Nintendo has announced the discontinuation of their Wi-Fi Connection Service for the Wii, DS, and DSi systems. Over 400 titles are affected, including Mario Kart Wii.

Engadget reports:

Services that will keep working on the DS after May include the DSi Shop, DS Browser, and DSi Browser, while the Wii keeps Netflix, Hulu, Wii Shop Channel, Internet Channel, Pay and Play and YouTube.

Could the slow sales of the Wii U be motivating this move? Will casual gamers be put off by this and hurt the company's future sales?

GitHub is stepping into the text editor arena with Atom. Although the editor acts as a web application, the project is using a specialized variant of Chromium to render itself as a native application. This allows Atom to access local resources, like a file system browser, where a normal web application would have security restrictions.

For this reason, we didn't build Atom as a traditional web application. Instead, Atom is a specialized variant of Chromium designed to be a text editor rather than a web browser. Every Atom window is essentially a locally-rendered web page.

Not too much to see yet, but you can visit the landing page to sign up for the beta.

Ars Technica writer Lee Hutchinson , who worked for NASA during the Columbia incident , writes about the 2003 destruction of the shuttle Columbia, and the questions asked afterwards. Could the disaster have been anticipated? If so, could a rescue have been performed before the shuttle's incredibly destructive re-entry? The answers to those questions hatched an incredible plan - and changed the way NASA handles shuttle missions to this day. It's worth a read not only for the historical perspective, but also for the account of practical project planning and the immense scope of such an endeavor. He calls it the untold story of the rescue mission that could have been NASA's finest hour .

Pharmaceutical company Zogenix has received US FDA approval to launch a new hydrocodone-based analgesic in March. The drug is intended only for chronic pain, not as an short term or as-needed analgesic. CNN is reporting a coalition of groups are lobbying for the FDA to revoke their approval before the medicine is even available.

The concerns echoed by all groups are broadly about the drug's potency and abuse potential. They say they fear that Zohydro -- especially at higher doses -- will amplify already-rising overdose numbers.

"You're talking about a drug that's somewhere in the neighborhood of five times more potent than what we're dealing with now," said Dr. Stephen Anderson, a Washington emergency room physician who is not part of the most recent petition to the FDA about the drug. "I'm five times more concerned, solely based on potency."

A number of other news outlets are hyping the potency of Zohydro, going so far as calling the drug ten times more powerful than a 5mg Vicodan. A fairer comparison may be to OxyCodone, since they have similar opioid levels. Zohydro ER will be available in 10 mg, 15 mg, 20 mg, 30 mg, 40 mg, and 50 mg strengths.

Chemistry Pipedotters can find the structural formula for hydrocodone bitartrate on RxList.

Should the FDA allow such a potent medication on the market? Or would moving opioid analgesics to Schedule II mitigate the potential for abuse?

Over at Time Magazine, Harry McCracken has taken a closer look at the differences between iOS and Android and concluded that for the most part, they're equivalent in form and function. But not in one remaining area: app availability. Here, McCracken complains, Android is constantly playing catch up and iOS apps too frequently arrive sooner and in better form.

It's long been the case that the world of Linux distributions offers at least one compelling choice for virtually every taste and purpose, but -- much like those dissatisfied with the weather in New England -- users who don't see a distro they like need only wait a few minutes. The open source nature of Linux means that users not only can fork and create entirely new distros of their own at will, but also take advantage of others' efforts to do so -- and those efforts are ongoing.

What makes one distro last and another give up? Linux Insider takes a closer look.

An article in Power Magazine discusses how manufacturers of power generating equipment are planning to use 3D printing in metal for production of complex machinery parts:

Siemens announced in December that it would begin using 3D printing - also known as additive manufacturing - to produce replacement burner components for gas turbines rather than using conventional methods. It said that for certain types of turbines, repair times can be cut by as much as 90%.

Meanwhile, GE Aviation announced that it would contract with Swedish company Arcam to produce 3D-printed components for its jet engines. Its oil and gas division plans to start pilot production of 3D-printed gas turbines fuel nozzles later this year. With conventional manufacturing methods, the nozzles are assembled from 20 separate parts, but with 3D printing, they can be created in a single piece.

NASA used similar methods previously to manufacture parts for the J2-X engine, according to this article at Extreme Tech . So, how far will this technology spread? How long will it be before consumer-oriented metal objects are being printed just-in-time at your local department store?

At the Mobile World Congress, soon-to-be-Microsoft Nokia announced three devices running Android. It seems these are Nokia's gateway drugs for Windows Phone, using a similar look and feel as Windows Phone while having the underpinnings of the Android Open Source Project.

From ZDNet: According to Nokia head (Steve Elop), while it may not involve a Microsoft OS, the Android-based X family will serve to bring more users to the company in emerging markets. The X family will be "a feeder system for Lumia," he said, and "gives people a gateway" to Microsoft's Windows Phone products.

Will this help MS-Nokia with emerging markets? Or will this be orphaned after Microsoft fully takes control?

I admit it. I was one of the 7.1 million users of the ill-fated service, iGoogle. For over eight years, Google offered a quick glance of your favorite news feeds on a customizable, fast loading, and ad-free homepage. Similar to Reader's fate a few months earlier, Google retired the service in November 2013, leaving its users to look for alternatives.

For the past few months, I have tried a number of these alternatives. Unfortunately, most are either riddled with ads or exist as JavaScript heavyweights. Ad Block Plus can remove most of the ads, but it often leaves giant holes on the page. Because I set the page as my homepage, I also don't like waiting for the browser to load every JavaScript library know to man just to render the page's "Web 2.0" layout.

Luckily, I'm a developer - a developer with an itch. Therefore, Pipedot now offers a user-customizable feed page! An example feed page can be seen here or you can go to your Pipedot user-page at http://yourusername.pipedot.org/ to set up your own page.

It apparently takes a lot of work to mine for crypto-currencies like BitCoin, or my personal favorite, DogeCoin. It's actually so much work now that using general purpose CPUs is completely fruitless, and even GPU-based mining is falling out of favor. However, what if you had access to a supercomputer? Perhaps you could just "borrow" somebody else's supercomputer for a while... they're already paying for it anyway, right? They probably won't even notice!

Or maybe they will...