I am a geek.  I love being a geek.  I’ve always sought ways to do things better and faster with a computer.  That’s what I do RL.  Second Life is a mecca for me and the geekdom I’m surrounded with.  I often want to bow down at the brilliance of others who create and know spectacularly geeky things.

Have you ever observed a geek throw down?  “I started programming on a Commodore”…”I had a Trash 80″…”I didn’t even have a hard drive”…”my first PC had a handle so I could carry it and hook it to a TV”…”remember bulletin boards?”…”text based gaming?”….”oh yeah!  cool!”…”<insert group impersonation of a 300 bps modem connecting, here>

A big shout out to Niecho for introducing me to Metabolt.  Metabolt is a text based viewer for SL.  Why would I want a text based viewer you wonder?

When I’m working through a dance I hate tormenting others for the hours I spend.  It’s also sometimes hard to log in 3 or 4 dance alts on my system without coming to a crawl.

Metabolt is a great alternative – lets me log in dance alts, have them sit on a pad, and accept the dance invites.  Because it’s a text viewer (no graphics), it uses almost zero resources.  It’s actually not hard to use for what I need.

I’m still figuring it out.  First thing?  I found how to create a file that logs all 6 dance alts in with one double click.  Awesome!  this lets me test dances thoroughly until I’m ready for the dancers to practice it!  No more testing just one or two pads at a time, rinse and repeat.  (I had a hard time sleeping after that thrill! – it’s true!)

Next?  Ways to move them around faster and identify them easily is what I want to figure out.  (Niecho has the skittles brigade and an entire rainbow.  I wasn’t that creative.  ha)  Being able to edit a mover notecard while a dancer is on it is awesome, btw.

Ok, before I start drooling again, info about metabolt is below along with the download link.  It’s no longer being actively developed but does exactly what I need for testing dances and works great on my Windows 10 machine.

Stay calm and geek on!
~ Eva

Description from:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Third_Party_Viewer_Directory/METAbolt

METAbolt is a text client with rich features to enable users to perform most important functions in SL.

The aim of METAbolt is to provide a thin client which people can use:

• at work
• on the move
• on low spec machines
• on low/metered internet bandwidth
• to keep connected to SL while working on processor intensive software such as Photoshop, Visual Studio and many others
• PC/Laptops with no graphics cards or with SL incompatible graphics cards
• to run useful bots such as customer services, modelling, security and direct group invites.

METAbolt is fully accessible and compatible with JAWS.

METAbolt works in SL as well as any other grids based on OpenSIM. However, METAbolt is primarily developed for SL.

Download:

https://bitbucket.org/METAbolt/metabolt.bitbucket.org/downloads/METAbolt.v0.9.71.BETA.exe