The Emerald project is over, blah blah blah.

There is one last release, 2600, however. But this release was handled solely by Phox, all the changes are his, he built it, published it and through all of this no one else saw any of it. So honestly who knows what is in it. I wouldn’t trust it.

He added in one feature that is public, channel spoofing. So you can still use the viewer after LL blocks it…. or maybe not, Oops! Looks like he forgot to make the setting persistent, so it does not actually work. Fail.

Either way, there are a few other viewers you can use. Emergence is LGG’s fork of emerald, he will not be updating it, but it will still work after LL blocks emerald. This is the one I am using when not using my own, only because I have known him for years.

There is also Imprudence. This is my second choice. It’s only downsides is you have to manually add the voice files and llkdu.

Third is.. I don’t know yet. Both Chalice and Jessica are going on to continue Emerald under another name. But this is still in the planning phase.

I am moving on the 29th. Because of this I will not be around much for a few days.

See you all later

Yes I know it is completely pointless, but I had a lot of fun the other day sending RTTY and SSTV over SL voice the other day.

RTTY is Radio Teletype, used for sending text over radio and SSTV is Slow Scan Television, used for sending still images the same way. You don’t actually need a real transmitter/receiver to try it out. Both types can be tansmitted through the air speaker to microphone and still be decoded perfectly.

What I did is just started up MMSSTV and MMRTTY, and piped their output into SL voice as my mic. Another person standing near me piped there SL voice into the same programs and we sent messages and pictures to eachother. Completely pointless

Go ahead and try it out, be careful around other people in SL as everyone around you will just hear loud annoying modem-like sounds, and you will most likely get banned from wherever you are.

Even though it has been a while since 2439′s download was pulled people are still asking about it.

The latest batch of new features, like many other features in emerald are not actually new. They were taken from a popular copybot viewer. Unfortunately since it was just a poor copy/paste job they left in some of the more harmful parts of the features. Look carefully enough and you can steal sounds, textures and more with emerald 2439.

So LL is finally giving us the ability to change our names. Unfortunately like everything else they do they are doing it horribly wrong.

The new system

The new primary name above your head will be called a display name. You can set this to anything you want. This will also appear in local chat, IMs and your friendslist if you have the person friended. There will still be a unique username that you can not change. For us current users it will be in the format “firstname.lastname” all future users will be “onewordusername”. This means the mandatory choose-from-a-list surname is no more.

The Issues

Identity theft and impersonation galore. You can set it to ANYTHING, even other users names and legacy SL names like “Dante Tucker”. In order to tell someone is who they say they are you actually have to manually look in their profile for the username. Sure there is an option to display the username on the tag as well but it is off by default.

Also the fact that current users have had these names for years, I myself live half my life as Dante Tucker. LL is stripping you of the name you call your own and giving it freely to anyone who wants it.

The debate

Users have wanted to be able to change their names for years, but this is not what we were asking for. Just a simple name change, or a custom last name is all that was asked for. Instead we get this mess.

If you saw Philips keynote speech at SLCC2010, and I did, you will remember he gave a list of features that would absolutely 100% be implemented in near future. And that Display Names was specifically one of those features. There is no stopping it and not everyone seems to know this. If you head over to the SL blog there is nearly 800 comments, the majority of which are users begging for the feature to be abandoned.

My own personal views are mixed. There are an unbelievable amount of issues that need to be fixed before this is released. But it does open up amazing possibilities for greater self expression.

However I doubt anything other then Dante Tucker will be showing over my head for quite some time.

Hello and welcome to my new WEB 2.0 web site. I hope you will enjoy it. Please head over to the guestbook and post a message also check out the super fancy links section, ADD ME AND I”LL ADD YOU BACK!! ^__^ ^__^

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