Da5id Weatherwax

First the obligatory caveat: I'm a live performer not a DJ. There are no recorded sounds in my sets. So my experience is likely to be a bit different. So, we seem to have two subjects here. The easy one is tipping. I'll play and sing for you whether you tip me or not. I'll not deny that the tips I do get finance my SL existence and cover some RL expenses like spare strings, stream rental, wear and tear on my gear etc. However you're welcome to enjoy the tunes whether you tip me or not. If my music isn't to your taste you're welcome to shut off my stream and just hang out with your buddies too, although I'll be grateful if you're not blasting too many audible gestures at the folks who are listening. On the subject of performing rights, the genre I play in, namely folk, has a vast library of traditional songs which are free to all. The songwriters active in the genre typically set very few conditions on other people wishing to learn and perform their songs, allowing them to become part of the repertoire. If they are successful and have an arrangement with a major label, this has frequently brought them into conflict with that label when they tell somebody like me "Yeah, it's all good, go ahead and play 'em" Fortunately the vast majority of those songwriters and musicians in this genre do have their fellow musicians backs in that regard as much as they can. In addition, those of us who are part of the folk music community can be a pretty obstreperous lot sometimes and there has been more than one label tried to get too restrictive and subsequently backed off from the backlash it generated from their listeners/customers and the sudden slew of "scolding ballads" excoriating their behaviour that were penned by the artists and immediately released to the public domain for all to perform. For the most part, a niche genre like ours isn't worth their hassle and we, for our part, acknowledge and promote the original writers of what we perform where one is known and not lost in the mists of time. Where actual enforcement of rights is concerned, there's a sort of mutual "let's not go there" that has held for the 4 decades or so I've been involved in the genre, a bit like writing "Here be Dragons" on the blank part of the map. Even when a live performer in SL is playing a more commercial genre, though, a busker on a busy RL street corner is going to have more listeners than even the largest SL venues attract. Probably a significantly higher income for the performer from the street corner too. We're simply not worth their effort.

For banking I use an app on my phone that authenticates via a combo of the IMEI of my device and a biometric. The only functional attack on this is MITM, which I know the code is set up to detect as much as possible - Not 100% perfect but better than most. I still have the option to CALL them and say "lock it all down" - If I do that then any transactions using ANY online auth method are frozen. That level of security and making it convenient/easy to use is expensive. Not for me, the customer, but for the company implementing it. If LL go that far I'd expect to see it on the Tilia-side only, for L$ cashouts or purchases. Only when real money is being transferred. If LL want a wider implementation of 2FA they will go for a method that would be cost-effective to implement on the scale they envision - it will be weaker, but it will still be better than name+pass.

@Drayke Newall - I hear what you're saying, and let me say up front, with my RL experience in the field to back it up - there is no perfect cybersecurity. Ever. Not even completely air-gapping your systems is perfect. HOWEVER Yes, 2FA has flaws. I know exactly how the hacks you are talking about are done and, like you, I'm not going into details on a public forum with rules against posting howtos on such things. The different methods of providing the "second token" all have different flaws, and different vulnerabilities. A thing they have in common, however, is that they universally have fewer vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit than do systems relying on a single token. I do always read the domain name of a link before clicking on it. Even if an email address seems legit, if its about something relating to security I'll be giving it an extra level of scrutiny, including tracing the "received:" headers to make sure it originated from where it claims to, and even then I won't click links in it unless it's a mail-with-link I just requested and am expecting. But then, with my background I'm probably a lot more careful than most regular users. Users who are not like me when it comes to security - which basically means "everybody except security professionals and the clinically paranoid" - would gain a tangible increase in their online security with any of the current 2FA methods, even with their flaws. Since I am the kind of 'net user I am I'd probably gain a bigger benefit than most because my security on the accounts and devices 2FA might rely on is made tighter. But you can't make the fact that a system has flaws be an argument against it on principle when even with its flaws it would still be a net benefit.

A major thing I learned over decades working on cybersecurity as a systems and network admin... If you want your users to buy in to your security policy, you make compliance with it the easiest way to go. If you make it a pain in the rear, people will do everything they can to work around it, because that's what people do, and your security initiative will crash and burn. For something like this, LL need to pick 2FA methods that are as secure as they can manage without introducing a significant level of inconvenience. Achieve that, and its an optimal solution that folks will buy into. Fail and they've either left it too insecure to be worth anything or they've made it such a pain that nobody will opt in and may bail on the environment altogether if it's made mandatory.

