“I remember sitting with Alidar Moxie and Robyn … something … in their new store. I bought all the Cog stuff that connects with Google Calendars,” Oberon told me in January this year. “Then the StatsCollectors came out and I bought a six pack of those. We have them placed at various strategic spots on the island to track visitors. What is great about these collectors is they tie to a Website where we can look at charts and graphs interpreting the data for a 30-day period.”

He showed me how he retextured one of Ali’s old CogKiosks with the ALA logo. Pretty cool. Of course, we upgraded the kiosks and discountinued that shape, providing instead, ten different shapes and sizes that can be used. ALA is using those now, along with our Countdown Timer, RSS Screen, and the Super Event Board.

I jokingly suggested that he ought to place an affiliate vendor in their bookstore, and he mentioned that at one point, he had purchased 25 CogHUDs to give out to ALA members who joined the SL group for ALA members. Ali had it all set up but it got too complicated to support when she sold the business to Codie, so they dropped the arrangement and refunded the money.

I seem to recall that we had a booth at a Virtual Fair put on by the Librarians of Second Life one year and did fairly well. A very sizable number of librarians do volunteer work for their institutions in SL.

Visit inworld: ALA Island

Now, we want to see how YOU use the FilterCam HUD, and we’re giving you some incentive. MechanizedLife is holding a FilterCam Photo Competition with support from the makers of the Avimote PoseMaker HUD. The prize packages total more than L$15,000 and everything you need to know to enter is listed below. Just be sure to get your entries in before the end of the month. And please, don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or drop me an IM in-world if you have any questions! Good Luck!

What: FilterCam Photo Contest

When: 6 February through 28 February 2010, Winners announced 1 March 2010

Prizes

1st Prize - L$5000 + Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition (L$2450 value)

2nd Prize - L$2500 + Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition (L$2450 value)

3rd Prize - L$1000 + Avimote PoseMaker Personal Edition (L$2450 value)

Prizes will also include: MechanizedLife gear and Tillie’s Posestands

Rules

• All entries must originate in Second Life and must be created using the FilterCam HUD by MechanizedLife
• Entries must be submitted to the FilterCam Flickr Group
• Entries must include the tag “FILTERCAM CONTEST”
• Post-processing is permitted, but should be used sparingly as the idea behind the FilterCam HUD is to create beautiful in-world snapshots that do not require extensive post work.
• A descripton of the filter/mask used and any post-processing applied should be included in the photo description.
• You may use any of the filters/masks included with the FilterCam HUD or you may create and use filters/masks of your own design.
• You may submit up to 3 entries.
• Entries can be submitted through 12:00am SLT on Sunday, 28 February 2010, at which time judging will begin.  Late entries will not be considered.
• Winners will be announced on Monday, 1 March 2010 at 5pm SLT and prizes will be distributed at that time.

Judges

The following individuals have agreed to participate as judges for this competition.

• CodeBastard Redgrave - Owner, MechanizedLife and Creator of the FilterCam HUD
• Gabby Panacek - PR Manager, MechanizedLife
• Ryker Beck - Second Life artist and designer, creator of many of the filters/masks included with the FilterCam HUD
• Stephen Venkman - Second Life Artist and Photographer
• Tillie Ariantho - Second Life Photographer and Creator of Tillie’s Posing Stand with HUD
• Jori Watler - Second Life Photographer and Jewelry Designer

About FilterCam HUD

FilterCam is a fantastic visual effects HUD system which makes it effortless to add a variety of high quality special effects to your pictures or when filming machinima. Over 80 high quality masks and filters are provided, including a picture frame and keyhole, as well as blood, cinema, circle, clear, grunge, iphone, nightvision, oval, postcard, scanlines, square, tryptic, and wanted.

FilterCam Tutorial:  Creating Masks & Adding Custom Filters to the HUD

Ryker’s Tutorial for making your own filters

About Avimote PoseMaker

The Avimote PoseMaker HUD allows Second Life residents to pose their avatars in any position they like, right where they are, without the need for external tools. It can be used to override part of an existing pose, such as when a hand is stuck in a skirt, or to create complete new poses.

Here is my Pinup CalendarCog Kiosk, providing marvelous memories as well as up-to-date information on the events of my life.

