Journalists and geeks united in exasperation on Wednesday evening when Google made a very sad announcement: The company is shuttering Google Reader. We should’ve seen this coming. And those that didn’t see the inevitable death of Google’s RSS feed organiser and reader might’ve easily missed the news, since Google buried it halfway down an official blog post about a bunch of other stuff. But it is true. The search giant will pronounce Reader dead on 1 July 2013. Based on the somewhat storied history of Google killing Reader features, though, we’re pretty sure someone will start working on an alternative within the next few hours — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google has expanded its Indoor Maps range to include over 200 locations across NSW and Victoria. Users can access detailed floor plans of large public buildings by zooming into the location on their tablet or smartphone.

Indoor Maps are essentially indoor directories that you can carry around in your hand. Crucially, the service does not require a GPS signal and instead relies on wireless networks — which means you can use it indoors. The maps will also automatically update themselves when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors — via redwolf.newsvine.com

No site is fully immune to getting hacked, but there are some obvious things every site owner can do to make it a bit harder for hackers to break into a web server and add rogue links or take over a site completely. Today, Google launched its new Help for Hacked Sites series to teach webmasters how to avoid getting hacked in the first place — and how to recover their sites if it happens.

The first part of the series is geared toward relatively non-technical users, while the later part is aimed at users who can read code and are comfortable with using terminal commands. Overall, the series features about 80 minutes of video and a dozen or so articles that cover everything from basic things like figuring out that a site was actually hacked to working with your host to recover a site, all the way to using vulnerability scanners, understanding SQL injections, reading log files and using the shell to log into your site to determine the root-cause vulnerability — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Computers are taking another step toward independence from humans, following a new announcement from Caltech. A team of researchers has developed for the first time a method for chips to route circuits around damaged components and thus heal themselves.

These kinds of self-repairing integrated chips, the researchers said, could lead to smartphones that recover by themselves from technical failures ranging from a battery problem to total transistor failure, among many other applications. The research at the California Institute of Technology is described in the March issue of IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

The team, composed of engineers from the university’s High-Speed Integrated Circuits lab in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this capability in tiny power amplifiers. Seventy-six of these tiny amps, including the components needed for self-healing, could fit on a penny — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lots of blind people have blind friends, so This game of cat and mouse takes place regularly. It can be funny but it’s certainly a little frustrating.

As smart phones are fast becoming a basic part of a blind person’s toolkit, it’s perhaps not surprising that someone has now created an app for that.

People Finder has a very basic but accessible interface. Like mainstream products with similar aims, such as Grindr for the gay community and Spotme for networking at conferences, you have to have the app running if you want to meet up with people in your circle.

It alerts a user, via a vibration and a noise, when someone else with the app comes within 50 feet. It uses Bluetooth to detect people.

As you search for your friend, the app will let you know how close you are, by saying near or cold as you walk around.

To aid social niceties, There’s the option to message the person through the app to say you’ve clocked them, before descending on them — via redwolf.newsvine.com

My daughter, however, jumps at the chance to play games with her old man. She’s only 3, but she’s always exhibited a keen interest in games. Recently, she took a fancy to Ron Gilbert’s new puzzle adventure game The Cave. While she prefers not to play, she insists that I do and then she bosses me around in the game. She’s confident enough, however, to play some of the older arcade games. She’s not too shabby with Pac-Man; her favourite version is Pac-Man Arrangement.

But out of all of the older games, she most enjoys playing Donkey Kong. Maybe it was because it was the first game we really played together, or the fact that she watched the King of Kong documentary with me one afternoon from start to finish. Maybe it’s because Mario looks just like her Grandpa. Whatever the case, we’ve been playing Donkey Kong together for a while. She’s not very good at it, but insists on playing it over and over again until she finally hands me the joystick in total frustration.

Finally, one day after work, she asked to play Donkey Kong, only this time she raised a pretty innocent and simple question: “How can I play as the girl? I want to save Mario!”

It made sense. We had just played Super Mario Bros 2 on the NES a few days before, and she became obsessed with playing as Princess Toadstool. So to go back to Donkey Kong, I can see how natural it seemed to ask the question. I explained to her that Donkey Kong, while similar, is not the same game. On this occasion, I really could tell that she was disappointed. She really liked Donkey Kong, and really liked playing as Princess Toadstool. We left it at that and moved on.

But that question! It kept nagging at me. Kids ask parents all the time for things that just aren’t possible. But this time, this was different. I’m a game developer by day. I could do this — via redwolf.newsvine.com