The transient instability of social media serves as a reminder that I should refocus on my personal website as the core of my online presence.
Sidebar LifeStream Change
Until recently I was using a Friendfeed embedded badge for my Lifestream (a peripheral sidebar content freshener) but from March 8th onwards my Friendfeed stream simply stopped updating from any services or feeds. I don’t understand it, as other Friendfeed accounts still seem to be updating, but considering how support and innovation on the site have pretty much ceased since the Facebook acquisition, this seems a good time to switch Lifestream embed sources.
So I’ve replaced Friendfeed with Twitter and Flickr badges. The main loss is that my Tumblr, YouTube, and other feeds won’t show up anymore, but if the content is important enough I can either tweet a link, or post it to this weblog. (I refuse to auto-tweet from outside services.)
Really, over time I’d like to get rid of third-party sidebar badges and just make this weblog into a more tumbl-y stream of links and content; more “fireball” if you will. That’s how it used to be.
Recent Reading
More space-related reading from recent weeks:
Why can Hubble get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto? (Emily Lakdawalla for Planetary Society) Because galaxies are really big and planets are really tiny by comparison and Hubble was made to look at big things.
Up: the story behind Richard Branson’s goal to make Virgin a galactic success (Adam Higginbotham for Wired UK)
Swimming with spacemen: training for spacewalks at NASA’s giant pool (Lee Hutchinson for Ars Technica)
AmericaSpace Exclusive Interview With Golden Spike’s Dr. Alan Stern — former NASA scientist Alan Stern headed up the New Horizons mission to Pluto, and now is President and CEO of Golden Spike, a private lunar exploration company.
Space Launch System Truths and Misconceptions — another AmericaSpace interview, this one with Dan Dumbacher of NASA, whose agency title is a mouthful: Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. (Mostly meaning “person in charge of Orion capsules and the big rockets that launch them.”)
China’s Long March 5 Will Not Launch Until 2015 (Bradley Perrett for Aviation Week) On delays affecting China’s production of future rockets.
NASA’s LRO Sees GRAIL’s Explosive Farewell — As the GRAIL spacecraft crashed into the moon at the end of their mission to observe lunar gravitation, the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter was able to observe the plumes of dust kicked up by the impact.
Comet PANSTARRS and the Moon
I got this picture of Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS at 8PM on Tuesday, 12 March 2013, about 2 days after the comet’s closest approach to the sun. I couldn’t see it with the naked eye due to haze and glare from the sunset and bright suburban lights, but a six second exposure with a narrow aperture resolved the comet as a faint smudge to the left of the new moon.
Also check out thisisbossi’s shot of the comet and moon with Lincoln Memorial.
Green East Coast Meteor
Saw a bright green fireball in the sky tonight, low over the northern horizon (as seen from Fairfax) going west to east. I couldn’t get a photo in time, but I sketched it with Paper app on my iPad mini while the image was fresh in my head.
This fireball was nowhere near the intensity of the Chelyabinsk meteor, but was still high and bright enough to be seen all up and down the east coast. The CapitalWeather story on the event has a couple of videos, and the American Meteor Society’s update has an approximate ground track.
Looks like any fragments from the object probably landed in the Atlantic Ocean. (I wonder if the green color of the fireball was from oxidation of metallic compounds consistent with a spent rocket stage. The west-to-east track might be consistent with the angle of some past low earth orbit launch. This is all speculation, though.)
Recent Reading
“Sell Out,” a story by Simon Rich: Part One, Two, Three, Four. (New Yorker)
DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland — that quickly disappeared. (Onion AV Club)
The extraordinary science of addictive junk food. (NYT)
Your fat has a brain. Seriously. And it’s trying to kill you. (Outside Online)
Sunk: The Incredible Truth About the ‘Bounty,’ a Ship That Never Should Have Sailed (Outside Online)
The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble. (NYT)
Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams. (Ars Technica)
Social work in the Tenderloin will kill something inside of you. (Vice Magazine)
Not your usual listening exercise: 6000 people’s perceptions of aid delivery (How Matters)
Photoshop is a city for everyone: how Adobe endlessly rebuilds its classic app. (The Verge)
How to Use Introversion for Career and Personal Success. (Lifehacker)
Pad Thai. (The Morning News)
Evgeny Morozov: ‘We are abandoning all the checks and balances.’ (Guardian)
Resenting Hipsters. (Jacobin Mag)
Why I left news. (Allyson Bird)
Why RSS still matters. (The Verge)
Twitter Archive
About a year after I complained about Twitter’s lack of archiving, they implemented a kind of backup solution involving a zipped tweet archive.
The Twitter archive is a bit of a headscratcher. It’s a searchable offline snapshot of tweets stored in JSON files organized into a year/month navigation UI — usable in any browser, but you must first request the archive from Twitter Settings and then retrieve it as a ZIP file after the server builds it and notifies you by email.
The nice part is that your full Twitter history comes to you as a portable web app that you own; a self-contained snapshot to store or upload to your preferred web host. On the down side, why decouple the archive from the stream in such a manner that you must return to the download page for a new snapshot every time you want an updated version? It seems like Twitter could have deployed the archive as a feature of every user profile, with the downloadable archive as backup. It seems a disjointed approach to what should be a simple archiving problem, which makes me wonder what kind of coding issues Twitter faces that would make a dated message log anything other than straightforward.
For now, my tweet archive lives in the history section, where I also keep backups of the embarassing older iterations of my web presence.
Leaving US News
Today was my last day at US News & World Report, just a month shy of my sixth year.
Google Reader Shutting Down
Google Reader is shutting down effective July, 2013. I use Google Reader everyday multiple times per day to keep up with webcomics, news, technology, lolcats, and the internet in general, and shifting to an online life without it will be a difficult transition. (I barely use Google Plus at all.)
There are many alternatives, and it’s good to hear that my Google Reader-based iOS app of choice, Reeder, has backup plans. Still, a whole ecosystem of article reading, link discovery, and web traffic was built around RSS with Google Reader as a main hub, and now websites must prepare to take a hit to visitor engagement after they lose one of the internet’s main traffic drivers.
O’Donnell predicted this last October, after they killed sharing and deprecated Feedburner APIs. It’s a disappointing and cynical move by Google, but not surprising given their ongoing shift away from open formats like RSS towards the closed walled-garden approach so favored now by the big networks. That Google would capriciously shut down a widely used service without trying to make it work effectively and profitably gives me pause about continuing to use any of their services. Again, migration will be difficult.
Marco thinks this a good thing; with Google Reader out of the way, now a million new reader apps can bloom. I do hope so, but I’m still saddened that Google would kill off Reader like this.
So far, Bloglines. Newsblur, Feedly, and The Old Reader are all getting hammered. I’m not moving yet; we have till July. This gives time to watch people flee to other services, and see the feedback come in from the alternatives. Now let’s see what gets built, and what the crowd coalesces around.
More from Cortesi, Alastair’s Adversaria, Mat on Wired, GigaOm, Atlantic Wire, MetaFilter, Reddit, and Quora.
Update: I went with Feedly.
Sunday Recap
Sunday was bright and warm. At church in the morning we heard a message from Reverend Paula Dempsey of the Alliance of Baptists and sang an Emma Lou Diemer gradual. After a Thai lunch we walked down through DC to the National Gallery, stopping by the White House and the Renwick Gallery en route.