Inspired by the cool videos from Make magazine, here is a simple idea for making a sugar sprinkler. All you need is a nice bottle and a bottle pourer.

For a long time I used Thunderbird as my main feed reader. It's main advantage compared to other tools is that instead of displaying just the the text of a feed item, it renders the whole item using the Firefox engine. Therefore the layout of the site which you subscribe to is not getting lost. However once I joined SAP last year I had to switch to something else because I wanted to check my feeds in the office and at home. Since I heard good things about Google Reader I gave it a go and I am still happy with my decision.

There are lots of things I like about Reader. One thing which stands out for me is how easy it is to send items you like to your friends via email. Another thing which is a neat idea are the so called shared items. It means that while I am skipping through my feeds I can mark anything interesting as shared. All my shared items end up in an extra feed + an extra website. You can check out my feed here and my website here. Why is this cool? It allows you to subscribe to items which were already marked as interesting by people you know and trust. Similar to what the people over at Digg are doing.

I still remember how my father and I investigated the sky through a telescope during those crystal clear summer nights and learned more about the Universe. Yesterday at TED Microsoft presented for the first time their new project WorldWide Telescope which allows anybody to explore the Universe just by using their computer.

From what I can see the execution of the idea is absolutely stunning. I can't wait to show it to my father.

The offical site for the project can be found here.

Over at copyrighteous Benjamin wrote a nice post about how online stores could fill in the type of the credit card you are using automatically.

"Any decent credit card system knows that if a sixteen digit credit card number starts with 4, it's a Visa."

Actually some websites are already smart enough, e.g. shopify. However I would be interesting to know why not more websites are implementing a similar system like shopify has.