Last night in London

Hope you enjoyed the show last night in London City.  Here's some pictures of the event, and a reminder that today at 11am SL time (7pm UK) it's time for Substation Retro and then at 1pm SL time it is Worlds End on the Beach!

Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing our American friends across the great pond, a very happy Thanksgiving, from all of us in London City.

This holiday commemorates a harvest festival celebrated by the Pilgrim Fathers in 1621.

Speed up your Cache with a Ramdisk

For your consideration :  The Ramdisk Experiment

Mechanical drives are slow to access files such as your Second Life Cache, and whilst Solid State drives are much faster, constant 'writing' shortens their lifespan.

Enter the Ramdisk, which is 100x faster than even the fastest Solid State drive, because it resides in your computers RAM, the very fastest memory there is.

Forget the Ramdisk of yesteryear where everything was wiped from memory as soon as your computer was switched off,  they have come a long way.

Modern Ramdisks create an image file automatically when your computer is switched off or rebooted and saves this to the hard disk.  When Windows is started, it copies this image back into the Ramdisk so you can continue seamlessly.

On a 16GB computer, we allocated 1.5GB of memory to Ramdisk, leaving us with 14.5GB for normal running.  This 'loss' of memory is unnoticeable, and what is more, the totally free Ramdisk by ROG/ASUS uses Dynamic memory allocation up to the 1.5GB we stipulated.  This means that if that amount of 'disk space'  is not being used, then the Ramdisk decreases in size, releasing the memory back to the computers main pool.

Extract the x64 files folder and run set-up.  Then tell it how much memory you wish to allocate.  It will ask to reboot your computer.    Once you have done this, load your Second Life viewer, and in preferences, under Network, select the location of your Ramdisk, but be sure to set the size of the cache just slightly below the size of the Ramdisk.   Cache's larger than 1GB seldom offer any benefit, so keep it around that size or only slightly more.

For added streamlining, tell your Antivirus software to exclude the Ramdrive.

You are now set up and ready to go.

A couple of pointers..

You may need to disable 'Fast boot ' in Windows as sometimes this can shut down the system ahead of the Ramdrive being written when dismounted.

You may become a little more aware of your CPU fan at times of high traffic.

Download from here:  http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/utils/RAMDisk_Win7-8-8-1_V20206.zip

Last night in London

Hope you enjoyed the show last night in London City.  Here's some pictures of the event, and a reminder that today at 11am SL time (7pm UK) it's time for Substation Retro and then at 1pm SL time it is Worlds End on the Beach!

Season Change

As we head into winter, enjoy the illuminations at London City

London City Illuminations

Though November, you will love the spectacular program of entertainment and weekly shows set against the breathtaking backdrop of iconic London Landmarks as they are brought to life in this celebration of animated luminosity. For details see mainlandlondon.blogspot.com.

Visit in Second Life

Armistice Day Service

Pictures from todays Remembrance Sunday Service.  Thank you for coming.

USA Midterm Elections

You would think from all the hype, that it is a General Election, but it is just the two year juggle, where whoever is in power, traditionally loses control of the senate and congress to the opposing party.

Only twice since the civil war, has an incumbent president won both houses during his first term in office.

Passions are running high as America heads to the polling stations, to cast its first national consensus on life in the USA under the governance of Donald Trump.

With his tough stance on illegal aliens, the lowest unemployment since man first walked on the moon and tax breaks that reward all workers,  will the people remember this and reward him, or is their hatred for him so much, they would rather see the country in the gutter, so that they can say, they were right?

It is your chance to talk about it here in London City from midnight UK time (4am SL time).  Please keep it relatively nice if possible, but tell us all what you really think!



 

Happy Halloween

A very Happy Halloween to you all from London City.   Enjoy the festivities today at World's End Halloween Party with Katty and Coffee.  Starts 12pm noon SL time (7pm UK).

Worlds End Pub: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/London%20City/37/9/24

Abranimation - Motion Capture and Bento dances

Real Life Motion Capture Company Awesome Dog Limited  the creators of the Second Life leading animation brand Abranimations,  original Mocap dances and animation overrides, has a Mainstore in London City.

Abranimations has been a partner of  London City for five years, but the brand has been in-world for thirteen years and uses the very latest capture techniques, for their  bento dances; where multiple cameras track the movements of real life dancers and performers and  digitally encode them into virtual world animations.

If you check your inventory for Abranimations, the chances are you will find items ranging from toys, games, accessories, avatars, gadgets, dances and AO's from your travels around the grid, made by this famous company.  You can now add to your collection of the best animations by visiting them in London City.

CEO Abramelin Wolfe explained that, "Originally we lived near London and it is a very special place for both Wildcat and myself and seeing and feeling the buzz in London City, we knew we wanted to be here and that it felt right for our business.  I especially like the little touches that bring it all to life."

Talking about the latest innovations from their company he explained, "We have recently set up a brand new studio and we are working really hard with new fluid and exceptionally realistic animations, including bento finger animations, which can already be seen in our in-world stores".

Abramelin has also made a fantastic free accessory for London City visitors, a union jack style Mesh Avatar to go with some dances and mime animations.  "We made a special Brit one to give away free here".





Abranimations is located here http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/London%20City/31/129/24   All animations have a test pad in the shop which you can sit on to dance and try before you buy.  What's more - in this massive stores there are many other products on offer, including club games, stunt bikes, guns, a butt animator and an hilarious fish slapper!

Abranimations has also featured on the Drax files where Abramelin explains some of the company history and demonstrates the extraordinary lengths they go to in their studio to ensure the perfect detailed dances that we all enjoy in Second Life.

Abranimation is a registered trademark of Awesome Dog Limited

Login issues

Vintage "outage" page.

As of Monday morning UK time, Login issues to Second Life continue.
Since Sunday, there have been incidents where the entire population has been thrown off-grid for an hour or more at a time.

You can check progress on this issue by clicking the button at the top of the blog to see the Grid Status

Frustrating as it is, these things happen from time to time and rest assured the lab is doing all they can to restore normality.

This graph as at 2am SL time (9am UK) charts the outages.  The gaps indicate when no residents were online.

This issue was subsequently resolved Monday afternoon.

From the lab:

Heya Folks.

I can confirm it was a DDoS attack, and yes, the folks on my team had a rough weekend.

We do our best to fight DDoSes, but this one took quite a bit more effort than normal.

I’m sorry people’s plans got interrupted over the weekend. It was a rough weekend for all of us… including those of us on this side of the grid, too.

The weekend continues

We survived the invasion of the aliens from Mars, in last night's show, The War of the Worlds.  Hope you all enjoyed it!

The UK clocks went forward one hour this morning.. so today at 12pm SL time (7pm UK) it is Substation with Bailey and Coffee, then join Katty on the beach for Worlds End from 2pm SL (9pm UK).  Don't worry, we all catch up again as everyone else's clocks change next weekend!

War of the Worlds, date for your diary!

War of The Worlds, interactive stage show will be held in London City on Saturday 27th October.
The event begins at 12pm SL time (8pm UK).

To be in the show, please wear turn of the century costume of your choice.