Maybe you have already seen the link on the right to AfriGadget, a great web site dedicated to showing how to solve "everyday problems with African ingenuity". I really suggest that you have a look at it! Today I came across another great idea, this time from South America: lights made from water bottles!


If you have questions about this great solution, check out the comments on Make. Well, and now that you're already here you should have a look at the websites that are on the right in the "On deed a day" section, it's worth it.

The 7th Elections to the European Parliament (held every five years) are coming up again and will take place between the 4th and the 7th of June 2009.

I don't want to discuss the elections here in detail (check out Wikipedia for information about the 2009 elections and the European Parliament in general), but as the latest polls suggest a low EU voter turnout I wanted to point out three online resources that might help you making your mind up about whom to vote.

• There are several so-called "Voting Advice Applications" (VAA) (aka VoteMatch aka Wahl-O-Mat) available online, that try to inform you about policy differences between the political parties in your country - information that might help you to choose which party to vote.
  
  If your are interested where the present parties in the European Parliament stand on the issues try the Pan European Vote Match.
  
• For an even more ambitious and comprehensive project have a look at the EU Profiler
  
  

I tried both online voting tools, EU Profiler and VoteMatch Europe (and additionally the national VoteMatch for Germany, Wahl-O-Mat).

The EU Profiler is very comprehensive and ambitious (data from almost 300 parties and more than 20 languages) but luckily it has a sleek user interface that makes navigation and comparison easy.
However, I keep wondering if it is maybe already too complex - I found an obvious mistake just by superficially browsing the statements given by the German social democrats.

The VoteMatch Europe website left the worst impression on me (the national one for Germany is far better). It is poorly designed: explanations regarding the parties' positions that are supposed to appear ("By clicking on the viewpoint below, an explanation will pop up in a new window.") do not appear (tested in Opera, IE8 and Firefox 3), and all parties are only presented as acronyms: ALDE EPP ID anyone? Not very helpful.

Although I like the idea of having the possibility to compare the positions of the different parties, the tools can only serve as a very rough guide and many statements are far too general to be useful ("The European Parliament should be given more powers" - well, that depends on the kind of powers; or "The EU should allow member states to export their waste" - All kinds of waste? And export where to? Other EU countries or Africa?).

Less fun but probably more useful might be a look at the parties' manifestos: EurActiv provides a brief overview of the four main European parties' electoral manifestos and compares them with previous efforts.

And if you can not wait: here is a prediction of the outcome of the elections.

Comparision of online voting tools EUprofiler and Vote Match for the upcoming EU Parliament Elections June 2009 ( European, Europe, VoteMatch, EU Profiler ) - Voting Advice Applications (VAA)

I like Firefox. Although I am not completely happy with it (Firefox 3.0 sometimes uses too much memory and has a sluggish JavaScript performance), the possibilities of expanding and/or changing its feature with add-ons are great. For example, this article shows you three easy methods to improve Firefox's handling of security certificates and encrypted data exchange. Especially important if you often connect to the Internet outside of your home.

The right way to handle encryption with Firefox 3

Of course you heard about the Credit Crisis in the USA, about sub-prime mortgages and falling house prices. Probably you even feel the effects of this crisis in your country. But do you exactly know what happened? Here is a very nice short film from Jonathan Jarvis that explains the processes behind the crisis visually:

Short videos on financial issues in plain English: The Crisis of Credit Visualized by Jonathan Jarvis explains the US American credit crisis.

This is also a good moment to point you towards the great videos produced by Common Craft. While their ingenious films usually explain technological terms and concepts in simple, plain English (for example, what are "Phishing Scams", how does Twitter work or what is Podcasting), they also created a video about the US election process and a series of films on financial basics. Check them all out!

A video from Common Craft about investing money.

In the news we often see images from weather satellites. Most of the times, however, we only get to see images from the last 24 hours, something that always bothered me a bit. So I decided to download the (publicly available) daily weather satellite images from Meteo France and combine them into a little film. It shows the weather in Europe from October 12th to December 20th, with four images every day. Some gaps exist due to download problems. Enjoy.

Satellite images of Europe's weather between October 12th and December 20th 2008. Video combining several weather satellite images of Europe Autumn 2008.