Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Tiles, Everyone, Tiles!

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Most of you are acquainted with the very cool Slope Tiles feature (if you are not, here is a handy guide). I have an important improvement to announce, which is located in the Edit Tiles dialog box, located at the very bottom of the Slope Tiles page:

useas

Simply stated, if you prefer the Slope Tiles approach to your home page (as I do), now you can make it the permanent default any time you are logged in to Slope, no matter what computer. And this is yet another one of those feature improvements for which I can directly say “thank you” to the Slope community for suggesting it!

SlopeCharts…….But

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I’ll once again state a theme I’ve embraced, which is Quality instead of Gizmos (Don’t worry, gizmo fans, there will come a day when I go back to that). Thus, any product announcements I make will be more along the lines of “this no longer sucks” as opposed to “Wow, look what I just did!” This is one such post.

One thing that has bothered me forever in SlopeCharts is how, when drawing an object, I couldn’t anchor it into the future. This is easier shown than described, so here’s what I am talking about. Take a few moments to watch:

drawing
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Slope’s Virtual Room

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Let’s light this candle, shall we?

Look, don’t get your hopes up. This is just an experiment. But it could be fun. The good news is that you don’t need anything special. You don’t need to download anything. You don’t even need a VR rig (although it makes it more fun). All you need is a browser, which I strongly suspect you’ve got, and click here. Once you are there, change the avatar, and for goodness sake, change the name to something meaningful. Hopefully some of you will have a microphone headset so we can talk, but it’s OK if you just float around. Like I said, this is an experiment. Let’s see if one or two of us can bump into each other virtually. Come on in!

virtual

VR is Getting Good!

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Some of you old-timers here may remember that, years ago, I set up a virtual reality system here in my house. (Well, not exactly; my beloved and way-smarter-than-me son built the computer and put the VR together). It was, for its time, impressive, but wow was it cumbersome. It had a dedicated tower computer, multiple “scanning” devices positioned around the room to track where we were, a bulky headset, two hand controllers, and long, cumbersome wires all over the place. It was the best the world had to offer, and it was a total kludge, besides being very expensive.

Still, we had fun with it. In one of my prouder moments as a father, my daughter recorded herself in a virtual bar, beating the hell out of other patrons.

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