All My Posts About Inventory

All My Posts About Inventory

 20 December, 2012

Over the years I've written quite a few posts about inventory control-- including the two just before this post. Some are serious, some just wacky.

Here's a list:

Semi-Serious

17 December, 2012   Inventory Control, Part II

16 December, 2012   Inventory Control, Part I

19 March, 2012         I Found it in the Sock Drawer

23 October, 2008      Inventory Control, Revisited

23 October, 2008      Inventory: Some Hints for Management

3 September, 2008    Inventory Count: 17,363

1 December, 2007     Working on Inventory

8 March, 2007           Inventory Control


Just Plain Wacky

16 February, 2009     When Interventions Go Wrong: II. The Hearing Continues

12 February, 2009     When Interventions Go Wrong: I. The Competency Hearing

10 February, 2009     Intervention!

9 February, 2009       Sweetie's Inventory Malfunction

7 February, 2009       Inventory Obsessive Disorder

4 April, 2007             Inventory Leak

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Inventory Control: Part II

Inventory Control

Part II

Written 17 December, 2012

What was I saying?

Oh, yes. So, by using the inventory search filters you can seek and destroy unwanted scripts, landmarks, sounds, gestures, animations, and notecards. Terms like about, unpack, open, rez, and thank will root them out. If you're a big shopper, you'll be surprised how many  will turn up.

Oh! And search bald. You might find hundreds of bald caps. You need only one.

Although there WAS that one time my one and only bald cap went rogue.

Type float, too, as it will show all those floating text scripts in the boxes you bought. And new script, and delete, free, invitation, join, t-shirt


6. Remove duplicates of copyable items.

Unless you've modified it in some way or have removed the original from your inventory, there's absolutely no reason to take a copyable item into inventory. Zap the duplicates. If you find twelve copyable R2D2s in your Robots> Star Wars> Utility Droids folder, you'll need keep only one.

You'll find some copy/mod items come back into your inventory as no copy, no mod, or no copy/no mod. That's due to settings on scripts, sounds, or other objects in their inventories. Be sure to delete those and not your original item.

7. Zap all those calling cards.

If you've not already zapped them, you'll find calling cards for hundreds of people in the Calling Cards folder. You can safely delete them. Keep them only if you need to remind yourself about a person. My calling card folder now consists of two items-- a notecard on which I made notes about people before I zapped their cards, and my own calling cards, which I keep for sentimental purposes.

I tried to store calling cards in a box once, but it didn't work for me.

8. Kill duplicate landmarks.

You're already deleted unwanted landmarks that arrived in the folders of items you've purchased-- now zap duplicate. Open your map and they'll be easy to spot.

I keep no more than a dozen landmarks in inventory. I have notecards for categories like Clothes, Shoes, Hair, Skins, Furniture, Animations, and Texture Stores and pull the landmarks into the cards and then remove them from inventory. I rarely use the notecards; instead I'll use the Picks of an item's creator to find his or her store (most likely that landmark I picked up in 2006 isn't good, anyway). It's easy to see who made an item-- just rez and edit it and click on the creator's name to open his or her profile. Usually the store will be in the picks-- or perhaps under the Classifieds tab.

9. When sorting, open a second inventory window.

When working on your inventory, open a second window (you'll find the command in the menus up top). It's so much easier to drag items from one window to the other than it is to move up and down inside a single window. If this is new to you, you'll kick yourself for the time you've wasted.

10. Empty your Lost and Found and Trash folders.

Be sure to carefully check items before you zap them. Here's why:

Since late 2006 returned objects show up as as a single item in Lost and Found. Objects in inventory look like a cube; grouped objects look like a stack of tiny cubes.

The name of grouped objects will be that of one of its components. It might be named Object, or Beach Grass, or Dalmation, but may include your house, all your poseballs, and a hundred non-copyable plants.

If you find a grouped object in your Lost and Found, find a sandbox and rez it there. You can take objects one by one and they'll show in inventory with their actual names. If you miss items, they'll be returned when the sandbox is cleared. If there's more than one item, it will be grouped. Head back to the sandbox if necessary.

Search your Trash folder carefully before you empty it. You might find a non-copyable item or two there-- but what you really don't want to do is to zap Trash that contains the folder that holds all your jewlelry. Before you push the kill button, look over the folders carefully.

By following these ten steps, I've managed to keep my inventory count below 23,000 without actually getting rid of anything. The inconvenience has been minor. When I need something, I might have to rez a texture organizer, open a notecard, unpack a box, or, on occasion, go to prim storage-- but tens of thousands of textures, hundreds of photos, and the thousands of things I've built aren't bloating my inventory.

