Name that Maker! The Inspect Feature (Level 2)

Pie Menu



Torley Linden's Customized SL Watermelon Pie Menu. Your pie menu won't look like this unless you are very good!


Ever seen an amazing object, on or off an avi, that you just had to have? Well, there's a neat hidden feature in your pie menu that lets you find the maker of any object, even if it's attached to an avatar (think hair, shoes, accessories or body parts). That feature is called INSPECT.

The pie menu is the circular semi-transparent menu you get when you right click on any avatar or object in Second Life. ( Mac Fans: right click = apple key (cmd) + click ) Yeah, that’s right. Looks familiar, doesn't it. The pie menu does not, alas, offer you endless fruity deserts, but it holds a variety of delicious everyday features.

If you look down at the bottom slice of pie, leaving behind the normal SIT, IM, ADD FRIEND, TOUCH,, and EDIT commands, you'lll see the word MORE>. Whohoo, loookee here, Page 2 and still more options, including a tweaker's favorite TAKE COPY. ;) But soldier on and click MORE> again and you will find INSPECT.

Inspect will reveal to you, as far as SL in it’s quasi-omnipotence is able to determine, the entire lineage of an object by showing you the creator's name of every prim.

So now you know who made the object. Even better; INSPECT will let you click on the profile of the creator and IM them or look in their PICKS to see the location of any stores they own. :) You can teleport directly from Picks to their store to buy the item you admired or take a landmark adn return later. Eitehr way, you're an SL Inspector first class and sure to amaze yoru friends.

Inspect. Most handy.

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Practice Location: Try a mall in the Vctorian sims of Caledon, where you'll find lots of goods to click on and avatars with many attachements. We recommend Caledon SteamSkyCity.

Tip: You can Turn off Group Notices

Believe it or not, we learned this JUST TODAY. We've no idea how we overlooked it!

If you select EDIT > GROUPS and choose INFO for the group you want, you can uncheck a box that will stop you from receiving group notices.

Similarly, you can uncheck the box that says List Groups in My Profile, and no one will be able to see you are in the group Notrious Uncaught Serial Killers Looking for Victims in Virtual Worlds.

On second thought, maybe you'd better leave that box checked! :p

Tip: Flying

Photo: Chey's Alt Dakota in a Controlled (ha!) Fall.


When we were new, we had no idea how to fly higher or lower; we only knew to turn Fly on and off (the F key or Fly on the menu tab at the bottom of your screen).

Consequently, we landed by turning Fly off and crashing to the ground.

Cheyenne would try to stop her fall at the last moment by toggling Fly on and then off, but a lot of times it didn’t work.

Xubi didn’t even try the toggle; she just crashed to the ground. She liked it so much she’s falling even today. Her usual entrance is a crash to the ground at Cheyenne’s feet. Her best fall was from the Eiffel Tower in Paris 1900 sim, where she landed in a park atop a pair of lovers.

When we were new, we were astonished and delighted when we found we could use the e and c keys or Page Up and Page Down to fly, respectively, duh,  up and down.

And we were delighted when we found flight assist devices that let us break the 150 meter newbie limit.

[For a free flight assist device and other goodies, teleport to SLURL

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Forsaken/40/139/21

and pick up the Pele Freebies. You'll find them at the wall of the walkway, near the torii gate at the east end of the Gardens in which you'll materialize.]

We were so delighted we decided to see how high we could go. We still don’t know how the maximum height, but there seems to be no limit. We flew straight up for HOURS, passing 50,000,000 (that’s right, fifty million!) meters! Our poor bodies were distorted and misshapen, but we drank plenty of Tang and were soon back in shape.

Imagine our surprise when, months and months into Second Life, we found an easy way to stop a fall!

Holding the space bar will instantly stop a plunge and lower you ever so slowly to the ground..

Chat must be closed, however

The space bar allows slow motion moving in any direction, so it’s useful when swimming or walking, and in particular when one is walking near the edge of a cliff or trying to stand beside friends without bowling them over.

How easy! How could we not have known that?

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Summary

F will toggle Fly on and off

E or Page Up will increase your elevation

C or Page Down will decrease your elevation

Holding the space bar (Chat must be closed) will stop a fall.

You will move slowly when you walk while holding the space bar (most handy!)

Welcome to our Tips and Tweaks Blog!

Hi! We’re Exuberance (Xubi) Lafleur, founder of The Icarus Society and the source of all silliness, and Cheyenne (Chey) Palisades, founding member of The Icarus Society and magnifier and amplifier of Xubi’s silliness.

We have a LOT of fun in Second Life. We appreciate the sublime, but seek out the ridiculous. We love to fall from the sky and go plop and make huge, useless, ridiculous builds like giant drinking birds and flying rolls of Viva paper towels and just in general bounce (literally) around the grid.

We’ve learned a lot through our misadventures, and we want to share our often illicitly-gained knowledge with you, our constant (and, we hope, silly) readers. Our desire is to slowly build a site that will help both new and old citizens alike learn little-known things about Second Life.

We would have loved to have found such a place when we were new. It took us months to figure out how to export photos and textures from SL to the real world and make Friends conferences (Xubi is still struggling with that one). And we only JUST learned that you can use the space bar to slow movement to a crawl. This is most handy, for it can be used both to stop a fall and will let you navigate in tight spaces.

We don’t want you, constant, silly reader, to have to struggle as we did. So here we go! Enjoy! And don’t forget to be silly!

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Photos: Chey and Xubi, Xubi, Chey, Xubi and Chey in an Oopsie Moment.