Building a “Walltop” Electronic Picture Frame

An old laptop needn’t be a use­less lump of junk — it can be turned into a digital pic­ture frame!

This art­icle from GRYNX appeared earlier today on Slashdot, and explains step-by-step how the author turned an old Dell Latitude into an elite pic­ture frame, using the free­ware IrfanView pack­age to provide slideshows. The laptop didn’t have a hard disk, so the cun­ning fel­low moun­ted a net­work share over his wire­less net­work to provide the images.

Total cost? Apparently about 21¢.

Posted June 21st, 2005

PC World’s 100 Best Products of 2005

PC World US has, per­haps a little pre­ma­turely, released its defin­it­ive list of The 100 Best Products of 2005.

Straight in at the deep end, the Number One product is… Mozilla Firefox. Their glow­ing synopsis:

Let the browser wars begin anew: This open-source pro­gram is stream­lined, cus­tom­iz­able, and just plain bet­ter. No won­der it has attrac­ted mil­lions of users in just a few months. Is it merely a coin­cid­ence that Microsoft finally plans to give the aging Internet Explorer the major over­haul it has needed for years?

The list is split into sev­eral cat­egor­ies: PCs and Peripherals; Monitors and TVs; Office Software; Digital Photography; Security ; Printing and Publishing; Storage and Backup; Mobile Tools; Web; and Consumer Electronics. You can of course view the whole list of 100 products.

Adorning the Top Ten are gems like Gmail (#2), Skype (#8), and Apple OSX Tiger (#3).

Posted June 11th, 2005

Systm Episode 2 Released

Hot on the heels of the first video release from Kevin Rose and Dan Huard comes this second epis­ode of Systm. In this install­ment, the pair build and con­fig­ure a cheap “media centre” PC using free soft­ware such as KnoppMyth and MythTV. Torrent links below:

Large Format

Small Format

Posted June 11th, 2005

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