We just watched our first episode of Discovery Channel’s new mini-series, Planet Earth. In a word, amazing. Definitely worth a look, especially if you have a high-def set and get Discovery Channel HD. Very family-friendly… we all were entranced by the hour-long episode.

I noticed that they’re selling the series on DVD, no surprise there, but I don’t see that they have it available in HDDVD or Blu-Ray, at least not on their store site. A quick jump over to Amazon shows it available on April 24th in both formats. However, reading closely, it shows that the narration is the “original by David Attenborough”, not the Sigourney Weaver narration that’s playing on DiscoveryHD right now. Interesting. I wonder what that’s all about?

Anyway, I’ll probably have to pick that one up… it would be an outstanding “demo” disk for the HDTV.

Apple just released the new 8-Core Mac Pro, with dual Quad Core “Clovertown” Xeon processors. The remaining specs, while still impressive, don’t appear to have been upgraded. Still no Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive announced, but you know that’s why they have the second optical bay in this iteration of the case design. The price adds a $699 premium over the dual dual-core 3.0 GHZ version.

And I may have missed it from earlier, but it looks now like the price on the 30″ Cinema Display has dropped $200 to $1,799.

Rumor has it they were waiting until Adobe CS3 finally shipped to go ahead and release this box, but I think it portends a little of what will be shown in just under two weeks at NAB. I’m expecting to see Final Cut Pro Studio 6, with upgrades across the board and some new apps thrown in the box, as well as an upgrade to Xsan and a preview of Leopard. The grapevine has Leopard shipping in June (perhaps to be officially announced at the WWDC).

Back in June of 2006, I decided to take an old “pismo” class PowerBook (500Mhz G3) that I had laying around and make a Digital Picture Frame out of it. Pictures are here.

The idea is pretty simple. There are slowly becoming available from several companies digital picture frames, usually around 7″ in size that will display photos from digital cameras, but appear on your bookcase like a regular frame. While they do the job, they don’t do it particularly elegantly. Some of the problems I’ve seen are the fact that a) the screen is small, b) they require moving photos onto a memory card and changing that out on the frame, c) they either simply change the pictures out every few minutes or do some cheesy animation, and d) are very expensive for what they do. I wanted to do something more elegant.

It’s hard to say I achieved “D” completely (it was, after all a $3,000 notebook at one point), but seems to be worth around $200 on e-bay now, seeing as it’s about 7 years old. And it was, after all, just lying around not doing anything particularly productive. So we’ll call that one a wash.

Hardware-wise, I was in good shape. While not particularly powerful by today’s standards, it was a 500Mhz notebook with a very nice 14″ screen, a 12GB hard drive and built in wireless 802.11b networking. It runs OS X very nicely, and one of the built-in screen savers under OS X takes a folder of photos and does a slow cross-fade and zoom in/out animation that is visually very pleasing. So the mechanics from a software standpoint should be very straighforward… load up a folder with pictures, point the screen saver at it and let it rip.

I took a field trip to Aaron Brothers, and located a 15-inch shadowbox frame that is about 3 inches deep. Along with the shadowbox, I bought a sheet of black foam-core, and headed back to the house.

Before getting started, I did a fresh install of OS X on the notebook and made sure everything was working properly.

The first step was to disassemble the notebook and lose as much as I could and still have it remain functional. This meant losing the battery, the CD-ROM drive, the modem, and lots of plastic. I tried to pull the battery charging circuitry (the small circuit board jutting up from the main board that fits between the battery and CD-ROM bays), but it appears as though there was some elements of the power inverter there, since when I removed it the machine wouldn’t boot.

Removing the screen from the plastic bezel was challenging, but soon I had nothing but the glass itself and the cable that connects it to the main circuit board removed. Also removed from the screen bezel was the antenna assembly for the integrated 802.11 wireless.

The next step was to lay out all the remaining components on the foam backing of the shadowbox. This was a little tricky, since the main circuit board with the power inverter daughterboard was about 3/4″ too tall for the shadowbox. Had I been able to remove that daughterboard, it would’ve fit perfectly. As it was, I had to cant the circuit assembly about 15 degrees to make it all fit. I then proceeded to use small screws to affix everything to the foam backing of the box, carefully laying out the antenna assembly, the hard drive, the CMOS battery, etc. I also used a bit of gaffer’s tape to hold wires in place. I cut a small notch in the back of the foam to allow the power cord for the computer and a USB extension cable to come out of the box.

