of Stress

Chicken farmers were very enthousiastic about my EggBoxer and I was making quite a lot of sales, when suddenly a disaster hit us all: The EggBoxer stopped to work! Immediately it started raining IMs from disappointed customers. And I rushed to find out what was wrong.

Well, that did not take very long: It soon became clear that Sion, the creator of all these eggs and chickens and the "proteggtors", had decided to change the password that was used to encrypt the details that are displayed when an egg is put into a proteggtor.

The EggBoxer, of course, NEEDS this encoded data to be able to store all the information. There is no other way to get it, because the eggs have a lot of cool features, but an API (Application Programmers Interface) is not one of them. For some reason, Sion does not seem inclined to make it easy for other developers to create accessories for his products. (I don't see a reason for that, an open interface would in my view only ADD to the success of his products...)

Of course I immediately decoded the new password and found out it was a sentence in plain English text, that was a direct threat to sue anyone decoding it! Amazing! Sion's non-co-operative attitude to other developers was clearly not by mistake, it was a company policy.

Meanwhile the farmer's group discussions were of course fizzing with activity about the EggBoxer and speculations of what had happened and why and how. And this was not just a technical debate, the legal and ethical implications were part of the discussion as well. Some people considered it wrong to decode the encrypted messages, but the majority of the farmers just wanted the convenience of boxing their eggs without the tedious and error-prone hand-copying the color codes on their screen into a more usuable form.

I soon had a new version (1.45) of my system ready to be released, but I was hesitating: There was the threat Sion had hidden into the new password and there was of course the possibility for him to keep changing his password every day, making the development of accessories into an arms race instead of a normal business.

Of course I IMmed Sion to have a talk with him, but he did not reply.

Then, towards the end of the weekend, an official announcement appeared. Not from Sion himself, but sent to the chicken groups via other people: Sion had come to the decision to make the password public, so that everybody would be able to use it for building accessories.

The password he published, was the original password, that was already built into my system. And the proteggtors that were sold from that moment on, were all using the old password again. No need to release version 1.45, no arms race, and an end to a stressful weekend.

Vidal Yeodeol

I recently met javabox Kawanishi. A great clothing designer from Holland. I like the stuff he makes and the price tag is way below what we are used to see from the established designers.

What I did not like, was the way his stuff is marketed. Maybe it is just an allergy of mine, but I hate it to yell from the rooftops how great you are and that everybody should buy your stuff. (To be honest, it is not even javabox himself who does that, but some of his affiliate vendors do.)

I would like a Vidal store where customers can shop around in a relaxed way and ONLY have to talk to the sales staff if they have a question about the products. Well, that is very well possible: I just had to open my own store to do it. And I did. Javabox gave me the vendors and the building materials to make a shop in the true Vidal look-and-feel and I managed to fit it into an unused area in my sim.

So now Yeodeol has its own Vidal Fashion store.

EggBoxer

Of course you all read about my Egg Wrapping system. It made life easier for us and other breeders. Unfortunately it soon became obsolete with the introduction of the V11 sionChickens and sionEggs. Over the past weeks we have been working on a system for collecting and packing the V11 sionEggs.
This resulted in:

"EggBoxer" -- EGG COLLECTING AND WRAPPING SYSTEM

Every time you click the system, it will pick up one of the eggs your chickens have laid. It fetches the egg to the location of the EggBoxer and helps you to put it into a proteggtor. Then it helps you to pack the proteggtor in a box that allows you and your customers to see all the important data about the egg inside.

All this information is collected WITHOUT HAVING TO TYPE ANYTHING.

The central element in this system is the "EggBoxer". It is a prim you install about one meter above your chicken pen. When there are eggs to be picked up, all you need to do is click the EggBoxer and it will rez a small basket, that goes out to fetch the egg for you.


This "Fetcher" picks out one of the eggs and moves itself below it to pick it up. Then it moves upward with your egg to the same height where your EggBoxer is located. Next it moves in horizontal direction to the EggBoxer.


When the Fetcher reaches the EggBoxer, a proteggtor will be rezzed on top of the EggBoxer. Now it is your turn to take some action: You have to click the proteggtor, to move the egg from the Fetcher to the proteggtor.


