How to convert a website favicon.ico into an image

Few google searches bing back, oops, bring back amazing finds like this. However before reading on know that Google Share Stuff has been Discontinued since last March in favor of Google Reader's sharing bookmarklet. I'm not sure what that means to the favicon service defined below which clearly still works. You've been warned, meaning you can't expect it to work indefinably </captain obvious>

Google Shared Stuff (S2) offers a secret URL that can automatically pull favicon images of any website provided you know the URL. The images are in the PNG format (not ICO) and hence will render correctly in all browsers via the tag. - labnol.org

All you have to do is append a url to the following line and get the current favicon.ico of any website.

http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=www.yancylent.com ->

I can't even tell you the trouble I went through a couple years ago writing a PHP routine that saved the files down to a folder, changed the name, added that name to a database, only to find out that IE Explorer didn't support .ico's like other browers do. This is a fine alternative, thanks google.