Next, I cut the foamcore to fit the opening in the front of the shadow box, and then cut a hole 1/4″ smaller than the size of the screen. Using an Xacto knife, I beveled the foamcore to create a mount for the screen, and then placed the screen in and used gaffers tape to hold it in place. The black foamcore acts as a matte for the screen, making it look like it goes perfectly with the frame.

Final assembly consisted of placing the foamcore mounted screen in the front of the box, and then placing the computer mounted back of the box on the rear, and using the frame screws to hold everything in place. At this point, the only thing exposed was the power and USB cables coming out of the back.

The moment of truth came when I applied power and it actually booted! It was a little strange seeing the OS X boot screen on this rather odd-looking Mac, but with a keyboard and mouse hooked up to the USB cable protruding from the back of the box, I had a working computer. I configured the wireless to attach it to the network and was ready to go.

I moved it into place on the bookshelf in our family room, and ran the power cable and USB cable down behind the bookcase, giving a very clean look. I enable remote desktop access in the system preferences and disconnected the keyboard and mouse.

Now I can remotely access the frame from my MacBook Pro or desktop mac, and load images onto the picture frame remotely. I’ve got it set to automatically wake itself up at 10:00 in the morning, and put itself to sleep at 9:00 at night. One minute after waking up the screen saver kicks in and the pictures start playing. I disabled the feature to put the screen to sleep, so it plays pictures all day long. It’s very quiet and quite intriguing from a conversation piece perspective.

I’ve actually experimented with having it automatically download pictures to display, since it’s always on the network. The way I’d like things to work is to have it monitor an RSS feed (i.e. photocast), download new images and throw them into the loop. Since photocasting on iPhoto is tied very tightly to .Mac, I haven’t been able to get that working satisfactorily, but now that I have a .Mac account, I’ll have to revisit that idea.

Extending the concept from here would be very easy… I can easily envision a further RSS enabled screen saver that not only plays pictures, but shows stories from news sites or blogs, occasionally shows the weather, etc. I’m not sure I really want to go there, however, since I really wanted a lean-back experience, passive in its presentation. I think that type of interaction is better suited for a device like an Apple TV hooked up to the big screen.

One thing that would be very cool, however, would be to put a frame like this at the grandparents house, having it subscribed to a photocast of pictures I publish, automatically updating remotely. It’s a great way to share photos with family and friends in a totally 21st century way. I really don’t see why this frame couldn’t be mass-produced for around the pricepoint of the 7″ frames that are on the market right now, and be much more elegant. What would you pay for such a device? I can see people easily paying $299 to put such a gadget in the grandparents home, especially if it was very easy to set up and well integrated with the other infrastructure (iPhoto, photocasts, etc.).

I’ve got an old titanium powerbook G4 lying around now; I’m thinking about making a portrait version as my next project. The trick there will be finding a frame… the titanium has a widescreen layout, not a standard aspect ratio.

I’m going to try to be better about posting, I promise. There’s a lot going on, and I just don’t manage to find the time to keep this site up to date. To that end, I’m just now getting around to posting pictures from our December 2006 trip back to Walt Disney World with my parents. Check the post out here (backdated to place it properly in the archives) and the pictures here.

I’m also working on a new design for the look of this site, I’m getting a little bored with the blue boxes, although I’m not sure what I’m going to change things to.

Mom has started blogging! You can see her new site at http://www.devoll.net/mamade.

I’ve upgraded to the latest build of WordPress, and am liking what I see. The upgrade process is almost as painless and easy as the installation process. I’m very impressed with the WordPress people.

I’ve finally bitten the bullet and signed up for a .Mac account. I’m using it primarily to sync address books/calendars/etc. between my desktop and Mac Book Pro, since I’m doing more and more with my notebook each day (that’s a topic for another post). Having .Mac is turning out to be a pretty neat thing… I’ve started using iWeb in conjunction with iPhoto to post pictures. The basic templates that come with iWeb are nice, and the slideshows created on .Mac are pretty cool. I’m just starting to learn Aperture, and am anxious to see how powerful it’s web publishing tool is.

I’m also trying a new comment spam prevention method. Let me know if there are any problems posting comments.