When the EggBoxer sees you egg has been transferred to the proteggtor, it will rez a "Wrapper" to put your egg in. The wrapper will automatically be named to reflect version, race, color vectors and color name(s) of the egg. The Wrapper will also be colored in the two colors of the egg.
Once the egg has been transferred to the proteggtor, the Fetcher is no longer needed; it will vanish automatically.


You now need to take the proteggtor into you inventory and put it into the Wrapper by dragging it from your inventory to the Wrapper, holding the <ctrl>-key. Finally you take the Wrapper, with your egg in it, into your inventory.


So what will you get this way? As you collect eggs, they will get stored in a standard way in your inventory, making it easy to see which egg is which. The boxes are also usefull when rezzed in-world: You can immediately see the two colors and when you click the box, it will display the egg's race, color names and two color vectors for 30 seconds in hovertext.

To be able to work, the EggBoxer needs to be filled with empty Proteggtors. These will have to be bought from Sion of course. You can just buy a pack of proteggtors, unpack it into your inventory and the drag the whole bunch of them from your inventory to the EggBoxer holding <ctrl>. You will then be ready for packing a lot of eggs.

You can buy the EggBoxer in my shop at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Yeodeol/96/25/53
Or at XStreetSL: https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1629248

SL-Goldrush

Have you heard about the SL Goldrush yet? It is a brilliant idea! The avatar behind it is Nite Zelmanov. He sells gold nuggets you can hide on your land in SL.

All the nuggets get listed on his website and people can go find them. This brings lots of people to your land of course and they come to look at the place, because they want to find your nugget.

Inside the nugget you can put an object, that is given away as a prize to each avatar who clicks it. They also get a landmark to your place and most of the time they get some money (L$ 2 or L$ 3) from Nite as a reward.

But there is more! All the finds are stored in a database on Nite's website and every week, one of these is drawn to get the jackpot! The amount in the jackpot depends on the number of nuggets that were sold in the past week.

This week was a great week in nugget sales and the jackpot contained the record amount of L$ 14070. And guess who won it?? I did! Yay! Time for a big thank you to Nite in the form of this blog post.

Make sure you go check this out at the GGG HQ In-world: Peacock Park 134,236,64 or buy nuggets from one of the many GGG-vendors you find at all the locations of participating land owners. You can find mine at the New Egg market in Yeodeol...

SionEgg Wrapping System

I am in the egg business nowadays. I run a few farms and eggs keep rolling into my inventory. Some nice colors too! I Want to sell them, but... Have you noticed all these eggs look THE SAME in your inventory? What a mess!

And the eggs are no-modify, so you cannot give them descriptive names.
The only solution is to put them in boxes you can modify.
Best would be to put the color code and the color name into the name of the box.
If only that wasn't so much work... :(

Here comes our Egg Wrapping system to rescue you!

Use the system as follows:

1: Rez an egg from your inventory.
(By dragging it to the floor.)
2: Click it and read the color code that appears.
3: Click the Wrapping System. (Two boxes will now appear.)
4: Say the 6-digit color code of the egg you just rezzed.
(Both boxes now get that color and the color code and name will appear above them.)
5: Drag the egg from you inventory (while holding ) to the box that is next to the "Copy" arrow on top of the system.
(The text "(fp)" will now be added to the name above the box.)
6: Change the permissions for the next owner on the egg in your inventory.
(By right clicking it, selecting properties and removing the tick-mark in the Copy box.)
7: Drag the egg from your inventory (while holding ) to the box that is next to the "Non-copy" arrow on top of the system.
(The text "(to sell)" will now be added to the name above the box.)
8: Delete the egg from your inventory.
9: Delete the egg you rezzed on the floor.
10: Take both the boxes that have been rezzed into your inventory.

Done! Your egg has been wrapped!

The boxes check the permission on your eggs, so you cannot wrap an egg with the wrong permissions by mistake.
The color names are filled in automatically from a database of more than 1500 colors.
The color code is displayed both in percentage (00...99%) and in HEXadecimal code (00...FF).
Percentage, hex code, name and permissions are saved in the object name AND displayed in hovertext above the boxes.
The boxes get the same color as the egg inside them.

[This product is no longer for sale due to the transition to V11 sionChickens]