Monthly Archives: January 2016

As a beginning Blender user, I've struggled with the concepts but managed to produce some low-poly mesh bunting for #MardiGras in #SecondLife. The hardest thing right now is keeping materials and textures in the right order and remembering to assign green apples to green apples, and oranges to oranges. Currently alphabetical order matters with materials so it might be smart to rename any assigned textures in Blender in the same alphabetical order. Unfortunately, I am not that organized so it was a carnival of blunders until I got it sorted.

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G+: As a beginning Blender user, I've struggled with the concepts but managed to produce some low-poly mesh bunting for #MardiGras in #SecondLife. The hardest thing right now is keeping materials and textures in the right order and remembering to assign green apples to green apples, and oranges to oranges. Currently alphabetical order matters with materials so it might be smart to rename any assigned textures in Blender in the same alphabetical order. Unfortunately, I am not that organized so it was a carnival of blunders until I got it sorted.

These "bunting banners" could be even lower poly so they could be longer, but I thought of a way to do that after this had been uploaded to the "big grid." Still, they look pretty festive.

The testing in the Beta Grid led me to upload just 2 versions, a "medium" LOD that actually looked good at a reasonable distance, and a "low" LOD that was visible at maximum camera range but is just a flat one-sided plane with the same materials/texture faces. They could be better, but they're a start.

The "high" LOD version has some issues and would have been too high-poly for what I needed, which was to decorate my shopfront for the upcoming #MardiGras celebration in St John (on the "big grid").

All in all, a student effort with a "B" grade, but I'm pretty happy with the result.

      

In Album Mesh Bunting for Mardi Gras in Second Life

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Tweetly Weeks

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Tweetly Weeks

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Today and Yesterday and a couple of days after tomorrow

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Today my husband David and I got together with my father-in-law Shel, and Shel’s lady-love Linda for lunch. We had dinner together last night at Bahama Breeze, because COUPON. And we’re having dinner with them Wednesday for the purpose of congratulating my niece Naomi on graduating (early) from high school. I’m not sure where we’re eating, but I bet a poo-kon will be produced at the end.

Such an exciting life I lead! We eat out based on whichever of us has the best restaurant coupon!

It’s not that we can’t afford this stuff; we count ourselves lucky on that score. It’s that using a good coupon is one of our little family jokes. We’re not “extreme couponers;” we throw away grocery coupons although we do pay attention to in-store deals. We just keep an eye out for good deals from restaurants and some retail places that we actually visit frequently.

I’ve got a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon that’ll be used for something or other shortly. It’s our go-to place for housewares (kitchen) and soft goods (bedding and towels). I’ve got something from The Container Store that may lapse before I get around to going there; I usually reserve a trip there for Christmas gadget-shopping and my occasional “get organized” kicks.

A couple of months back, we met Shel and Linda at Texas de Brazil because Dad had a coupon good for half off for at least 2 entrees in a party of 4. But when the check came, he realized he’d left the “poo-kon” (my word) at home. As TdB isn’t an inexpensive place, there was dismay and anguish generally. But I saved the day, because I’d received the same email offer and it was still buried in my stack of emails that weren’t important enough to read, but important enough to not delete (most coupon deals I mark as spam and delete, but I give businesses I actually patronize a “pass”).

Last year for Shel’s birthday, we produced an edible “coupon good for 1 happy birthday” That was a pretty good prank, and also delicious. So redeeming it was… a piece of cake.

Workaround for Last.fm: Universal Scrobbler

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I listen to a LOT of music via Internet radio streams, and until August, I used to be able to put a nice list of “Listening” tracks on my various blogs. That was courtesy of Last.fm, which used to be the main place people could gather or “scrobble” their personal music libraries as they listened to iTunes or CDs on their computers or listened to radio stations online that provided the right kind of track medadata.

UPDATE: WOW – check out the list at “Scrobble Along” and see how that site makes it possible to scrobble some pretty interesting Internet radio stations.

Well, Last.fm “don’t play dat” anymore. They still provide “scrobbling” music playlist service if you listen to your personal music library and/or CDs via iTunes or Windows Media (or Clementine, and maybe WinAmp if that’s still working), and they might provide cover art TO various apps for listening to music online. However, they no longer pick up the data FROM those apps (with a few obscure exceptions, apparently Tunemark and Rdio might do it, but not TuneIn).

RadioRiel

Last.fm just does not want to “scrobble” or pickup metadata from Internet radio streams anymore, so how to capture all that interesting music for possible later purchase? There’s a workaround: it’s possible to manually or semi-manually scrobble tracks via something called the Universal Scrobbler. It’s not perfect, but it’s quick, it’s clean, and a WordPress plugin called “Last.fm Played for WordPress” reads the scrobbled tracks instantly, where the former plugin did not. In some cases, it uses Last.fm’s own music database to discover and capture the track information. So there. I spend too much time listening to my obscure streams to let that data just disappear.

Basically, while listening to music off the Internet (or even if I happen to hear something on the radio and get the track and artist name from Shazam), I can enter the artist or release name in the search page for Universal Scrobbler, and it can check one of 3 databases and send the information to Last.fm for me, where it appears on my list of tracks, which then gets picked up by my plugin. It’s not perfect and it won’t capture anything automatically, but it’s better than nothing.