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The Electric Sheep Company’s Christian Westbrook has an update on his blog today about the open-source Second Life simulator mentioned here yesterday. The code for the roll-your-own sim is now available as an open-source project, OpenSim, on the OpenSecondLife Web site. “The simulator does not interact with SL’s asset server in any way, supports server-side scripting via Lua, and uses simple flat files to store asset information at this point,” Christian writes. Check in with him or OpenSim if you want to lend a hand. As reader otakup0pe Neumann noted here, the sim is so far “rather rough around the edges. . . . That being said, it will certainly help some forms of testing and might see some interesting applications for off-grid building areas.” Very cool.

Spotted on the MAKE Magazine blog (run by goggle-headed nutjob Phil Torrone): the new Hackszine site, developed to “promote the philosophy of Hacks as a way to gain control of the devices and systems in our lives.” I like it. Already there’s a cool 3pointD-worthy hack up on the site, a mashup that lets you map places mentioned in books via Google Maps. We look forward to more.

Adrienne Haik of virtual-world services firm Metaversatility passes on the YouTube clip above, an interview on Channel 4’s Richard & Judy show with three Second Life residents: Fizik Baskerville (aka Rivers Run Red’s Justin Bovington), Slim Warrior (aka musician Leo Wolff) and Errol Mysterio (aka author Tim Guest who’s written a book about his Second Life experience). It’s nothing much new, but it’s an interesting 10 minutes. Fizik perhaps overstates SL’s current economic power (and refers to Rivers as “the content-creation company for Second Life”). Most interesting to me are the reactions of Richard and Judy, the show’s hosts. They do a great job of representing the mainstream wonder about virtual worlds, without being overly lurid. Richard, especially, has some learning to do: I love how he refers to his avatar at one point (toward the end) as a “program” and then soon after that as a “site.” The paradigm has yet to shift for some.

The virtual world known as Entropia Universe announced last May that ATM cards would be made available that would allow members to withdraw their in-world currency as hard cash at real-world ATMs. (Entropia’s PED currency is fixed at 10 to the US dollar.) Now comes the news that the bank that had backed that service will no longer be supported by MasterCard, effectively shutting down the ATM project for the moment. The Financial Institutions Commission of British Columbia reportedly called the bank a “rogue financial institution” having “shown complete disregard for the laws of British Columbia.” It’s impossible to tell whether Entropia picked a lame horse or the Commission took exception to the bank’s distributing virtual currency. Either way, it spells the end, at least for the moment, of one of the more interesting crossovers between the virtual and the real — though it may have been a crossover that was doomed from the start, given the regulatory issues involved. [Via Virtual Worldlets.]

As you may have noticed at right, 3pointD went through a slight bit of sidebar redesign this evening. Most prominently, I’ve added a “recent comments” section, thanks to an ace plug-in for WordPress. So bring on your insights, opinions and/or invective; from now on, you’ll be able to see at least part of it near the top of the sidebar. Other than that, I just rearranged some of the sidebar elements, and got rid of my SLurlPane. I liked the SLurlPane — I liked having the big graphic element up there — but it felt too static, and it slowed down the page a lot. I’ve replaced it with a little Flickr badge — but now that’s busted! The last dozen or so page loads haven’t changed it from the L$ graph, for some reason, even after I uploaded new pics to the 3pointD pool. I suspect this may have to do with my changing one line of the badge code, but I’d done that in the old one and that one worked (until recently, actually). Any suggestions? Anyone know a good Flickr hack that would let me get a larger size pic in there (without having to use the medium size on the interface, which hangs off the edge of the page)? Or a suggestions for some other dynamic graphical element to put there?

Basically, though, let me know how we’re looking. There haven’t been any major changes, but I always like feedback. Thanks in advance!