Mobile Meme-ing

Mar 24, 2015 | Blog Challenges, Monday Memes

It seems that this week OnLive decided to make Firestorm the only viewer for their mobile SL Go apps. Yay for that! Since they added Firestorm for the desktop app I’d been trying out SL Go for my aging iMac, and it works great, (even though the 720p resolution is frustrating on a higher res monitor) but I haven’t paid as much attention to the mobile apps because the only option was the official LL viewer. Now that it defaults to Firestorm I had to try it again. When I found myself sitting around waiting for my mother to finish up an appointment this afternoon it seemed like a perfect time to give it a test drive.

SL Go on a Nexus 4

If I look frustrated, it’s because I can’t figure out how to leave my house.

The only trouble with my experiment is I was trying this on a phone, and SL on a 4.7 inch screen is pretty darn tiny. It rendered fast, it looked great, and I wasn’t getting any blurring, but trying to select anything in the UI is not easy. Pinch and zoom, attempt to select, click the wrong thing anyway, zoom back out, try again… It was a challenge. I couldn’t get my landmarks to scroll so I thought I’d type a sim name in search and go exploring that way, but it didn’t feel like recognizing my on screen keyboard. With no handy landmarks I was trapped in my house, but hey, my house was rendering fabulously, so that’s something, I guess. 😀  I did try later on the iPad with a bluetooth keyboard and everything worked really well and looked nice, so yay for Firestorm on SL Go! If I ever have some need to log into SL late at night when I don’t have the laptop handy I can always grab the ipad and I’ll be all set.

Meanwhile, sitting around this afternoon also gave me time to take a look at the Monday Meme.  Strawberry Singh has a quick and easy one this week, and I couldn’t resist. Her instructions:

Copy and paste the following statements in your post and complete them writing down the first thing that pops into your head. Don’t forget to link your post in the comments (here).

I am… pretty awesome 😀
I want… to find the motivation to exercise regularly
I have… so much to be grateful for.
I wish… the concerts I want to see weren’t always so far away.
I hate… being laid off 🙁
I fear… the future
I search… for things often, because I misplace stuff a lot.
I wonder… if I’ve ever made a difference for someone
I regret… abandoning my diet just when I was almost at my goal
I never… thought I’d be a widow in my 40s.
I always… light a candle for my husband every night, just because it feels right to do so.
I usually… procrastinate
I dance… infrequently.
I sing… all the time (when I’m alone)
I often… log into SL, switch to Chrome to surf while everything loads, then forget I’m still in SL.
I sometimes… spend hours just trying outfits on my avvie and moving stuff around in my house.
I cry… a lot.
I need… to network and find a terrific new job
I should… go to bed earlier.
I love… blasting my car stereo at top volume \(^_^)/

I’ll add one

I will… get through this RL rough patch and move on to even better things!

Thanks Berry, hope you’re having a fantastic spring break!

Go! Go! Go!

Apr 6, 2014 | Chatter, Images

This past week OnLive announced an adjustment to the pricing for their SL Go service, adding the option to subscribe for a month of unlimited usage at $9.95, and lowering the cost to $1 per hour if you choose to buy credits for hourly access. I had tried the twenty minute free trial a week or so ago, but at the time the $3.00 per hour fee was a little too high to consider giving it another try – I know how I tend to use SL and the last thing I wanted to do was watch the clock and worry about wasting time and money. An entire month for a flat fee is a much more appealing option, and they note that you can cancel anytime. Now that a month works out to about the same cost as a couple of magazines, and provides just as much entertainment value to me, I think it’s worth 9.95 to give everything a proper trial run and get to know how it works. Having spent several hours using it I find I like it a lot better than I did immediately after the trial.

Calas Galadhon is always a good place to enjoy the scenery 😀

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So I Gave SL Go a Try…

Mar 25, 2014 | Chatter

I didn’t originally have much interest in the free trial for SL Go. I’d been following the news with interest, but I hadn’t considered trying it out until I found myself without a computer that could run SL. Now, while my laptop waits for new parts, I’ve had to resort to using my hub’s aged iMac and it is not a fan of Second Life. I can log in and putter around in my skybox, but even then I have to keep graphics low and my fps is in the low single digits. Exploring is not an option at all, and I was beginning to miss playing virtual tourist. It seemed like a good time to try out the SL Go free trial, both on the desktop and the mobile, and see if it might be a good temporary way to access SL, at least until my laptop is fixed. I was seeing a lot of reviews about how amazing everything looked, so I signed up for the trial with high hopes.

Having now used all of my twenty free minutes, my experience with the trial convinced me that one of these applies: 1) All the people raving about how amazing this is must be using totally different software, or 2) I’m way too picky and hard to please. (more…)