The only thing I'll say about your BD music videos, is that they need to come with a jumbo sized can of Earworm-B-Gone! After you put up the "Fear Not This Night" one I caught myself improvising around it when warming up for a set in SL and I dont even play that darned game. The one you posted with "Mad World" is even worse.

it's been my everyday viewer since it was "resurrected" (forked seems too mild a term) from its predecessor. I get along with Niran's UI choices mostly, and the ones I don't are no greater a hassle than the few that bug the stuffing out of me on any other viewer.. (Don't tell him that, he'd just start ignoring me when I pester him on Discord) but then, I'm a geek and the granularity of the graphics controls is a huge plus point to me - in addition having a reasonably high-end graphics card means I can turn most of them up higher than the LL viewer can do and still get perfectly fine framerates. I'm more limited by the bandwidth downloading all you horribly unoptimized folks than I am by my hardware actually rendering you

I was wearing one, every time. It is possible to be hit hard enough you lose the mouthguard though, and when some arsehole of an opposing fullback then steps on your face in the ruck, his cleats break teeth.

I had fun when I lived in the US showing all my football-following buddies rugby games. They got the "basics" of the game as soon as I told them "Rule one: No blocking. You can only impede or tackle the guy with the ball in his hands. Rule two: Kicking or rushing only, no forward passes, only laterals. Rule three: Unless the ref whistles, do not stop." That was enough for them to start "getting it" when they watched, I could explain to them the difference between a ruck and a maul and the interesting differences between league and union later once they were into it enough to ask One thing about football we all agreed on though, we much preferred watching the college game to the NFL. It's more dynamic and showcases the tactical skills of the players better. Regarding the padding or lack thereof in rugby, I find it difficult to imagine how a level of protection that comes even close to that worn for football could be introduced without changing the game out of all recognition. But maybe if it had been done I wouldnt be missing so many teeth and wouldnt have the permanent rivets in my left arm that tell me whenever the weather is about to change.... (all the above injuries picked up in the equivalent of the high school and college game, I never played even semi-professionally)

I'm torn between applauding and running for a shovel to dig a nice safe hole under the biggest rock I can find

(I was originally going to post this in the arts and music forum but I'm putting it here instead in the hope it reaches more of you that way) As my friends across the pond were preparing to celebrate a rather strange Thanksgiving I was doing what I normally do as part of preparation for any week, putting the finishing touches to, and rehearsing, the set list(s) I would be playing in the coming week. It struck me that I had something enormous to be truly thankful for in these troubled times. I haven't picked up a busking pitch or played a RL live gig or session since late February. All the RL venues here closed in early March, all bookings cancelled until further notice. Even when this lovely city, a true hotspot of the arts and performance, was not under the most severe public health restrictions nobody who could be out and about would gather to listen to a busker and the po-po would tell that busker to move smartly along if they did. It's almost impossible to sing through a mask anyway. Like so many of my colleagues in performance I was instantly unemployed. My usual fallbacks when I wasn't getting bookings as a performer were also gone, because there was no work as a sound or lighting tech either. Hundreds of other performers were in the same position, having to take whatever they could get as a "day job" just to keep the lights on and the fridge full. In the music industry you're used to "living on your wits" somewhat but I know from personal chats with others that even after all this shakes down there will be some who will not be returning to the stage. I'm not talking about the real tragedies, of the voices we will no longer hear because the pandemic has taken them from us, but of the small-venue musicians who can no longer summon up the energy, the fire, to break free of the rat race a second time. They know, from sometimes bitter personal experience, how great a leap into the unknown launching a career in the arts is, how precarious it is and how numbing the fear can become. Deep in their hearts, way too many of us know that we don't have it within us to do that again. I have something to sustain me that most of them don't. I have YOU. It is you,the population of SL, who have continued to show up to my sets, continued to appreciate my performances and kept my sense of identity as a musician alive. I'm still putting a set list together every week because I'm bringing it to you and you're showing up to hear it. Even though that soul-crushing day job is blowing massive holes in my schedule, I'm still a performer because of you. So, from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU. You are what I have reason to be thankful for this season.

I absolutely agree, and I hope you weren't thinking I was denigrating that style of music, because I happen to love it myself. If there was a tinge of disgruntlement in my reply I suspect it was that there was a title that made me - as a Folk artist who's been privileged to be around some of the true giants of the genre over the last few decades - sit up and think "here's a question for me......" and then to have to admit to myself that my enthusiasm had been premature :)

@Wulfie Reanimator had it exactly right - I forgot that "zero position" in a texture is its center. it genuinely doesnt add any complexity to the math though- a constant adjustment to the offset is not - as the script presented demonstrated - hard to incorporate.

