Cloud Setup January 2013

By Wayne Brown
I've started quite a few blogs since this one. They all target specific audiences. This one is aimed at the general audience of friends and relatives, online or otherwise.  One of the first posts describes my home base in general terms.

See Places in Mind
I'll provide a bit more detail here.

"Home Base" is a parcel in Second Life. It costs $L 9000 per month (37 CDN). This provides me with 1500 "prims", which is a measure of the number of objects on the property. That's ample for a nice house and space to play with building ideas.

 Hardware

At home in "real life", I can put a lot of machines online:

  • Desktop PC (2 monitors). This Gateway DX 4320 machine is has been my main machine for quite awhile. At the heart of this machine is an AMD Athlon II X 635 processor and an ATI Radeo HD 5570 Grapahics card with 2807 MB of graphics memory. I think it cost about $500 (special deal). It's an excellent platform for Second Life and general applications.I'm often asked what kind of PC works well in Second Life. This machine is great. These are the spex. As you can see, it's hardly a high end super gamer ...,
  • Mac Book Pro. This is a 2011 model (I7 running at 2.2 GHz with 512K of graphics memory) , quite adequate for Second Life. Not as powerful as the PC. I routinely run a lot of applications simultaneously on this machine, including Second Life, Google Chrome (browser), Skype, iTunes and Nicecast (Streaming audio). All this can be done from bed before breakfast or on the road anywhere.
  • Mac Mini (2010 edition). This is our home entertainment machine, running Netflix movies a lot of the time. It also does a half decent job of Second Life (pretty slow and laggy, but with a 42" monitor). I plan to upgrade this machine to the newer version with a faster processor. It may well become my main machine, basically mirroring the Mac Book Pro on the desktop.
  • iPad. A famously lovely tablet, worthy of an entire blog on its own. In the present context, it's worth noting that it can play the Cloudy Mountain Radio stream (Shoutcast), chat in-world with Second Life (Pocket Metaverse) and run a full-featured browser (Chrome).
  • iPhone. A mini version of the iPad which also happens to be a phone. For the current context, it's worth noting that the phone keeps me in touch with the cloud by running Pocket Metaverse, Chrome, Blogger and Shoutcast.
Core applications

  • Second Life. Social, building, scripting, home in the cloud.
  • Blogging. Writing. The place to store thoughts that I want to share with various audiences, including Second Life residents, general public, geeks, philosophers, ...

Core application softwareafk

All this gear allows me to create a footprint in the Cloud, both on the input and output side. I'll mention just the applications that are running for hours every day:
  • Chrome. Google Email. Blogger (5 blogs). General Internet browser. Chrome gives me a portable internet window since the Chrome desktop is synced over all my hardware platforms, providing the same set of bookmarks, even if I'm logged in to somebody else's computer.
  • Firestorm Second Life Viewer. Each instance runs one "alt" or avatar.  I normally run just one, but I can field as many as 5 at a time (one each on the hardware listed above). Theoretically, it's possible to run multiple instances on a single machine but this tends to be laggy and unstable.
  • Nicecast. This streams to Shoutcast.
  • Skype. Free, hands-off phone calls for those endless holds and adding voice to Second Life encounters (better than voice support built in to Second Life).
  • Blogger. Many, many blogs. Approximately 5 that are current. 
On-Line Storage
  • Google Drive. Shared on-line documents 
Media
  • Adobe Master Suite. Use mainly Photoshop CS and Premier (Video Editor)
  • Final Cut Pro. Video editor.
  • Aperture. Apple's high-end photo editor and library manager.
  • Flikr.  On-Line Photo Library
  • You Tube. On-Line video
Books and Reference
  • Kindle
  • National Geographic
  • Scientific American

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