[Image: Panorama of Shanghai, courtesy of Siemens; view larger!].

EMI has announced that "unsold copies" of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, "will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads."
More than a million copies of the CD "will be crushed and sent to the country to be recycled," we read, where they "will be used in street lighting and road surfacing projects."
This reminds me of a house I visited back in September, in Chicago – about which I wrote a short article for the March 2008 issue of Dwell – wherein the owners had pulverized boxes of old vinyl records, added them to a glass aggregate, and used that to surface the floor of their master bathroom. You could actually see tiny, vaguely recognizable pieces of crushed 45s catching sunlight near the toilet... National Geographic also covered the house.
In any case, does all this imply some strange new infrastructural claim to fame?
"You know that CD they used to pave the King's Road?" a man asks you, putting his coffee down as if to emphasize the point. He crosses his arms. "I played bass on that."

(Thanks, Steve!)

[Image: ©Michael Nagle for The New York Times].

Seeing this photo of the Galapagos Islands, with its strange, almost hand-painted color scheme, like something from an old British postcard, made me wonder if perhaps we might yet discover a way to deep-inject colored dyes into active magma chambers, producing technicolor flows of liquid rock in a million years' time.
Volcanoes will erupt in Chile, forming bright green hillsides, yellow cliffs dotted with blue boulders. A fine pink gravel will wash up and down the steaming beach.
So can we introduce color into underground reservoirs of liquid rock – with the effect that, far after humans have died off, these weird and fantastic displays of dyed geology will arise, poking up beneath eroded soils, revealing themselves in fissures after earthquakes? Colored bulges of bedrock push toward the earth's surface, seeking the sun.
And isn't that exactly what will happen anyway, as mineral belts of industrial waste and plastics compress over time into new stratigraphies? We could pattern future hillsides like Scottish tartans. Like shirts from J. Crew. Like Sol Lewitt: give him a whole magma chamber to play with. Like some vast underground ink-jet cartridge ready to print colored landforms onto the surface of the earth.
Can we dye rock itself?
Unsupervised geological interventions are the future of landscape architecture.
What Ted Turner did for film, we will do for geology: the re-colorization of the planet.

(Photo courtesy of The New York Times).

gDocsBar is a handsome-looking extension for Firefox that puts Google Docs in a nice, lean interface within Firefox's sidebar. The sweet feature here: drag & drop for uploading files to Google Docs. Nice.

While it’s easy to knock advertising, there are occasions where it becomes irresistable. One such occasion is the latest campaign for the newly formed University of West Scotland (formerly Paisley University and Bell College). Around a suitably vague new-wave tagline of ‘Inspired’ are several variations of shots in some kind of concrete bunker, of what look like people who have just wandered out of the nearest GAP store. We felt obliged to put the following questions to the University of West Scotland:

- What was the creative rationale behind the concept? What does ‘inspired’ stand for? What was the reason behind relating that word to the image?

- It strikes me that all the students featured are rather photogenic. On what basis were the students chosen? Could anyone apply to be part of the campaign or were they selected?

- Were the students dressed by a stylist or allowed to wear what they wanted?

The University felt obliged to not comment. I can only therefore assume that the students were handpicked as being ‘photogenic’, they were dressed by a stylist and there was no rational behind the ‘fashion’ image, it’s context or the link to the university.

Everyone does design jobs that for one reason or another don’t turn out as they would have liked, but the ‘thinking’ behind this seems so cold and heartless as to be completely cynical. The sub-text, when reading between the lines, is that the University thinks the students it is trying to recruit aspire to nothing more than dressing ‘trendily’, and the patronising notion that the students it traditionally recruits from certain social demographics, (whatever they might be), can’t comprehend anything beyond a pastiche of the simplistic fashion/brand marketing messages they are fed every day.

You may have heard this one before, but I just found out about it and couldn't wait to share. We all know that booting from an install DVD is slow, painfully slow. And that's only after you find the DVD in your desk somewhere. Unfortunately, using Leopard's Time Machine requires you to restart from the install DVD in order to restore your drive, right?

Well, not any more. You can create a bootable Time Machine drive easily by doing the following:

1. Re-Format your Time Machine Drive
2. Open Disk Utility (It's in your Applications/Utilities folder)
3. Click the Restore Tab
4. Select your Leopard Install DVD as the Source
5. Select your freshly-formatted Time Machine drive as the Destination
6. Click Restore

That's it. Once it's finished, you have a fully-bootable TimeMachine drive for which you can hold the option key down at startup to select as the boot drive. Don't forget to finish by selecting the new drive in your Time Machine preferences as the backup destination.

This is a web usability question that concerns you, the people who read my blog, and also those who author their own blogs / websites.

Cat, at Creative Latitude, and I have been wondering (as was Darren at Problogger some time back) about how we present our external hyperlinks to you. When you leave our sites by clicking a link we’ve endorsed, should the new site open in a new window / tab, or would you prefer to stay inside the browser window you’re currently using?

I wasn’t aware that it could be such a bone of contention for some people, until I went back to read the comments left on Problogger. It seems that some people actually get angry when a website takes control of their browser by opening a new tab, and of course that’s not what I want here. Cat fought on the side of the ’same window’ campaign a couple of years back, although in the end gave up.

UPDATE:
Cat fought on the side of the ‘new window’ campaign.
Ahem, sorry.

When I add a link to a blog post, there are two or three extra tags I add:

1. title=”link title here” (this helps with search engine optimisation)
2. target=”new” (this opens the link in a new browser tab or window)
3. rel=”nofollow” (this prevents search engines from following links to possibly bad neighbourhoods)

I rarely add the third tag (nofollow), except when I’m not sure I should be endorsing the referenced site. Google, for instance, place certain sites in ‘bad neighbourhoods’, and it’s possible that by linking to those sites, without adding the ‘nofollow’ tag, that Google won’t trust your content.

From an accessibility standpoint, using the target=”new” tag breaks the ‘back’ button. Webnauts.net tell us to avoid forcing links to open in a new window, as this can be disorientating for those who don’t know what happened.

Of course people can also manually choose to open links in a new window or tab, but this is one extra step that I previously thought it would be better to remove. This is where you come in.

What do you think?

I’m very interested to know how you prefer links to open.

New window? Same window? Why do you prefer one over the other?

Article image courtesy of The Family Handyman

UPDATE: 30 January
With over 70 comments left inside 24 hours, this is clearly a topic that people feel strongly about, on both sides of the argument.

I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I will no longer add the target=”new” tag to my site links. Indeed I’ve back-tracked and completely removed them from my new blog, Logo Design Love (opens in the same window). Thank you very much to everyone who has taken the time to leave your thoughts. I’ve learnt a thing or two in the process.

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Piper Cub:

Airbus A380:

Completely stolen from this interesting post over at Hacker News.

I don't have an iPhone, so I can't confirm this tip, but I read it somewhere and wrote it down to share.

When you're in Safari on your iPhone, rotate the iPhone horizontally prior to touching the address bar - the window will switch to horizontal mode and present you with a horizontal keyboard with the larger character keys.

I would assume that this tip would work on the iPod Touch. If you have either and this tip works, please let us know in the comments.