After getting burned by good looking products that ended up looking like crap in the situation I wanted to use them (as part of creating a particular "look" or as part of the furnishings/decorations of a particular area) simply because I couldn't make a trivial mod to them for me it is now 100% no-mod == no-buy. I'll take the time to make my own rather than buy a nomod product, even if I can't make it look quite as good as the one on the MP. it will still fit with the look/ambience/whatever I want to create using it cleaner than the unmodded "better" one.

The math is trivial. The important thing is that your offsets are a finite decimal - no recurring numbers - and whatever size you pick must always have tile boundaries of your X*Y tiles fall exactly between two pixels. Since the pixel dimensions of your tilemap must be powers of 2, X and Y must both be multiples of 2. Size your tilemap dimensions to the smallest power of 2 that will display your tiles without distortion at the on-screen size you intend. with a tilemap X*Y tiles the offset vector for tile (x,y) - with x and y both beginning with 0 - is <x/X, y/Y,0> and your repeats vector is <1/X,1/Y,0> that math works for ANY arbitrary sized array of tiles in any size texture, but for clean pixel boundaries in SL textures sticking to the multiples of 2 for the X and Y rows and columns of tiles is safest.

Makes perfect sense to me - and a "tilemap" is otherwise known as a "texture atlas" which is why I said Apply your tilemap to a square face of a prim, then apply it the same way to a square button UV-mapped the way I described, it will work EXACTLY the same way, with the SAME scaling factors and offsets.

Depends if the mesh was designed to be an easily textured HUD or not. To use the trivial example of 8 square buttons that make up a single planar mesh you make one button first. Look at it straight on in blender, down the appropriate axis and UV unwrap it as "project from view (bounds)" Your square button will fill the entire UV map, give it a square image as a texture inworld and it will be no different from texturing one face of a cube. To make the 7 other buttons, go back into edit mode and duplicate the first 7 times, arranging the dups how you'd want the buttons laid out on screen. - Now you've got 8 buttons, each with the same square UV mapping, all buttons overlaying each other in the map. Now assign a different material to the two tris making up each button. Those 8 buttons are now 8 faces in SL and can be textured independently, each with its own square texture. If you want to use a texture atlas with all the button faces in one texture just with different offsets you can - exactly the same way as if you were wanting the different parts of your texture atlas to appear on different faces of a prim. Identical methodology applies to buttons of any arbitrary shape. You don't have the issues of unwrapping a curved shape like you do with a 3d object that can be viewed from any angle. A planar mesh hud only ever interacts with Mr A Square of Flatland and is only ever viewed down one axis so you use "project from view" to make the hud shapes look EXACTLY like they would on the screen in the UV map - because there's no geometry to see other than from that angle. Then you just stack as many of these planar meshes as you need on top of each other inworld (with a small offset to ensure no z-fighting) and link them to create the HUD object - the "depth" of the stack makes no difference to the HUD displayand it remains as easy to texture as a HUD made of prims.

Mesh is a godsend for efficient HUD design that has been horribly underutilised.If you're smart you can make HUDs where the blank space between buttons doesn't contain "invisible HUD" that you can't click through to interact with the world. A planar mesh button (or group of buttons, even just relying on face detection rather than detecting where on the face you click you can still have 8 functional buttons in a single mesh) rotated on its side to hide it isn't just "invisible", it's gone, takes up no screen space - do remember to make sure you have something to "show" it again that stays visible - because you CANNOT click on the faces of a planar mesh when its edge-on to you. Way too many creators have "already made the HUD" and while they may have updated the underlying code and the products that code controls many times they are still using their old prim-built HUDs, with all the prim-restricted design decisions baked in. There are HUDs associated with some of my favorite kit that I've been so tempted to hack the bejeesus out of and reverse engineer their API so I can just build myself a more efficient and user-friendly one out of layered mesh planes not prims. (If I ever did, I would, of course, hand the result to the original creator full-perm and switch back to their "official" one if they ended up adopting any of my redesign)

Not gonna argue with a word of that - but something persistent that could be tied to and differ between each instance of an object would be great too, which would have to be an inventory asset

Grid scope KVPs or experiences - they have to know that what we really want is ANY kind of persistent writeable storage, right? Just letting us write lines to notecards in an objects inventory from a script would be MASSIVE. Something that wouldn't be lost when the script resets, is copied with the object and doesn't require us to host some external data server and rely on it being available or our scripts go spectacularly pear-shaped. Even if it needed special handling that would break the asset code for notecards and they made a "notecard-like" asset called a "datastore" or something that could hold as may strings as a notecard does lines and made one cost the standard upload charge to create, I'd be all over that like white on rice...

are you wanting Indie or Folk? - for example I just had a quick trawl through alexrainbird postings and was hard put to find a single traditional song - for traditional I could maybe make a suggestion or two but if alexrainbird is your standard seems you are looking for Indie/soft rather than folk.

