As announced back in March, Google Reader was shut down today. According to the message currently displayed when attempting to access the service, which also links to a list of alternatives, users who haven’t done so already will still be able to use Google Takeout to download a copy of their Google Reader data, likely to import into their new RSS reader of choice, until 12 PM PST on July 15. After that time, everything will be deleted.
From what I’m seeing, the vast majority of Google Reader users have now switched to Feedly, with the rest, myself included, spreading among a large number of other services, though it’ll remain to be seen how the new Digg Reader will change that situation over the coming weeks and months. Understandably, those services will currently be experiencing levels of traffic that they may not be equipped to handle just yet, which will probably be most noticeable for the smaller ones, while the newly launched ones are still likely to be struggling with bugs or features that aren’t yet implemented, so this is far from the best time to test them if you haven’t done so already, but things should get better in time, in part perhaps also because the traffic levels will be somewhat lower once those who have made accounts on multiple such services will make their final choice.
Seeing as I haven’t tested any except The Old Reader, which was the one I chose after going through a few articles comparing the options shortly after the initial announcement, I’m afraid I can’t help you compare if you’re still looking for another reader, but can point out that a bug in The Old Reader currently makes the page scroll to the clicked post regardless of the settings and one obvious thing that it lacks compared to Google Reader is the ability to manually refresh all feeds at once.
Admittedly, as their server status page reports, the spike in traffic is seriously straining their servers and everything is running significantly slower than it should at the moment, manual refresh commands possibly failing even on single feeds, so such an option couldn’t work at the moment even if it would exist, but perhaps things will improve with time. It is, after all, a small project maintained by a few people in their spare time, and partially with their own money, seeing as donations don’t cover the costs, and they were only reporting some 260000 users three weeks ago.
Of course, the first thing I looked for was a simple interface without too many features I won’t use getting in the way and with a look that won’t make me think it was designed with mobile devices in mind, but the fact that it is an independent project maintained by people you can definitely see as volunteers clearly weighed a lot in my decision to pick it back then as well. Unfortunately, this does make such problems far more likely and also greatly increases the risk of the whole thing eventually needing to be discontinued, so I’ll wait and see what happens, but do plan to stick with it if it won’t get worse.
As I mentioned before, this Thursday I needed to have a wisdom tooth pulled out and, since it was still completely under the gum and pushing against the tooth next to it, as it had no room to come out normally, that required surgery. Rather difficult surgery, I was told, since it also had a shape that made it difficult to grasp and pull out properly, so it took about 30 minutes and at least the first day of recovery was definitely not easy, but it is getting better now and at least that’s one less thing to worry about in the future, so I guess it’ll work out in the end.
The only troubling moment there came after the doctor finally managed to get the tooth out and was sewing the gum closed again, when I suddenly felt very nauseous and didn’t think I could hold it back, apparently getting very pale as well as a result, but I let them know, he finished quickly and then the nurse laid me on my back and gave me some medicinal alcohol to smell, which seemed to solve the problem almost immediately. Other than that, the only things I felt were the first shots of anesthetic, the whole area already being numb when he decided to give me some more, and a little prick, probably even less painful than those first shots, when the tooth came out.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t so nice after I got back, as it was quite painful for a few hours after the anesthetic wore off. However, the pain itself wasn’t such a big issue, and after those first few hours it wasn’t exactly an issue at all, but feeling that I was pulling the stitches apart whenever I swallowed coupled with the need to swallow all the spit and blood very frequently definitely was, and napping during the afternoon or evening wasn’t an option because whenever I closed my eyes I saw myself back there and felt like the surgeon was still working in my mouth. Seeing that it was still bleeding somewhat even when I went to bed that night definitely didn’t help either, but at least I managed to sleep then, after somehow getting some largely unchewed bits of food down before taking the antibiotics I was told to take.
It started getting better yesterday, though there was still some blood and eating before I had to take the antibiotics again wasn’t much easier. Then I also went to have the scheduled checkup and was told everything looked just great, and also that it was perfectly normal for the previous day to be so difficult, considering how difficult the operation itself was. They even gave me a small bottle of mouthwash for free, telling me to start using it these days, while the pain and swelling will make me unable to brush that area properly.
Still, even though eating was noticeably less difficult last night, managing to even chew a little, there was still a little blood even today and the swelling is only now starting to go down, so I’m no longer holding an ice pack there as much as possible either. This last part seems to be precisely on schedule, since the swelling is supposed to peak 48 hours after removal, pressing ice or at least cold water on the area being recommended up to that point, so I guess I can definitely say that the worst part is behind me now and hope that nothing else will pop up, neither these days nor next Thursday, when I’ll have to go again to have the threads pulled out…
Other issues are that I’m worried that the antibiotics will make me end up struggling with candida yet again, seeing as taking such things greatly increases the risk and I had some issues with that even without taking any, and that I sort of wanted to keep my tooth, or at least to get it and then decide what to do with it myself, but they quickly cleared the tray of everything while I was lying down, probably so I won’t be looking at blood again when I’ll get back up, though I’m pretty sure that it was a smell that made me nauseous. But the first of these is probably something to worry about later, if it’ll come to it, and there’s nothing to do about second, so I guess I’ll leave it at that for now and see what else I can do around here…
After becoming, on May 15, the record holder for the longest distance driven anywhere other than on Earth by a NASA vehicle, Opportunity passed another milestone on June 24, when it exceeded 37 kilometers of total odometry. Based on the numbers we’ve known for the past 40 years, this should have made it pass Lunokhod 2 and set the overall record for longest distance driven by a vehicle anywhere other than on Earth, so it should have been a pretty big day.
