User:Tid Kidd/Use Tips

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Useful tips to get money

• (i) low pay You can actually get paid for doing nothing in SL! Well, for doing nothing more than sitting in a chair or dancing on a special dance pad. Owners of new clubs or attractions need 'traffic' to their places (nothing worse than a place where no-one goes!) and are perpared to make small payments - typically a few dollars per hour - if residents are prepared to come along and sit or dance on their "premises". And look out too for money trees, with low-value bills among the leaves, or maybe fruit that pays out money. Search > All, type in CAMPING or MONEY TREES and teleport to any places in the list
• (ii) medium pay You can be quite well paid for completing surveys. These are usually based at special ATMs, and involve you giving your email address and answering questions that are consumer- or market-research based. (If you are going to do these, I strongly recommend that you get a special hotmail email for the purpose, as you may well end up getting spam). And not all the surveys you do actually pay out, so the more you do the more chance of actually getting Lindens. Two of the biggest survey hosts in SL are Money Island and hippie pay, which you can find with Search > Places
• (iii) higher pay You can get work as a nightclub dancer or as an escort. This is often work that is of a "sexual" nature, though it is up to you how far you take it. (And the higher you take it, the better the pay, of course). As well as your basic pay, there are tips too, which can boost your earnings. Search > All, type in JOBS, study the list, teleport anywhere that interests you and have a look around; if there is no-one there, make a note of the Owner or Manager and send them an IM telling them about yourself and what you are prepared to do
• (iv) competitions and prizes There are opportunities to win money - sometimes BIG money - by entering SL competitions. Look out for these - it may simply be a DJ at your favourite nightclub running a costume competition, or a Name That Tune for instant prizes.
• (v) the easy way Of course, you can buy Linden dollars with your own cash. The exchange rate varies, but you should be able to get around 250 L$ for 1 USD. Once you have your payment details set up with LL, use the tiny blue button (top right of your screen) to buy Lindens inworld
• (vi) the long road Ultimately, though, the biggest immersion in SL is by joining the builders, the artists and artisans, designers, shopkeepers, photographers, writers, all those who provide skilled and professional services. These residents may even come to make a RL career out of what they do in SL, and earn their RL living, or at least part of it. For this, you will need to do your market research just as you would have to in Real Life. Ask yourself, "What are my particular talents?", "Is there an obvious gap in the market for something?", "Could I do something that few others are doing here?", "Have I got something to sell?"

Other useful tips and solutions to problems

• There's a map on my screen - I can't get rid of it! When you start doing tutorials in Second Life, you get a Tutorial HUD on your screen until you have completed the tutorials. Meanwhile if you go to Help Island, and can't get back to your Orientation, you are stuck with this HUD open, cluttering your screen. To get rid of it, right-click the HUD, and from the circular menu that comes up, choose Detach.

• General problems : clearing cache - If you suddenly find problems with your inventory, or appearance, or just annoying general irritations that suddenly appear one day (they weren't there yesterday...), then the first thing to suspect is that your SL cache has grown too large and needs emptying: it needs this doing at least monthly if you're a regular user. Do the following....
  • Edit > Preferences > Network > Clear Cache
  • then relog immediately after

• Inventory : WORN If ever you want to know exactly what you are wearing (clothes, hair, attachments, whatever), then click on your Inventory button, and at the top where there is a field to input text, type WORN. Everything worn or attached to your avatar will appear in a list, but nothing else. And you can then right-click on anything in the list and Detach it if you want.

• I can't see myself! - If you are in the Edit Appearance pose you may find yourself staring at the back of your avatar's head when what you really want is the front. If you go into View menu and check Camera Controls, a tiny box with 2 blue circles and a bar will live on your screen until you remove it (I keep mine on permanently). Using these give you all the control that alt + arrows gives you, and you can see yourself from all angles at all times and in all places.

• Suffering typing lag? - Is it soooo slooow typing that you are waiting half an eternity for each letter to appear? Much better to keep Notepad or TextEdit open - type into a new blank document, then keep cutting and pasting from there into SL. Believe me, it's quicker, much quicker!

• Slow rezzing? - You know the one - you've logged in, but your hair isn't there, or something else is missing. Fly up and keep going until you get about 250 metres up. You should find that you have rezzed ok and can just fly back down again.

• Teleport problems - If you find that you can't tp, again try flying up as high as you can, then tp from there. A second alternative is to Search for Pooley on the Map, tp to there, then see if you can tp from Pooley to where you want to go. (Low lag sims are easier to tp to and from).

• Client menu - what is that? - You will hear people talking about the Client menu a lot, you look at your menus and you say "But I haven't got a Client menu!". You need to activate it the first time, by pressing Ctrl-Alt-D (Ctrl-Opt-D on Mac). There are many useful commands for the technically less wary, but perhaps the most useful is Client > Character > Rebake Textures (another thing you will hear a lot is people talking about is rebaking - it simply means that sometimes, although you look fine to yourself, other people don't see you right, especially after teleports; then you need to rebake, which is like a refresh.)

• My avatar is all black! - You are almost certainly using two monitors, and running SL on the non-primary monitor. You need to take as many of the following steps as you need to, to cure the problem:

1. disconnect Second Life from the non-primary monitor and ensure it is running only on the primary monitor
2. clear cache (Edit > Preferences > Network > Clear Cache), then relog
3. if necessary, fix your avatar (re-Wear the avatar from inventory, or wear a new skin for example)
4. if necessary, relog a 2nd time - you should be fixed by now.

• Torley Linden's Tip Of The Week - If you are already signed up to the Linden Blog, you will know about these. If not, go to your account on the SL website and sign up - some of the tips are quite advanced, but if you keep them they will be a useful resource in the future.

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