Picture Frame
Kiara got me a digital picture frame for a Father’s Day/Birthday gift last night. It’s really frickin’ cool! It has 128Mb of internal memory, but it also has card slots for SD, compact flash, XD, and another type of card that I don’t recognize. It also has a mini-USB port, so you can copy files to the internal memory from your computer (but it didn’t come with a cable for this [that's ok. I had one handy.]) Lastly, it has a port where you can plug in a USB flash stick. Very cool stuff.
It has the ability to cycle through all of the photos one at a time, or it can chop the screen into quadrants, and show 4 pictures (although fairly tiny) at a time. I played with the mosaic option for a while, but I decided that I liked the one-photo-at-a-time option, so that’s the one that I’m going with. This allows me to see more details of the photos. It’s really cool. I like it!
My PDA also uses SD cards for external storage. I currently have a 256Mb SD card, and I thought that this would be a good time to upgrade the PDA card to 2Gb. I would then take the 256Mb card and put it in the frame. No dice. My PDA can’t address memory up to that large of a size. Matter of fact, when I plugged the 2Gb SD card into my PDA, it totally freaked out and crashed. I had to turn it off, wait a bit, and then turn it back on to have it reboot. Fortunately, it came up intact with all of my data. Too bad the 2GB didn’t work. Oh well.
I took the 2Gb SD card, and plugged it into the frame. The frame found it, and it was empty (of course.) Now I need to get a card reader (they’re pretty cheap) so that I can drop a ton of photos on to it. The picture frame also does AVI animations as well. I’m not sure I’ll use that feature, but the 2Gb of space on the card allows me room to experiment with that.
I went to a local computer store at lunch to pick up the SD card (it was $15 [great price!!]), and while there, I also picked up two 2Gb USB flash sticks for $15 each. I’ve been wanting to play around with being able to boot from a USB drive to test out various flavor of Linux. This will give me the chance to do that without wiping my current 4Gb USB flash drive that I use for data storage, backup of essential software, and general goodness like that.
I was also told that this store carries new Microsoft Elite Natural keyboards. They are my favorite keyboard of all time, and you can’t get them anywhere any more. I’m glad this place had them. Maybe they were found in a warehouse somewhere, and the store bought them up to sell them. I picked up two of these keyboards. I need to replace the one that I have at home because my BIOS on my laptop doesn’t like it at all. I’m getting tired of unplugging my keyboard when I (re)boot my system. Replacing that keyboard with one of these will do the trick. The second keyboard will go into storage until one of the ones that I’m using now dies a horrible death.
I also walked around most of the store while there (never been there before and had to check the place out.) If I ever build another desktop system (doubtful), I’m going to go there and pick up everything that I need to build a new system. I’ll probably never do this again, though. For my personal machines, I just love having a laptop. The freedom that it gives me to do stuff from any room in the house (or at a friend’s house) can’t be beat. As far as my server goes (which is currently a custom-built desktop tower,) I’ll probably replace it with a 1U Dell rack mountable server. Of course, I have no need to replace the server anytime soon, so that plan will wait until the time comes that the server dies a horrible ugly death.
If the digital picture frames weren’t so expensive, I’d pick up one for my office at the house, and one for Kiara to have at her office. They’re just that neat. I guess it’ll have to wait until a later date to pick up two more of them.