Well, it’s not, because the Russians recently, and very conveniently, remembered to recalculate the distance covered by Lunokhod 2 and the new result is a staggering 42 kilometers, five more than before. As such, especially considering that Opportunity is almost nine and a half years into its planned three-month mission, the technical problems keep piling up, some new ones being mentioned even in the update that marked passing the 37 kilometer mark, its next winter haven is only about one kilometer away and the focus has now switched to Curiosity, it may well be that it’ll never officially become the vehicle that drove the most anywhere other than on Earth. At the same time, if it will somehow make it through yet another Martian winter in a state that’ll permit further long-distance driving, those same issues that increasingly limit its relevance and usefulness from a scientific perspective may just make the mission managers simply decide that it should be driven until it’ll hit the new goal, just to at least have the record under its belt for a while, before Curiosity has a chance to snatch it away.
What’s interesting when you look at this otherwise rather amusing effort made by Russian scientists 40 years after Lunokhod 2 ceased operating is that it clearly states that there’s still a space race going on. Unfortunately, most of the world’s governments, and the United States’ one in particular, definitely think otherwise when they set goals and budgets and, unless something changes immediately and drastically, several more decades will have to pass before we’ll have any chance of matching even the ambitions, much less the achievements, we had during the ’60s and ’70s, clearly not when also “updating” those goals according to our current level of technological development.
I have mentioned before that my main little “project” on MobyGames this year was to submit the reviews from The Adrenaline Vault as mobyranks, starting with the oldest and going through the list. We’re talking about a review site founded in 1995 which was still active, even if more recently as a “gaming blog”, which I actually remember following in my early years on-line, so in the late ’90s and early ’00s, and which I noticed wasn’t usually covered by the major aggregators and, surprisingly, didn’t even have a Wikipedia page, so I wanted to fix that in at least one place.
Unfortunately, it appears that I was too late. The last year submitted was 2003, in early May, and I kept putting off continuing, so I only learned yesterday, when somebody asked on the MobyGames forums whether anyone knows what’s going on with the site, that it disappeared around the start of June and that, according to a message I found posted on their Facebook page, although the closure was a result of hacking and therefore definitely not planned, it will not be relaunched. Another message posted by the same person just before the one announcing the closure seemed to ask people who used to follow The Adrenaline Vault to switch to Games Xtreme, but I don’t know how “official” that is.
Sure, much of the content can still be found, on the Wayback Machine as well as in various other places, including on the computers of people who regularly checked the site and saved some of the reviews, but I’m absolutely stunned by this, and I’m not only referring to the fact that such an established site is allowed to vanish so suddenly. Seriously, what fucking asshole would want to delete a site like this and, more importantly, how was it possible for them not to have any backups? That’d be shocking even for the smallest, most obscure site out there, so when it comes to a respected site with 18 years of history behind it, I simply can’t imagine it being the case, and yet this is exactly what that message says, so I’ll just say that something strange seems to be going on…
Time for another quick update, which I’ll start by saying that, after a rainy and stormy May and first half of June, summer seems to have unfortunately arrived in earnest as of last weekend. Highs are now steadily over 30°C, even exceeding 35°C at times, and we’re told that this is nothing compared to what July and August will be like, so it’s going to be highly unpleasant, to say the least.
This also means that I should clean the dust from my computer, especially that gathered inside the CPU heat sink, but I’m hoping it’ll make it at least until the start of July without hitting the temperature alert levels I have set and only do it then, to have a better chance of only needing to do it once. Granted that those alert levels are quite low and I could likely put them even 10°C higher without problems, but this is the sixth summer this computer will have to go through and I certainly don’t want the temperatures to end up higher than before, seeing as the risk of failures only increases with time.
Otherwise, I seem to be getting into arguments, even public ones once again, or otherwise losing people I’ve been talking to lately. Granted, sort of lashing out at a person who’s been ignoring me for a long time seems to have made her talk to me again somewhat, though I still doubt it’ll last, but at this point I guess that the one person I have been talking to quite a lot for the past year or so is lost after we snapped at each other over something she did, or more exactly over something she ended up not doing because of certain other things she did, and I find myself upset enough by that to not exactly care to try to patch things up.
Last but most definitely not least, severe pain for about a day and a half from my lower-left wisdom tooth, following the otherwise more normal levels of pain experienced recently in that area that made me think it had just finally decided to come out, made me end up seeing a dentist yesterday and the news was about as bad as it could be. The tooth itself is probably quite fine, but it’s still completely under the gum, which was slightly infected, quite stunted and has no room to come out, pushing quite heavily against the one next to it, which seems to already be slightly bent as a result, so I was told it’ll only get worse unless it’s removed, which obviously implies surgery.
At least it stopped hurting now as long as I don’t touch the area, and in fact it already had by Monday evening, and was told that it should probably leave me alone for a while, especially after having some antiseptic placed there, but chewing or brushing my teeth is still a big problem in that area and it will remain so for weeks to come, seeing as the surgery is scheduled for next Thursday and I imagine it’ll take quite a while for the area to fully recover after it’s done as well. That’s not something I care to think about any more than I have to before I get there, but I do anyway, so I imagine that my state of mind will get even worse with every day that passes.
