Hanging digital magic on your wall (by Ben)

So, what do you get you mom for her birthday when she's always asking you for recent pictures of your family. We'll that's easy if you are a regular subscriber to Popular Science magazine: You build her a digital photo frame. I saw this article a year or two ago and thought it would make a great present for my mom. I could set it up and she could hang it on her wall. As long as it had wireless internet access the frame would automatically take pictures from a flickr.com account and update them to the frame so that mom would always have fresh pictures of the family. It's bigger than most digital picture frames (It's an old 15" mac powerbook)

It was a little harder finding good software for the mac to run the flickr access than the article recommended for the PC. I tried about 10 different programs and finally found one called desklickr that ran with the older macs. It turned out to be a blessing. After spending a few hours unsuccessfully trying to get the program to automatically download pictures from my flickr account, and having all the kids in the family use my account to upload pictures... I realized that this program could also search the entire flickr website and download any picture from any account that had a specific tag. So I made up a random tag and gave it to the kids in the family so they could use their own accounts. After a few days of everyone uploading their best family pics, it came time to break apart the computer and stuff it into a frame.

Luckily, this old powerbook that Nicki wasn't using anymore was pretty busted up already. We wouldn't have been able to sell it on ebay.com for much. I disassembled the screen so that the only thing connecting it to the computer was the cables carrying the picture and power. Then I epoxied the screen to some spacers and to the back of the powerbook itself. Then I hot glued the screen to a matte I custom cut to just show the screen part of the laptop. Here you can see the laptop getting glued into the frame:



Once everything was glued into place, I used some dowels to provide a little bit of structural support and to keep things from getting all banged up and make sure it would stay in one piece until mom could get it up on her wall. I hot glued everything into one of those 16x20 display frames that is 3 inches deep, and drilled a bunch of vent holes in it to keep it all cool.



I missed her birthday by a couple of days, but it turned out to be a great gift. She always has up to date pictures (as long as we keep uploading them to flickr.com), and she told me that after she got it all installed she spent the better part of the day just staring at it enjoying all the pictures. It shows a new one every minute, so it should keep her entertained for a long, long time.



If anyone in the family wants to have unfettered access to davis pictures, you can use this screen saver for PC's, or this screensaver for macs. For all of the rest of you readers out there, maybe you've got an old laptop lying around, and still have time to whip up a present for the ol' parents before christmas rolls around.