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PRODUCT REVIEW Inventory Organizers My quest for more orderly chaos By Pollywog Gardenvale Spring is in the air and I woke up ready to do something about the 6,899 items in my inventory. A few weeks ago there was a message on the login screen that offered some helpful hints for dealing with an out-of-control inventory, but I didn’t read it. So today I’m spending my hard-earned cash on two inventory systems. Here’s what I bought. I sure hope they help!
Thinc Inventory Organizer  The Thinc Inventory Organizer looks like the kind of storage box that my grandmother had in her garage. Objects can be taken out of your inventory, put into the Organizer, and then returned to your inventory when you are ready to use them again. The Organizer has Next and Previous buttons, like a vendor, that allow you to page sequentially search through the contents. There is also a menu system for retrieving items. Because it’s a prim, it does not support a hierarchy of folders. If you want to organize items into different categories, you have to buy more Organizers. Just when I decided that the Thinc Inventory Organizer might be a good place to store my Christmas ornaments—wouldn’t you know it? It disappeared! I sure hope it’s somewhere in my inventory because my Snoopy PJs are in there. Oh well, maybe it’ll turn up...
PixelTrix Drawer System At this point, I called my friend Spunky who told me about the PixelTrix Drawer System and Media Laptop. Now this sounds more my speed. It was designed by someone who understands that you need an industrial-strength solution to deal with a problem of this magnitude. It also has a security system so people can’t go snooping through your drawers. You can also use it to share things with other PDS users, or with a group to which you belong. 
PixelTrix drawers come in styles from bedroom dressers to filing cabinets. (I wish that I had known about this before I bought my desk.) It’s a little on the expensive side, but if it works, then it’s worth it to me. The instructions said to read the instructions before you begin, so I did. Then it said to rename the dresser and name each drawer. Finally, it said to reset all the scripts in the dresser. Here goes:
[17:04] Pollywog’s Stuff. Initializing. So far, so good. The next step is to put my stuff into the drawers. Each drawer is a separate prim, so you need to select the dresser, and then in the Edit mode, click Edit Linked Parts. Then you can click the drawer you want to load, go to the Content tab, and drag the items from your inventory to the Contents folder.
If an item is copyable, the original stays in your inventory and a copy is placed in the drawer. Copy-protected items are removed from your inventory and transferred to the drawer.
If you want to restore something back to your inventory, you need to click the drawer and select the item from the drawer menu. Each item appears in a numbered list (in chunks of ten) that correspond to the numbered buttons below. So first, you need to find what you want in the list and then click the corresponding button. There are only ten buttons to choose from, so if you have more than ten items, you need to advance to the next chunk of ten. The button reserved for this purpose is labeled (K11-K21, or whatever). I’d much rather just click the name of what I want and be done with it. I don’t mind scrolling through an alphabetic list. So I pressed the K2 button to select my Colorable Flappy Wings. Because they are copy-protected, the single copy was transferred back to my Inventory, but not to my Body Parts folder where it used to be, but to the dreaded Objects folder. All I can say is, “thank goodness for the Recent Items tab!” 
If an item is not copy-protected, the system will create another copy in your Objects folder. Meanwhile, the original is still in your Inventory (unless you had the foresight to delete it) and you also have the copy in the dresser. Now you have yet another copy in the Objects folder. This is not quite what I had in mind, but I’m not giving up yet. The final step is to set the lock. To display the lock menu, you click the lock and select Touch on the pie menu. The lock menu also includes the hover text controls (which I was anxious to use, so every Tom, Dick, and Hairy who comes into my office and snoops around when I’m not there won’t see what I have in my drawers). I also found out that every time a PDS device is rezzed, it needs a new 32-character key. The key identifies the location of the device and establishes a communication link with the laptop (which we’ll talk about in a minute). It’s easy enough to generate a new key, but the dresser is definitely designed to be stationary. To generate a key, you click the Get Key button. The device will whisper the new key to the chat channel. I saved the chat text to a notecard and also took a screenshot for backup, just in case. (I later found out that you don’t need to do that, but I was being as cautious as anyone who has ever forgotten a password can appreciate.) But the fact remains that “Anyone” can still rummage through my drawers because the password isn’t set yet.
PixelTrix Media Laptop The PDS Laptop is the other half of the system and communicates with the dresser drawers by e-mail. It’s a standalone product, but is also the “System” part of the PixelTrix Drawer System. This laptop is actually much more than an inventory go-getter. It comes with a radio, a video player, a group land media router, and a wide-screen TV. It is a media laptop, after all. Although it has no real group functionality, it has loads of media management capabilities.  The laptop setup is similar to the dresser drawers and requires a 32-character key that is pasted into a notecard. As I started it up, I was a little surprised to hear a low rumbly sound (like the Starship Enterprise) followed by sultry, female voice that announced:
It also beeps like R2D2 and makes a sharp hum in a minor chord when you rez the router. It is, in fact, quite noisy. As I was pounding away on the keyboard, I discovered that the F1 key is programmed for my set of dresser drawers. So that leaves room for (F2-F15) more sets of dresser drawers. There are additional pre-programmed keys, but I found them hard to read because the keyboard is so small. I tried placing it on top of the dresser and using the camera tool to zoom in for a better look. Then I tried Mouselook, but couldn’t type in that mode. I also tried attaching the laptop to my body—which looked pretty cool as I was typing—but I still couldn’t see what I was doing. 
So I called Nathan Oddfellow, one of two people listed in the User Guide. He told me to hold the Alt key down and click the top of the screen to zoom in. Then, while holding the Alt key down, click the middle of the keyboard to zoom in closer. I tried this and it worked great, but you have to move your mouse forward a little to zoom in really close. Here’s what the keyboard looks like: I was anxious to conduct a cross-region test of its communications capabilities, so I took the laptop over to Surfdaddy’s pirate ship which is docked in the region next door. Of course I had to generate a new 32-character key and password, because the laptop isn’t really designed to be portable—at least not in the way you expect laptops to be.  Like the dresser, it’s probably better to set the laptop up in one place and leave it there. So I put the laptop on the railing of the ship and (after generating a new 32-character key, and updating the notecard with my user name and password) clicked F1—and up came the menu. Then, I selected my Pirate Stuff drawer and sent over a nice mug of rum. A PDS system can be set up with remote access passwords that allow anyone in the group who owns their own laptop (and knows the password) to access the dresser remotely. I can see lots of ways this would come in handy for schools, businesses, and people working on a project who need to share resources. In fact, I think I’ll buy another one for my office.
But I also realize that there is no magic wand that I can wave to transform my inventory from chaos into a garden of delight. The truth is, I need to go through it piece by piece and decide what I want to keep, what I want to save, and what I want to throw away. But I’ve been working on it and it’s down to 5,275, so pass the rum!
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