Anyone who stopped by my room this past year probably remembers my digital picture frame, built from a PowerBook 5300. It was a neat proof-of-concept, but with a 640×480, 8-bit screen, and in general just being one of Apple’s worst laptops ever, it wasn’t ideal for displaying pictures.

After my Titanium PowerBook recently toasted some of the voltage regulators on its motherboard (see Daisy, Daisy), it remarkably wasn’t completely dead. This summer, when I put the parts back together and booted it up, it started just fine. It’s lacking certain functionality (those toasted parts weren’t on the motherboard for nothing); for example, the optical drive no longer functions, and the fans go full speed if I try to put it to sleep, making it rather useless as a laptop.

However, the computer still functions well enough to live out the rest of its life as a digital picture frame, and that’s exactly what I’ve done with it. Unlike the computer in my previous frame, it has a very nice, high resolution, high contrast screen. It also is a fairly modern computer running at 1GHz with 1GB of RAM and a 64-MB Radeon 9000, so it’s able to display some pretty nice effects.

The frame Date/Time: 2006:07:20 21:42:06 Camera: NIKON E5200 Aperture: F2.8 Exposure Time: 1/16 s ISO: 64 Flash: No Size: 2592x1944 Focal Length: 7.8 mm click to enlarge

and its inner workings Date/Time: 2006:07:20 21:42:37 Camera: NIKON E5200 Aperture: F2.8 Exposure Time: 1/10.3 s ISO: 64 Flash: No Size: 2592x1944 Focal Length: 7.8 mm click to enlarge

It’s looking really good. It’s a nice size, perfect aspect ratio for photos with its wide screen, and the Titanium PowerBook is so thin that the frame doesn’t really look unusually thick.

And, since I won’t have to write software for it in REALbasic or learn the Mac OS 9 APIs, I should be able to write some neat applications for it.

A space opened up in the section of CSE 378 that’s in Mary Gates Hall, so I switched to that section. I no longer have to go all the way over to Fishery Sciences on Thursday morning, nor do I have to try and make it back to the Quad in ten minutes for my next class.

Here’s my updated schedule, which is also on my schedule page.

I have some pictures of Ohio to post soon, I just need to get them all transferred to my computer and get them properly catalogued and named.