There is no shortage of fashion blogs and fashion magazines, but I have yet to see a Home and Garden type of magazine for Second Life until now. Prim Perfect is a new Second Life magazine, with a blog that aims to home and garden market in Second Life. This should be a welcome addition. They are having a launch party May 1st on Venice Island.

I wish them luck.

In my last blog posting, I talked about the Google Operating System. You can also expand on this and create an entire operating system for your Avatar, to better separate your lives from each other. It might also help in keeping your Avatar’s existence private. An interesting tool is the Free Portable Privacy Machine. It is a Linux virtual machine that will run under Windows or Linux using QEMU, potentially off of a USB memory stick.

From within the virtual machine you can run Firefox and get access at all of your Avatar’s life within the Google world. The only down side is the version of Firefox they have installed, version 1.5, is getting old. I’m not sure if it can be upgraded to the 2.0 version easily or not. In any case it should still do the job.

-Veyron

Well, looks like I won’t be served any drinks with this I.D. card, but it is pretty amusing. Much like taking your avatar to work, this might be fun. Then again, it might be a bit incriminating….

-Veyron

Well, this is fun. I love doing the cha-cha lag dance. This new release is an equal opportunity lagger. Ever sim I’ve been in has had the worse lag I’ve seen since last year. Linden is working on it, obviously, but wow. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s having a bad day today. Sorry to hear about your hard drive Vint. I know how painful it can be to loose data.

-Veyron

p.s. Vint, try this web site for backing up data….

Last post I mentioned about how to give your avatar an email address with LindenPost.com. To take it another, logical step forward, you can give your avatar it’s own identity in cyberspace, separate from your own. This has a number of advantages. You get to keep your identity private, you get a semi-custom or custom email address and you can keep things separate. This is a step-by-step guide to how to do it.

We are going to leverage the wonderful Internet system we know as Google. We are going to use it as our operating system. But before we do that, we need to make sure your identity is separate from your avatar’s identity. The easiest way to do that is to run a different web browser than you run now.

This part is Windows centric, but the gist of it will work on any computer. If you regularly use Internet Explorer, the easiest thing to do is download and install Firefox. Firefox is going to have all the tools we need to use the Google Operating System anyway, so you’ll need it. Already use Firefox? You can’t really have two installations of Firefox easily. Here’s another solution, Portable Firefox from PortableApps.com. Portable Apps is a great set of free tools you can download that will run from anywhere. Usually installed from a removable USB drive. You can then take all of the software tools you might need anywhere you go. I put a USB drive right on my keychain and leave it in my purse. If you don’t have or don’t want to install Firefox on a USB drive, I believe you can install it locally on your hard drive. Another tool I find very useful is KeePass to manage passwords.

Now that you have different Firefox installed that has a separate identity from your own, we can go create your avatar’s identity. First step, go to Gmail and create an account. Let me know if you need an invite, you shouldn’t as Gmail is out of beta. If you need an email account to verify Gmail with, the LindenPost.com account would be a good choice, as your avatar created it. Gmail can also pull the LindenPost email via POP3.

Now you have a Google identity. From this point we can build up on this. Here are some Google add ons that are useful to add:

• Personalized home page is useful.
• Google Reader is very useful for reading blogs. I use it all the time.
• Google Notebook for storing notes and other bits you might come across.
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets for doing documents related to just your avatar.
• Google Calendar to keep track of those important dates for your avatar.
• Google Home Page, if you want your avatar to have it’s own home web page.
• Picasa Web Albums, 1GB of images to store online and serve up.
• And of course, Blogger, to blog for your avatar.

Next, we can integrate some tools with Firefox and Google. The Google Toolbar is a really good add-on for Firefox. If you’re signed in, it can tell you if you have Google Email, new posts in Google Reader, get at your Google Docs, make posts to Blogger, and it can store your book marks in Google History. Google History is sort of good/bad. It can track your history do a customized search and store your book marks, etc. It’s an avatar’s life, so it’s mostly harmless and fairly useful.

