MechanizedLife

Buy this gadget and the next words from you mouth can be “Start the countdown!” and who doesn’t want to say that in earnest? Whether it’s counting down to your next Big Event or the opening of the next Big Movie/Concert or the next election, you will be prepared with this handy, simple-to-use gizmo. You can either:

Countdown Timer

a) Rez it and have a simple countdown timer to some event. To use it for that purpose, just edit the SETTINGS notecard and maybe put new notecards in it for before and after the timer goes off to explain Why the Countdown. Settings are pretty easy. Countdown time is the time to count down to YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM format (Hour is 24-hour format).

b) Write your own scripts to do more advanced things with the device. If you’re not a scripter, this next part is going to be tricksy … The countdown is controlled via linked message, specifically the ‘num’ parameter of the linked message. The enclosed ‘Coundown Controller - Simple Example’ should include all of the information a scripter needs to write their own scripts. The ‘Countdown Controller - Running Example’ is the script actually running the clock.

If you have any questions you can IM or drop a notecard to Paypabak Writer or send an e-mail to info@mechanizedlife.com. Visit my Web site or my wiki.

You can purchase your timer at onRez or SL Exchange. Or visit the store on Chindogu! While you’re there, check out vendor and land rentals!

Bibe Mayo liked the idea of using our FormExchanger for handling setting appointments at this spa she is putting together. But she’d like to be able to have her staff use pick up the notecards, and the present version is only set up to allow the owner to do so. If this relatively young ava hadn’t dithered for a few days in exchanging messages between Ali and Bibe, maybe Ali wouldn’t have spent part of her FIFTH Rez Day rolling out a new script for letting a group-owned version of the FormExchanger (FE) share the load of handling notecards placed in the basket, whether appointments or suggestions or votes! Now the FE crate holds two versions of the pick-up portion of the product! One for the owner and one for a group (it needs to be set to the group)! And Bibe gets the first copy to test out! Thanks for the suggestion!

Now don’t go checking Alidar Moxie’s profile … There’s a version of her still on the “rolls” with a rez date of 7/31/03! Oh, the stories she can tell of the SL frontier! The new version of the FE, however, is available from SL Exchange or onRez, or visit the store on Chindogu.

I’ve released the newest version of the StatsCollector with a couple of new features that have been asked for.  The main ability I wanted to add was the ability for someone to ignore all of the visits by certain avatars.  What this means is that if a person runs a store, club, or some other location with a staff they will be able to very simply ignore all of the people on their staff and get much cleaner results on their feeds.

I’ve also added some other background features that should make for some exciting new information in the future.  You can buy this new version on Slexchange, OnRez, or in my Main Store.

Our newest product is a simple gadget designed to fill that small hole in the SecondLife experience that comes when you sell a piece of land and you have no real way of knowing that it happened. With the new MechanizedLife LandSale Notifier, all you need to do is drop it on the parcel, reset it, and you will get a short-and-sweet message the instant the parcel is sold. Simple, to the point, and easy to use. Oh, and its only L$ 50, a small price to pay to make good news travel fast.

On sale now at SL Exchange and onRez.

A couple of people with high traffic collectors noticed some oddities with their StatsCollectors in regards to avatar ages and payment statuses. While it took me some time to track down it turns out that a super elegant way I had of collecting said information failed in certain cases (less than 10% of the time). While the problem was not major and was spread out enough to make it not much more than a nusaince, it weighed on my conscience and I figured out a way to solve it over the last week.

I’ve had the fix in place since late Friday or so and have been monitoring it since. Its a solution that scales well, that requires no replacement objects to you the customer, and keeps the number of failures to under 1% (.001% for ages and .02% for payment status at the time of this writing) with the minimal scale on my end.

Thanks to all of you who pointed out such anomolies and paitently awaited corrections, we understand that you help us make our product better, just as you understand that sometimes the world we all know as Second Life throws some unexpected hurdles.

Now that that is going well, look for some future improvements for this product coming soon.

Following up on suggestions from customers, Ali has tweaked the RSS Feed from her StatsCollectors to include even more profile information, including the option of seeing profile pix in the listings of visitor names. You can click through to get detailed profile information for each visitor. Also, the various options for which you needed to scroll to the bottom of the listings has been duplicated on top of the page!

No, it’s not Sweetness, the product I posted on Ali! It’s the deli.cio.us Tagger! Del.icio.us is the queen of social bookmarking sites, owned by Yahoo! and host to more than 100 million bookmarked URLs. As if you didn’t know! Well, the MechanizedLife del.icio.us Tagger is a great way for you to add Second Life URLs (or SLurls) to your del.icio.us account. Just rez it and right click on it to Edit the SETTINGS file in its Content folder. Add your account name and password and preferred channel for handling tagging to the card, and save it. After that, you only need to type “/15 tag” (or whatever you set the channel number to) and the parcel you’re avatar is in will be added to your del.icio.us account. You can even add tags to the command (e.g. “/15 tag SecondLife MechanizedLife”), which is the most valuable social aspect of the bookmarking site.

Find this product at the following locations: Chindogu and Clever Zebra. Or you can purchase it online at SLExchange or onRez for yourself or as a gift.

I originally posted this on my other blog, but it is also relevant here.

I’ve made some changes to the way group sign-ups are managed. Basically before I had a sign, put the group name in the notecards for everything, and crossed my fingers that you all saw it. Some of you did, and that’s great, but I wanted something a little less of a hassle so I invested in a program that would automate group invites so that when you touch the sign you’ll get an invite.

Of course, being a scripter I couldn’t resist taking it a step futher and now when you purchase an item from me in world, through SL Exchange, or through OnRez, you will automatically get a group invite.

I also spent a little bit of time and built a building I had in my head for a little while and couldn’t decide what it was until it hit me that I saw people shopping there so I turned it into a shopping venue. If you have something you want to sell and need a place to get started, or you need a satellite location, come check it out. You can get 100 prims per week for L$150. I’ve set it up so each store has its own little plot, making it extremly customizable with your title, description, music, etc, etc.

See you there.

Unfortunately a service outage has hit my hosting facility and the Stats Collectors are not working. I have been assured that the service will be restored soon, but I do not have any idea of how long it will take them to rebuild the server.

I apologize for the inconvenience and rest assured I am doing all I can to make it as short an outage as possible.

Of course I totally forgot to update the blog when the issue was resolved on Monday….

So while not completely done with my new sim, Chindogu, I’ve decided to put the first group of lots up for sale. I say the first group because I decided to just set 6 plots up for sale, all on the south side of the sim, all 1024 sq. m. and all double prim (468 per 1024, L$ 6498/month); I’ll be making other lots available as they fill up. Every plot (now and future) have road access on at least one side, and some have access to the centralized park. Every renter will also have use of the community facilities in the NE Corner of the sim.

If you want a different plot, let me know I chose these at random and am willing to do different plots. Even if you decide not to rent, stop by and let me know what you think.