The most seamless "walking together holding hands or (whatever)" sets are actually VEHICLES with two "seats" - REALLY old-school but still the most reliable. When you are on them they are invisible but they act like an old-school AO detecting your state and playing the right anims as the two of you move. The downside is that to use them you have be able to rez the set on the ground first before "stepping on"

The thing is, @riverjoy - That was then, this is now. The days of startups getting into property in a big way like Anshe or into kinky furniture like Stroker or pretty much into anything in SL and making any kind of significant RL money are basically gone. Even Anshe and her various subsidiaries are not making the same kind of money they were back then. They remain viable - at least, the fact that she hasn't shut them down suggests so - but NOBODY is making that kind of crazy money in SL any more. These folks got where they were by doing something nobody else could in SL. They made their names doing it and even today everybody, from the old-timers down to the newest noob knows these names - not yours. The barrier to entry is so much higher now because all these things have not only "already been done" but they have established businesses still doing it. These established businesses suck up almost all the available purchasing power in SL and for every hoorenbeek, every akaesha, every catwa slink belleza or signature there have been HUNDREDS of creators that have sunk without trace. These days the odds against you are HIGHER than that. Now, you may be an innovative genius and come up with something really radical that nobody else has worked out how to do yet. You may be talented in some way and can find a way to bring that into SL and attract folks attention. If you are, and you do, then you have a decent shot of making reasonable - but no longer crazy - money in SL.If not, then for you SL will be something you put money into, not take money out of.

Favorite SL singer? WAY too many to list. For a lady with soul and some serious pipes you can't go wrong with Catdanc. Singing to backing tracks she still puts something raw into every song and makes it entirely her own rather than "just a cover". Wes West is a really talented country/traditional performer - great voice, guitar skills off the charts and a wicked sense of humor. He's been known to bring his band along to shows from time to time too. If you can get to one of these DO IT. Most SL performers are solo but with a full live band on the stream it takes it to another level. Mystelle is a guitarist with real talent- I know you said singers but this lady sings through her guitar. (Obligatory plug - if she's playing the blonde Epi Joe Pass edition on stage, I made that for her, duplicating her RL instrument) IF I'm mentioning instrumentalists I've got to include the smooth sax of Chocolatblack, you can smell and taste the pre-COVID nightlife of Paris in his sound. Anyone whose spent even a few days in the City of Lights will know what I mean. One of the best shows of his I've ever heard was actually live-streamed while he was busking on the banks of the Seine. Rock vocals are HARD, donlt let anyone tell you different, and Satch can handle them along with playing a really mean rock/blues axe. One of the most wonderful things about being a performer myself is that I get to hear the most amazing SL artists I woudn't have discovered otherwise simply because they are scheduled before or after me at a particular venue Me? I'm just a crusty old folkie that throws the occasional hour of traditional and modern ballads and story songs onto the stream of any venue that lets me get away with it

If the radio station has a stream compatible with shoutcast or icecast, set its URL as the lands music stream and you're done. Plenty of those on the wiki page @RowanMinx linked. If you're streaming your own playlist from your computer you'll need a stream host - which one depends on your circumstances, budget and the size of the intended audience but there are one or two really affordable ones that you can pay for inworld with lindens - then all you need is some DJ software that can run your playlist to the stream. Again, YMMV depending on the capabilities you want. There are free solutions that can handle it just fine, all the way up to full featured setups that allow you to live-mix on-air (assuming you have the talent for it - I don't) or you can fork over the cash for commercial software that usually has a slicker or more intuitive UI than the free solutions but not often much of an edge in raw functionality - you'll just (and yes, I know this is a horrible and inaccurate generalization) tend to find yourself tearing out more hair accessing that functionality in the free software compared to the paid stuff. A good rule of thumb is the more experienced you are in both comp-tech and sound-tech the less hassle you'll have using the free software because you already know how the guts of it operate and can adapt

by renting a shoutcast or icecast stream host and configuring your software to stream to it. There's too many options to list. How you do the "configure your software" part is also a "more than one way to do it" thing. Some DJ software such as mixx has it built in. Other audio solutions will need an additional program to handle it for you. I personally use BUTT but then my sound comes in direct from my USB DAC, I do the mixing on the smaller of my two desks, so all I need to do is to tell BUTT to take input from that device and send it direct to the stream host. It is possible, with a little tweaking, to set the "input" of a program like BUTT to be the stereo mix output of your computers sound system. That would provide a link to the stream from any DAW, and you could plug in a set of cans to your computer to act as a live monitor. Just dont forget to mute SL itself and every other prog apart from your DAW when you do that, you dont want to stream everyone's audible gestures or all the pings and blips from chat messages or other system notifications to your audience.