Another useful Firefox add-on is CustomizeGoogle. It makes a large number of improvements to the Google experience through Firefox. A couple of good changes to make is change to use https over http for a few of the Google services.

A add-on from LifeHacker is the Better Gmail extension. It adds a large number of tweaks and upgrades to Gmail. This extension might break at some point when Google makes changes to Gmail, but it should get updated as Google makes those changes.

A really useful add-on is Gspace. It makes your Gmail account a portable storage device you can use through Firefox. Gmail gives you over 2GB of storage, and Gspace lets you use it for storing files.

A more complicated upgrade is to Google Reader is the Google Reader Theme. It has a fair number of extensions to install and upgrade, but it makes the Reader look nicer.

One piece of troubleshooting advice, if you have trouble installing an extension with an error code, go in to Portable Firefox and increase the amount of cache used from 0 to some number like 16. Restart Firefox. Install the extension. Restart again, and then change it back to 0, restart and clear the cache. If you have Firefox on a flash drive, you do not want Firefox to cache to it. The reason it is set to 0, is that the flash drive is slow and it will wear out the flash drive eventually.

Lastly, you can add Google Talk. If you use Google Talk on your own Google account, you can run another copy in Firefox under a different Google ID. Go to the Google Talk page and launch it within the web browser.

There you are. Your avatar can now have a life of it’s own in cyberspace.

-Veyron

Here’s a clever idea, give your avatar it’s own email address with a Second Life related domain name, lindenpost.com. LindenPost.com is offering, during the startup beta period, 1 year email subscriptions to Second Life avatars for L$100. Which is really quite cheap. It’s not a like a freebie email account, there are no ads and it has some real webmail features. Plus you can download your email via POP or IMAP and send email with a normal email client.

Soon I’ll post a guide on how to bring your avatar out of Second Life and into the rest of Cyberspace using that magical machine known as Google. Then your avatar can play in Cyberspace and Second Life. All this without giving away your own identity.

-Veyron

One of my favorite organizations, is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF is almost always on the lookout for the little guy’s interest - i.e. you and me. As it turns out all proceeds from the sales of the Solstice GXP’s sold in Second Life by Pontiac are being donated to the EFF. I might also have something to do with one of the sponsors there, OMG Magazine…. Can you spot the blogger in the Eye Candy?

-Veyron

I made a minor change to Blogger, I changed the feed from the default to use Feedburner which has some nicer RSS feed options and other niceties. If you have subscribed to the default RSS feed, you may want to resubscribe with the new feed URL, which should be automatic. Let me know if there’s a problem.

a.k.a. Fear & Loathing in Second Life…. If there is someone I have to meet and talk to inside of Second Life, it is Gideon Television. Obviously a deranged, gun crazed, narcissistic, sex obsessed sort of individual that I’d really like to have a date with. Obviously just my type. A good time, just waiting to happen.

Clearly channeling Hunter S. Thompson or at least trying to. From this blog entry, The Best Little Whorehouses in Second Life, he’s is doing a good job of it. All we need to do now is shoot him from a cannon. I think there’s one in front of Paradise Lost.

I will have to confess to meeting him from afar in the Pontiac sim. I did go down to see Gideon perform in person, but I never did talk with him. It was a bit too zoo like. But I did meet Korbin, but that’s another blog entry.

What’s missing now is more blog entries from him.

-Veyron

Fabjectory has an interesting product…. Take your Avatar to work. They build a rapid prototype of your avatar, or anything else you want, from Second Life in meatspace. They claim to be incredibly details and in full color. The model is made of layered, colored glue. It looks sort of expensive and from a L$ standpoint, it is pretty expensive, but then, I should talk about spending too much money….

I wonder if they would charge extra for working bells….

Anyone going to run out and take their avatar to work? I would be interested to hear from anyone who did this on how well their avatar turned out.