This is the newest version of Photoshop as of today. A few days ago I pointed you to the video showing the new Select Subject feature. That makes selecting some things WAY easier. That is nice but the surprising part is the apparent improvement in Decontaminate Colors.
The Select Subject tool drops you into the Select and Mask… tool, where you find Decontaminate Colors. I use the feature often when clipping out part of an image. (example) I don’t know that it has changed, but it certainly seems to work better.
New Select Subject Tool January 2018
Clipping me out of the green screen in the above image was very quick and easy. May a couple of minutes.
Notice the hair along the left side and where it overlaps the right arm. I would usually have to spend some time working on those areas. Not this time.
Saturday was the annual Mole Day. Inara has an article on Mole Day with all the details.
SL Moles are the guys that build all the SL Governor’s public works things. We hear little about them, but they are a key part of Second Life™.
Mysterious girl.
The Machinimatrix Blog got hacked. It is fixed and all is well again. (Ref) The Machinimatrix people did not recommend changing passwords. But, it is probably a good idea.
NiranV the author of the Black Dragon Viewer has an article up on Projector Lights. Part of the information is about setting up Preferences in the BD Viewer. Then Niran gets into setting up the projector lights.
Projector lights are way neat and greatly improve the appearance of a scene. They make night and club scenes much more dramatic.
Catznip Viewer is releasing a beta, they describe it this way:
Catznip R12.1 (beta1) has been posted for patrons (64bit only). We’re testing dramatically faster texture rezzing (new, Catznip unique OpenJpeg). Prejump & landings animations optionally disabled and a slew of crash fixes.
Texture rendering speed was the obstacle to my use of this viewer.
Kitty Barnett, the author of Catznip, is looking for some financial support. So, this beta is only available to those that contribute through Patreon.
This is the 8th anniversary of Myst Online: Uru Live. Get details on the Myst Online website, Anniversary. Events through to February 7th.
Gacha Garden has a new event in progress. There are dozens of free gifts spread around the garden. There is a shopping guide here.
I’m not much of a gacha fan. I tend to only go when there is an exclusive item from a designer I like only available as a gacha. But, Gacha Garden is fun. Join the group. Lots of trading happens there. If you have an item you want to sell, this is a good place to start.
In America, we have an aversion to government intrusion into our lives and business. Our basic idea is each human is a free sovereign answering only to a higher supernatural power and we Americans join in a political union to form a government that serves the people, not rules, and laws we all agree to live under. This necessitates a need for our government to be transparent and open to investigation by its citizens.
The nature of humans to have diverse agendas and beliefs complicates the process. A need to protect information from those that would use it to harm us or use it to abuse others for personal gain and yet remain an open and free society greatly complicates the government process. Thus, a complicated weave of laws controlling a government run by our elected representatives is supposed to strive to keep us safe and abide by our, the people’s, decisions and will.
Our system has designated selected people to exercise the investigative and overwatch duties. The Memo is the result of these duties and oversight. The information is now being released to the public for all citizens, and the world, to read.
This is not her only article on reducing land cost or making more efficient use of Second Life. So, you may want to browse her blog.
I’ll point out here that Penny’s ideas on the ‘Default Camera Position’ are being adopted by the Lab. We will soon have “Preset Default Camera Positions” as a feature of the Linden Viewer.
Doors – Another thing with Penny and her building to scale. In another article, Smaller Doors Anyone Can Fit Through, she on about making doors into SL building to scale.
The handy knowledge in this article is for those that have bought homes/building other have made. How does one scale down a building and still fit through the door? Penny has the answer.
Animations – I came across this video from a post in a Plurk.
Notice the hand and face animations.
On Plurk Dutchie® has been promoting the ‘dance’ chair. There are some NSFW images from the dances.
The main channel is now running version #18.01.17.511913. The version ran on all three RC channels last week. It is reported in the wiki as having Internal Changes. Mazidox Linden described it at the Server Beta UG as, “This week we promoted a couple of things to RC on Agni including DRTSIM-367 (internal fixes) and a version of the service that handles avatar bakes, built with the new version of our OS.”
Shhhhh
The bake service is not actually a simulator change. It is a change in a backend service. The server and service have to work together. So, there is probably some simulator change. But, maybe just in which API it uses to bake the avatar.
The Linux Operating System (OS) the Lab uses in its server gets updated every so often. They have been (are?) in the process of another OS update.
