I don’t know whether to puke or have a seizure. I liked having the URL there. But then again, the URL is meaningless to 99% of users, because people like to put their head in the sand and create absolutely useless URLs. I’m looking at you, Dell and HP. And a whole lot more.

So yeah, probably a usability improvement. And you can click on the little segments. Personally I don’t like it, but that’s ’cause I’m a power user that looks at URLs. And if I really want to, I can always just hover over the link to get the URL anyway.

I wonder how it works. XML Sitemaps, maybe?

Update: Google has written about it. Looks like they analyse anything that looks like breadcrumbs. Too bad it’s not standardised, and they don’t actually tell you how to do it.

Also, Lindsay Holmwood has created a NSW Bushfire Twitter updater for those of us in NSW.

I just figured out a really simple and obvious way to access Gmail and Google Reader over IPv6 that doesn’t require the use of hacky portals such as IPv6Gate.

Google already offers their search engine service via IPv6 at ipv6.google.com. This works fine, although it doesn’t work with Gmail or Google Reader, as for some reason, they have not added those services to the ipv6.google.com domain — they only work if you are on the www.google.com domain.

However, there is a way to access Google’s IPv6 server and still retain the www.google.com domain: edit your /etc/hosts file.

To access Gmail and Google Reader via IPv6, add the following line to your /etc/hosts file (if you are on Windows, add it to your C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file):

2001:4860:c003::68 www.google.com mail.google.com

If you are using Firefox, you will need to restart your browser before it picks up the changes (as it uses an internal DNS cache).

You can add support for other services such as Google Images by adding the respective domain names to the end of that line. However, adding Google Maps gets a little tricky, as the map images are served off several different servers. In the comments below, Jari K gives us an /etc/hosts line that adds the map image servers, which apparently works.

Please note that the above IPv6 address may have changed since I wrote this post. To find out the most current IPv6 address that Google uses, use the following command:

dig +short aaaa ipv6.google.com

If the IPv6 address that you get from that command is different from the one I posted above, please let me know in the comments!

I wonder what the likelihood of Google adding AAAA records to the main www.google.com domain is.

I recognised it because I’d seen the real artwork not a week before at the Guggenheim Museum while in Spain. Strange coincidence. If you go to this image and look closely, you can see the artwork on the balcony to the right.

It’s a cool piece of art. It looks like a bunch of party balloons, all very light and bouncy. In reality, the artwork is made of steel, and weighs quite a few tons.