I’m happy to say I’ve survived the Google Reader Apocalypse and switched over to Feedbin to synchronize my feeds. Reeder on my iPhone supports this aggregator and so from that perspective the change has had very little impact on me. I miss is the desktop experience I had with NetNewsWire, but the web interface for Feedbin is much better than Google Reader and removed my need for a dedicated application.

The only new issue that I’ve encountered that I don’t remember from the Reader days are duplicated feed entries, which is only a big nuisance when it comes to a feed as active as Hacker News. The GitHub issue explains why this happens, but to summarize, Hacker News doesn’t assign a unique ID to each post, so Feedbin tries to assign one for it. Unfortunately, the way an ID is generated means that if the post title changes, as is often the case with Hacker News, a new ID is generated and appears as a completely different post in my feed. It got to the point where I became suspicious of visiting any posts on a topic I’d already seen. However, this sort of mental burden is exactly the sort of thing software is supposed to relieve us of!

I was playing a little Sega CD the other day (actually a CDX but who’s keeping track), but I was having some problems with a disc which was a bit scuffed up. I figured now that it is mostly readable I’d better back it up while I had the chance. Sega CD discs were sort of tricky for noobs like me back in the day because they are multi-track discs, with one data track and a number of audio tracks. Usually, even today, I resort to something like Nero Burning ROM when simple programs like Disk Utility do not properly handle these discs. If you back them up as MP3s and ISO you get the benefit of data compression, as well as playability with emulators. I prefer to play games that way sometimes because I don’t have to mess with component/composite cables on a receiver that isn’t easy to get to.

Just got done with my cross-country move from Kentucky to Oregon. I’ll be posting my GoPro footage from my trip once I get the raw video edited down to something a bit more consumable.

Update December 2020: I still have yet to process that GoPro footage.

I probably wasn’t the only one surprised to see EA announce an online racing game back in 2001. Motor City Online was an interesting twist on the MMO genre. The early 2000s were boom times for MMOs, especially MMORPGs like Ultima Online, Everquest and Asheron’s Call. However, genres other than RPGs were relatively uncharted territory, and being a fan of the Need for Speed series, I signed up for the beta.