Here’s a series of pictures and a write of of some abandoned freeway tunnels. Not heard of too many of these before as tunnels are so expensive and time consuming to create.

Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike Home Page

A sinkhole has opened in Texas, not much detail as to the cause as yet but no-one was injured. From the BBC:

A massive sinkhole has opened up in south-eastern Texas in the US, swallowing up vehicles and oil field equipment.

It is not clear what caused the collapse, but the history of the nearby community of Daisetta as a once-booming oil town may provide some of the clues.

Officials are investigating whether an old salt dome, in which oil brine and natural gas are stored underground, was to blame.

The resulting hole is thought to be at least 600ft (183m) long and 150ft (46m) deep.

A truck, a tractor and telephone poles were swallowed up by the hole. Vehicles from a nearby main road had to be diverted, but there were no reports of any injuries.

Arg arg arg.

No, not hot coffee in the lap again, but seeing the same post on so many different sites. Take for example these animal silluettes on boing boing, neatorama, productdose and cribcandy. That’s just a quick example of how the same thing will spread across big sites that really shouldn’t be repeating each others content.

Am I any better? No. Do I have any other solution than checking around the net before posting a story to your blog? No.

The big blogs really shouldn’t be posting up the same stories as each other. You can argue otherwise of course, look at newspapers or gizmodo/engadget for example. With limited new information or stories then of course people end up filling space with repeated content. It’s not healthy for so many big blogs to be doing this day in-day out, over and over.

Boing boing should lead the way in this, it’s a professional blog with a huge readership. I once made a call to arms over ethical blogging - that went no-where but that was my fault as much as anyone elses - and again here I raise the question of ethics.

Should the big sites mirror so much content? What effect is this having on the readership?

A robotic remote control! Damn it, I want one of these. Would be nice not to have to worry about finding the remote control again …

Toshiba’s new robot pal is basically a voice-operated infrared universal remote control, heavy on the cuteness. Programmed to be fairly smart, he’ll wait until you use a controller for your electronics, then ask you what you were doing: the next time you want to perform the same action, you just have to tell ApriPoko to do it for you. He’ll then wave his IR transmitter arm and *bing*, on goes your TV. He’s even equipped with a camera to identify users, presumably to learn their habits. For now he’s just an R&D demonstrator device, and is limited to simple commands. We hope we’re right in expecting the technology to make its way into consumer gadgets soon.

Link

Why do I love abandoned places so much? It’s the haunting nature of them, the story of why they were left, that nature reclaims this places as her own and that people go to these places and take pictures.

I just love it.

In 1993 the People’s Republic of China opened a park just south of Orlando, FL featuring over 60 handcrafted replicas of China’s architectural, cultural and historical landmarks. Throughout Splendid China’s 10 years of operation, the it was plagued by low attendance, frequent protests against the idyllic depictions of China the park provided, and financial mismanagement. The park was closed in 2003.

This past weekend two friends and I did a little urban exploring of the park, and took a lot of pictures. I was very surprised at how quickly the park has fallen into disrepair since its closing five years ago. It seems that vandals have stolen just about anything that wasn’t bolted down (and lots of things that were). Most of the ceramic figurines have been smashed, which made for interesting photos at least.

Photo link 1

Photo link 2

Link

Some of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in the world have a spiral stair as the final flourish. The spiral stair is an architects favorite, from Gaudi to Corbusier to Foster, but some of the most interesting spiral stairs are accidental pieces of architecture, such as those inside lighthouses or on giant silos and storage tanks. Here is a deliberately diverse collection of some of our favorites.

I just love spirals …

Link

Keeping your Windows up to date? Good. What about all your applications?

Thought not.

Well your apps connect to the net as well and they’re as vulnerable as your OS. It’s time you updated them. How? I’m glad you asked, for Windows try FileHippo or Secunia.

Run the scanner and you get a list of all the apps on your OS that need updates. Joy!

For OS X you can also do this, and it’s even easier. It would be though, wouldn’t it, cue smug Mac people like me. Anyway, you need to download the App-Update widget from here. Let it run and it generates a list of updates for your Mac apps with links for the downloads.

No excuses now, go update.

We all know that their is one search monster in the world and that monster is Google. It’s the biggest and best search tool going. If your start page, the page that opens when you start Internet Explorer or Firefox, is not Google then change it now. It’ll save you so much time. Here’s how:

IE: Tools, Internet Options, on the General Tab change the text in Home Page Address to www.google.(your country)

Firefox: Tools, Options, on the Main tab change the text in the Home Page Address to www.google.(your country)

Don’t know your country? Here’s a list for you. For other web browsers you are on your own, or send me a note and I’ll add it to my other post.

Once you have Google as your home page you need to lean how to search. The most basic way is typing in what you want to search for and clicking (or pressing enter) search. In my example I’m searching for information on the Beatles, so I know where they were from so I enter Liverpool England, you can see an example here. Although this is the most basic search Google offers many ways to enhance the search. After all we’re getting very general hits on Liverpool, nothing specific, so lets refine the search.

Just so you know, Google ignores capitalization, liverpool is the same as Liverpool or LIVERPOOL. So don’t worry about capital letters. Google drops short words automatically, so don’t bother entering the following when you do a general search: a, and, it, for, of. We can force Google to include these if we need to, it’s pretty easy to do. One simple way is to add the + sign in front of the word, for example +the, but more on this later. My last point here is about the ‘I’m feeling lucky” button, do you know what it actually does? It skips the search result page and takes you directly to the first hit in Google.

Google automatically adds AND between your search phrases, so by typing more search phrases into Google we get more specific results. Try Liverpool England Beatles, you can see we get more refined results already. Think about different words to use for your search, different phrases bring in different results.

You can refine this more by using the ‘must include + symbol. So try Liverpool England +beatles which will only return pages with the word beatles on them.

If we wanted yet more precsion we can use “quotes” to force Google to search for exact phrases. Such as Liverpool England +"The Beatles", the result is here. Note that the plus from the previous example is included again here. You can tie in all of Google’s basic search tricks together.

If we want to exclude certain results we can use the minus symbol, as you’d expect it works in the opposite way to the plus symbol. An example of this would be Liverpool England +"The Beatles" -Yoko. What we’d get from this would be all the previous hits, minus any page that references Yoko.

Okay, now we have a really precise search terms, so lets look at another way to use Google. I know about a Beatles song I like, but I don’t recall what it was called, or even the lyrics. Precise searching is not going to always be the easiest way. I know it fruit in the title so we’ll use Google’s alike symbol, the ~ (or tilda). Try The Beatles ~fruit and bang, we get the result, Strawberry Fields.

Google can also search for file types, so trying filetype:PDF the beatles will return only PDF results featuring The Beatles. The first hit is the great Complete Story Of The Beatles Revolver, which I recommend by the way. You can use any file type, for example .torrent.

When you find a site or topic that you like, you can find other related sites using Google, try related:http://www.beatles.com which gives you these results. Lots of related artists sites.

Although not strictly a search tip, if you use cache:http://www.beatles.com as a search term you can get to sites that are momentarily or permanently offline through Google’s cache of the website.

When you get your search results back from Google you’ll see some results are indented, this means that result is from the same website as the one above.

You can do boolean searching with Google as well, for example lennon OR mccartney. It’s not really required so much when you have so many other tools in the basic Google kit such as + - and “. You can play around with boolean search phrases on the Educational Boolean Search Tool. It’ll teach you all about AND NOT and OR in a nice easy way.

So now you know about Google’s not-so-secret search toolkit, go search the web in a better way than ever before!