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Hawaii Five-O’s classic closer, as McGarrett tells his trusty sidekick to take the bad guys away, just wouldn’t be the same as “Notecard’em, Danno!” Similarly, while a lot of good information can be sent around effectively using a notecard, it’s just not the same as a book.

You can’t format notecard text much nor can you include photos. Enter the SL book, where each page is a texture, and you have complete control over its appearance. You’ve seen them around I’m sure. You can rez them and flip through the pages or wear them as a hud to do the same.

Ok, you don’t have mascara on your cheek, but you know how you can be at a party or a meeting and someone does? Or parsley from lunch on their tooth? Or, God forbid, their skirt caught up in their pantyhose? Do you mention it?

Can we talk for a second about photo aspect ratios and profiles? I’m never sure if I should mention it, but a lot of folks walk around SL with profile pics and shots in the pick list that are just WRONG. That’s because your profile pic isn’t square. Photos in your picks aren’t square either. If you use a square cropped shot here, the effect is NOT slenderizing.

The pick example above is a case in point. It’s a classic 1024×1024 square cropped portrait dropped into a pick photo. Holy wide faces. We’re doin the chipmunk thing.

No. It’s an ornithopter (from ornithos “bird” and pteron “wing:), an aircraft that flies by flapping it’s wings. Ever since I read Dune by Frank Herbert I’ve wanted an ornithopter. Unlike RL where most ornithopters fly badly if at all, and like Dune, ornithopters in SL actually fly.

This has been a busy week in RL and SL. When the heat is on, sometimes the fun factor kinda gets a bit thin. Isle and I don’t get out as much as we used to because of her bandwidth issues. A lot of our SL time is about getting stuff done when we can.

But this week, we got some fun in. We managed to spend a couple of hours exploring NeoKowloon, which is one wacky cool place. Tucked in a shop, what did I find? An Ornithopter! 200L!

So last night, we spent twenty minutes of silly hilarity takin it for a spin.

I learned to read combing through my Mom’s anatomy texts. There were these cool pages of clear illustrated plastic. You turned the pages to go from skin to muscle to organs to bone. Mesmerizing. I learned then that every part of the body was useless without all the other bits. It was a system, a whole.

Let’s do that with the process of making a photo. Look at the whole, but step by step.

You might remember this shot of Isle, “Remembering Crimson Shadow” from her Friday Focus a couple of weeks back.

This shot was an eight hour labor of love and sometime frustration (even desperation). The story begins Thursday morning with Isle laying out the post’s concept;  A tribute to Crimson Shadow on its closing. She wants to wear the bloody angel outfit from Carnival of Doom, another Rezzable sim that’s already gone, using an emo skin that’s good and sad.

We are chatting  in Live (MSN) Messenger. This is our mainstay gadget for communications, day and night – our “nerve system.”

The workflow on this shot moves in and out of SL throughout the process.

… what I was wearing last week for the Gadgets N’ Gear spy post I thought I’d fill ya in.

I went shopping for a new outfit a couple of weeks back so I’d have a new look to wear out to the Rouge Lounge and Club Fusion. It’s hard y’know, keeping up with Nexeus Fatale in the cool department. Well, I got a stack of rawrs and Isle and Jori keep asking for my bald look.

So here are the details.

… it’s a nasty business, this spy stuff. Need a fixer?

This isn’t gonna be a nice, feel good post. It’s gonna be a real post. You’re used to a measure of privacy in RL, but this is SL. There ain’t no privacy.

You probably know someone in SL who has been stalked, hunted and/or spied on. There are RL hired PIs, SL ex’s, insecure lovers, wanna be lovers, business competitors, the idly curious and creepily voyeuristic, there is no shortage of those that want to track our activities.

Welcome to SL’s dark side.

… any seat you like. Do it yourself. It’s easy if you know how.

You know the deal. You love the furniture and hate the sits. You can suck it up and tolerate the sits to get the great style or pass it by. If you buy it, sooner or later you’ll file it in the FAIL folder.

Ever since I first faced this quandary, I vowed that one day I would seize control of my destiny and lounge about any way I please. The day came when I purchased the spectacular ”Midnight Fairy Oak with sits” from Natural Fantasies earlier this week.

I love this tree. It has a magical tone to it and broad flat limbs that cry to be climbed and sat upon. Out of the box it comes with three sits that are assigned in a fixed order as people sit down. I wanted more. More sits. More positions. More people. More control. More, more, more.

… than our view of it (Henry Thoreau).

Welcome to the many universes of life online. There is Second Life, Plurk, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, and so much more.

How does this apply to gadgets? Well, let’s examine the wider reality of “everything else online.” Since Steller Sunshine joined SL in 2002 the Net has been a constantly evolving environment. Nonetheless, SL scripters have found ways to incorporate the rush of online services into SL.

Case in point: Calendar Cogs from Mechanized Life.

It cost me 8,000L. I get updates for life. It’s gotta go.

I bought PhotoLife back when I didn’t really understand photography in SL. I was thinking like a RL photographer. I have umbrellas and soft boxes on my studio lights in RL. I should need them here, Right?

Wrong. I wish I had known:

• Light in SL punches though prims and it doesn’t bounce. Reflectors, soft boxes, barn doors and umbrellas just burn prims and get in the way to look “photographic.”
• Equipment stands get in the way both in RL and in SL. The difference is, you don’t need stands to hold up lights in SL.
• Less is more. Arrays of multiple lights, (often used for ambient and soft box simulation) are pretty iffy. You only get six local lights.
• The most important light is found in World / Environment Settings. You can move the sun here.

Long before the SL6B controversy drove the final nail into my PhotoLife coffin, I had decided I wanted a flexible, low prim, low clutter studio environment that delivered the cornerstones of SL studio photography: Backdrops, Poses and Lighting.

I found two. I bought two.

… of subscription kiosks. What did you think I meant?

Everyone, from retail store owners to the club operators, service providers to magazine publishers live and die because they have customers. Not buy once customers. Repeat customers.

I need to upgrade my subscription kiosks – the one I have is too time consuming and error prone. I don’t want to shell out the price of a couple pair of Stiletto Moody shoes per month either, so I went looking for “one time purchase” solutions.

You might think this is a simple thing. Subscribe and UnSubscribe right? You’d be wrong…