Five Quick Tips to Enhance Your Second-Life Experience

Podcasts: Listening in Second Life

Three: Listen to podcasts directly on your Second Life land. Take the download link from the Web site for the individual episodes and enter it into the Music URL on your land. You can listen to the podcasts in game, and even listen in as a group by all pressing the play button at the same time. I often do this for the science fiction story podcast Escape Pod, or when listening to podcast novels while I manage my IM's and attempt to slay the drama monster.

Clothes: Organizing Your Virtual Closet

Four: Organize your inventory by outfit. If you organize your favorite outfits into folders, you can just left click and choose "Replace Outfit" to change your entire outfit without having to select and wear individual items. Throw in weapons, accessories, animation overrides, and HUDs, and all of these will be loaded as well. This works especially well for people like me who like to use a variety of different types of avatars, because it makes shape shifting as easy as Paris Hilton on an Oxycodone bender.

(Disclaimer! Paris Hilton has never used drugs... for real...)

Superpowers: Seeing Invisible Objects

Five: See the invisible world. By going to view and selecting "Alt Shows Physical" you can see all of the physical objects in an area, including the invisible ones, whenever you hold down "Alt." You'll be able to see the red outlines of weapons, attachments, and invisible prims. The one downside of this setting is that you're going to see these invisible prims whenever you hold down the Alt key to adjust your camera, and I also need to warn you that these will show up in snapshots, so it's best to turn this off when taking pictures or videos in game. But it's still pretty cool to see some of the... ahem... attachments people are walking around with, thinking they are completely hidden.

That's it for this episode! So until next time remember, alt-highlighted invisible prims can be photographed, so consider very carefully which ones you want to wear in public... As this podcast is work safe, I won't elaborate on this point, but trust me, you don't want to end up in my scrapbook.