Author: blue

Alodit

blue LotD

Sometimes, even with the most organized inventory, you come across things hiding behind a dust bunny in a dark folder, and you have no idea how or where you acquired them.  You can maybe use the object’s acquired date (visible by right clicking the object in your inventory and selecting “Properties”) to look back at your teleport history and figure out where you must have been when  you got them, and that will give you a hint, but… not in this case.

This dress is sized for Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, Legacy Perky, and a one-size-fits-all fitmesh for classic avatars.

It comes with a twenty five color HUD, so it’s easy to find a color to suit.

While the store on the marketplace lists an in-world location, it currently doesn’t exist, so I can’t even run back there and see if the dress was a group gift.  Never mind, if you really like it, it’s available on the marketplace for L$175.

Brielle

blue LotD

This skirt and top outfit is a FREE gift for members of FabFree, which is FREE to join of course 🙂

I like floral patterns on black.  In this case, it gives me a chance to incorporate some pink into an outfit without it clashing with my hair too much lol.

The top and skirt are separates, and both are sized to fit Lara, Isis, Freya, Venus, Hourglass, Physique, TMP, and the five standard mesh sizes.  Alphas are included too.

Autumn Dress & Shorts

blue LotD

This is a FREE group gift from GGVG Fashion.  Their group is FREE to join.

The browns and yellows suit my DSD bunny, which, with the magic of BoM, I’ve now managed to base on Lara.

The dress and shorts are separates, and both are sized to fit Lara, Freya, Isis, Venus, Hourglass, and Physique.

There are two other patterns as separate gifts in the store as well, so if browns and yellows are not your thing, you can try one of the other styles!

Smesh net

blue LotD

Here’s a past group gift from smesh.  smesh is FREE to join, and there are a number of group gifts available.

There are fits for Lara, Freya, Isis, Tonic Fine, Tonic Curvy, Physique, Hourglass, and Altamura.  I’m wearing BoM panties with this – the suit does nothing for your modesty!

Susanna

blue LotD

This is a FREE group gift from MeHoney, and their group is FREE to join.

This bodysuit is super well fitting (although I noticed a few tiny clips in exaggerated poses, but I’m guessing it will be fine for normal wear).  It’s sized for Lara, Lara Smash Boobs (I didn’t even know there was such a thing!), Legacy, Legacy Perky, Reborn, Reborn Juicy, Kupra, and Kupra Corset.

Included is a twelve color HUD, so this will suit everyone!

Zagi

blue LotD

A floral print in lilac, a redhead’s idea of heaven 🙂

This dress is a FREE group gift for members of Mesh Body Friends, and MBF is FREE to join.

The dress is sized to fit Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, and Legacy Perky.

Tentacled caching

blue Stuff

If you have no interest in the technical side of Second Life, feel free to skip this article.

I run Squid to cache textures, mesh, and other assets that the Second Life servers asks the viewer to fetch to render regions and avatars.  You can read all about using Squid with Second Life via Firestorm’s website.  It’s quite a lot of technical work to set up, and I wouldn’t recommend the casual SL user attempt it.  However, if you have the spare computer resources and know what you’re doing, it can speed up rendering of frequently visited regions tremendously, and save on bandwidth too.

As I’m a software geek, I have an engineering mindset, and let me tell you, we engineers love to measure things.  So once Squid is set up, you can use something like Calamaris to measure the performance of the external cache.  Here’s a screen shot of my performance statistics for just over a week.

I’ve highlighted the interesting numbers in yellow.  I did 567764 requests (asking SL to send me a texture or a mesh, etc) and of those, I found 373864 assets already in my cache, giving me a “Request hit rate” of 373864 * 100 / 567764 ~= 65%, which is pretty good!

Even better are my bandwidth savings.  Without Squid doing its thing, I would have loaded nearly 14.5 gigabytes of assets.  As it was, I loaded less than 2 gigabytes, saving me over 12.5 gigabytes of download.  I saved 87% of my bandwidth requirements!  And Squid estimated my “browsing” performance improvements were a 671% speedup.  That’s pretty cool!

I said “even better” at the start of the last paragraph, but saving bandwidth is exactly what I’m tuning for.

There are a lot of knobs and switches in the Squid configuration file.  Depending on which cache replacement policy you choose, you’ll get either more cache hits or more bandwidth savings.  I’d rather have large assets like mesh instantly load and then perhaps take a little longer to texture.  You can achieve this by tweaking the cache settings after seeing what the cache performance does on average.  That’s why I said at the start that you have to know what you’re doing 🙂

Maysa

blue LotD

This is a group gift for members of the teleporthub.com group.  The group is a tiny L$10 to join.

The top and dress are all one piece.  Included are sizes for Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, Legacy Perky, Kupra, and Reborn.  There are a few places where you’ll need to employ your body’s alpha to prevent clips, but all in all this is a very nice combination, and the neutral colors suit me.  I’m sure this will get a few wears!

Ava

blue LotD

Here’s a FREE group gift from Belle Epoque for members of the teleporthub.com group.

The outfit is all one piece, and it’s sized to fit Lara, Lara Petite, Legacy, and Legacy Perky.  No actual leopards were harmed making this dress 🙂