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Inventory Control: Part I

Chey's Prim Storage

Inventory Control

Part I

Written 16 December, 2012

There are a lot of people walking around Second Life with more than 100,000 items in their inventory. I could easily be one of them, but I've worked hard to keep my count under control-- not all that easy when one owns several sims and does a lot of building, both of which tend to make one acquire a lot of inventory.

When inventory count goes high, searching takes longer and it's said (I don't know if it's true, but it's popularly believed) the entire Second Life experience is degraded. Even if it's not true, certainly most of us don't need all that clutter.

If your inventory count is high and you would like to lower it, here are some things you can do:


1. Get rid of all those freebies.

Do you really need those 50 free houses you picked up at New Citizens, Inc. back in 2008? I didn't think so.

Toss all that stuff.

2. Box stuff up.

You can easily pack hundreds of items into a single prim-- and with new viewer features you can place them into separate folders within the prim rather than having to place all those sub-category items into boxes of their own. Why not tuck those 30 non-copyable palm trees from the pack you bought from Lilith Heart back into their original box-- or, if you tossed her box, into a new box named "Lilith Heart-- 30 Palms."  Leave a few trees loose in inventory, perhaps, so you don't have to pull out the box every time you need a palm; the rest of them can be unpacked when and if you ever need them.

If there are some things you use on occasion or think you might one day use, keep them, but repack those 125 tables and chairs into a single prim, name the prim, delete those 125 items from your inventory, and take the prim back into inventory. You'll be surprised how fast your count lowers.

3. If you have land and can spare the prims, store boxes on your land.

For the past four years or so I've had a platform in the sky marked with a grid on which I store items I want to keep. I have them packed into boxes, by category-- Vehicles, Gadgets, Home Furnishings, Freebies...

I could of course keep those items in inventory, but Second Life has an annoying habit of disappearing random things from inventory. They're safe on your land, so long as you pay your tier-- and you can put every copyable item you own into a box so your inventory is backed up on the land in case you lose the items from your inventory. I use 20 or 30 boxes so I don't have to do serial unpacking, but you can keep everything in a single box, if you want.

Here's a texture I made for my prim storage. You can click it to enlarge, then right click and save it to your hard drive and import it into Second Life. My name is priminently displayed, but feel free to Photoshop or GIMP the texture, or just make your own. If you make a prim 10 x 20 x .5 meters and paste the texture on its top, the spaces for the boxes will be about the right size to hold a .5 x .5 meter box.

I  attached a 20 x 20 prim to one side, making a sky platform 20 x 40 meters in size. It gives me plenty of room for sorting inventory and even for building. Here's a photo of my sky platform, which can be found 763 meters above Whimsy (northwest quadrant).

4. Get a good texture organizer.

If you build, take a lot of photos, or publish a magazine, you'll most likely have thousands of textures in your inventory. You can easily offload them into texture organizers. This will work wonders on your inventory count.

There are free organizers, some good and some not so good, and quite a few good models for sale. I swear by my K.R. Engineering organizers, which I bought in early 2007. They're copyable and modifiable, and work perfectly-- and didn''t cost all that much. Alas, they're nowhere to be found at K.R. these days, or anywhere else on the grid.

I didn't try it, but I did go to look at the KinEx organizer, which is copyable, modifiable, displays sculpts as well as textures, and can be rezzed on the ground or worn as a HUD. I'm tempted to buy it even though I love my K.R organizers.

The KinEx, like the K.R organizers, features multiple categories.You can stuff hundreds of items in each category. I have about twenty organizers-- one for photos, two for building, one for Christmas and other holidays, one for signs and textures I've made, and several for textures I use around Whimsy. Another holds the pages of The Whimsical Times. I feel secure, knowing I not only have the published ThincBook book in my inventory, but the original book (which can be modified), and from which I can grab textures whenever I want, but in the organizers in my inventory, and stored in a prim on the land, since I back up my organizers often to a box on my sim.

It's easy to load a single texture or an entire category into your inventory when you need them. When you're finished, you can just delete them.

If you have hundreds (or more likely, thousands of textures and photos, you might want to take a look at a texture organizer.

Get the KinEx organizer in world here or search it on the Second Life marketplace.


5. Get rid of all those unpacking scripts, landmarks, and thank you notes that came with items you purchased.

You can go through your purchases one by one, but creative use of the search capabilities of inventory will help you find the culprits. Set search to notecards only and look for cards with names like unpack, open, about, thanks, and thank you. Zap them. Then look for notecards where they shouldn't be-- in your clothing folder, for example, or your household goods. Do the same for scripts and landmarks.

To set filters to show any category or combination of categories, drop the file menu and choose Show Filters. Select the types you desire; then close, and only those types will show in your next inventory search. Reset Filters will remove your search criteria and you'll once again see all items.

Here's Torley Linden's video on the search filters.

While you're watching the film I'll get to work on Part II.

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