Hacker Friendly

Sculpted Prims are coming to Second Life. While the recently released 1.15.0.2 viewer doesn’t yet support them, the FAQ mentions that they might be available in the beta viewer as early as next week.
It looks like the sculpted shapes are made by deforming a sphere according to a “sculpt texture” that maps R, G, [...]

K Zero has posted a nifty brand map of Second Life, showing the physical virtual location of as many corporate entities as they can find. It will be interesting to see how they keep it up to date.
So many on islands, so few on the mainland…
via 3pointD

Second Life received its five-millionth sign-up today. For those of you keeping track at home, the growth rate looks something like this:

1,000,000 on October 18, 2006
2,000,000 on December 14, 2006 (elapsed time: 57 days)
3,000,000 on January 28, 2007 (elapsed time: 45 days)
4,000,000 on February 24, 2007 (elapsed time: 27 days)
5,000,000 on March 26, 2007 [...]

The Amsterdam sim (one of the more popular attractions in Second Life) is up for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $20,000 USD, with a Buy It Now of $50,000.
Update: Somebody bought-it-now for $50,000. Yowza.
I wonder if Amsterdam (you know, the one with the cool flag) will have anything to say about [...]

MOO (the nifty mini-card printing service) now offers Second Life cards. Send your Second Life postcards to secondlife@moo.com and they’ll reply with an access code. Enter the code on their web page, and you can make cards from the postcards you sent.
I’ve seen MOO cards around town, and the quality is fantastic. [...]

The Lindens giveth, the Lindens taketh away. It looks like dynamic reflections have been removed from the First Look branch, for the time being. From Steve Linden:
Also: if you had enabled dynamic reflections (which is still in the early testing phase so will *not* be making it into this release which is why [...]

As mentioned on Second Life Insider, the new First Look Viewer has beta support for dynamic reflections. Yes, that’s right: reflect the entire world (avatars included!) in your shiny objects. Sort of.
On the left is a picture of yours truly standing in the sushi shop, staring slack-jawed into a highly reflective chrome sphere. [...]

Here is an interesting thread on the libsecondlife forums, posted by Michael_W:
I’m currently writing a basic server which uses libsecondlife.
It is currently at the stage that the official secondlife client can log into it (using a proxy for returning a xml-rpc response to the client so that it uses my server as the sim [...]

October 18, 2006: 1,000,000 residents.
December 14, 2006: 2,000,000 residents.
January 28, 2007: 3,000,000 residents.

See you in the game.

Matt Biddulph has posted a nifty hack for Second Life: using alternate hardware to control stuff in-game.
On the left you’ll see an Arduino reading analogue values from a potentiometer and feeding the results in via the USB-serial interface to my Mac. On the right, you’ll see a modified version of Second Life that is feeding [...]