So if you really insist on replacing the wonderful Rouge Pinups, which include ML staffer Gabby Panacek as well as ML founder Alidar Moxie, here’s how you do it:

• Make a copy of the original calendar and archive it.
• Then rez a copy of it and use Edit>General to rename it to whatever you desire.
• While you’re in Edit mode, click on Edit linked parts, then click the picture prim of the calendar kiosk.
• Go to the Content tab and you should see a script called RotatePic. (If you don’t, you didn’t do this right–try again!)
• You can delete the script that’s there and use the RotatePic script that I can supply you if you IM or Notecard me. (I will give you a notecard with these instructions and the script embedded in it.)

Once you’ve followed those steps, open the script and follow the instructions: “replace the uuid1, uuid2, with your list of texture UUIDs. Don’t forget the last entry must have no comma at the end.” To find UUIDs, right click on a texture or photo and you will see an option for copying the UUID. Paste it into the script.

Click Save, then click Reset. The kiosk will soon show the new pics in rotation.

Contact Paypabak Writer for the notecard with the new script! Who knows? I might even include a pinup of myself!

We just wanted to take a few moments and share with you a couple of great reviews/tutorials that were blogged recently by Alicia Chenaux and SarahTheRed Aurbierre.

Follow the links to read these two fantastic posts:

From Ch’Know Style: FilterCam 2.0 is Ready!!

And from What? Another Fashion Blog?: Feature/Tutorial: MechanizedLife FilterCam

Thanks so much to Ali and Sarah for their support of FilterCam!

UPDATE:  And here’s another good one from Shyayn Lusch’s The Digital Doll: CodeBastard Redgrave is Such a  B!tch Thanks, Shy!

If you would like to see glow come back on the HUD, at least with a debug option to enable/disable it in your viewer, please vote/comment on this JIRA here: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3167

SLers Ottawa Group clubhouse in the sky.

Raven has probably done the best job of ’splaining how Calendar Cogs work outside of this blog, of course (although the new upgrade now does away with the server components he describes). He is using the Superboard to handle events for his latest SL project, the “SLers of Ottawa, Canada” group, where he has created a clubhouse for fellow Canadians to meet and plot virtual domination of SL. (Doesn’t everyone belong to a group like that?) Sister Pay was there while Raven built the skybox for this group and came away impressed with the speed at which he worked.

Raven added a red bow for the holidays to the SuperBoard announcing SLers of Ottawa, Canada, events.

Thanks, Raven, for your continued support of MechanizedLIFE products!

You heard well! FilterCam is now better than ever with it’s brand new menu system and support for multiple preset notecards! This opens the door to new extension packs that will become available shortly.

Current FilterCam owners can get a free upgrade simply by wearing their old FilterCam HUD. If the updater fails, please contact us inworld.

The new version is available from SLX or inworld at one of the MechanizedLife stores.

Thanks a LOT as usual for all the beta testers and code breakers, you guys are awesome and patient! Hope you will enjoy this version at least as much as we enjoyed brewing this version.

Thanks to Sasara Klaar and Gabby Panacek for the new filter masks, they rock! <3

Many of our customers probably already read about the roadmap of incoming changes to the XstreetSL marketplace as described on Linden Lab’s blog. Tho we will refrain from commenting this change in policy, we believe our customers can understand our concerns regarding the impact of such policy on the burgeoning and vast ecosystem of content creators. As we believe those policies affects XstreetSL as a free market, we also believe MechanizedLife must opt in for alternative web commerce solutions that will be beneficial to our customers.

This is why MechanizedLife will take the following measures in the incoming days:

• We will downsize our presence on XstreetSL to a strict minimum, only keeping our most successful products on there.
• After selecting what we consider to be the best alternative out there, we will redirect all of our current web product links to this new commerce portal.
• We will register and list our products on a couple of selected alternative commerce portals after we are done evaluating them.
• We will provide an alternative web mechanism for our customers to be able to get special freebies like our CalendarCog Password Resetter. We will also make such key items available inworld.
• We will retire all our other freebies from XstreetSL, including the popular SLURL HUD, which will only be available inworld at the MechanizedLife store. We may re-list it on alternative commerce portals.
• We will encourage our customers to visit us inworld as we appreciate both your business and your traffic, or shop from our alternative web store.

We apologize for any temporary inconveniences during this transitional phase, but we hope our customers will gain an improved shopping experience as a result of it. Thanks and kudos to all of our customers for their continuous feedback and support, and making MechanizedLife what it is today.

Codie <3