This DPF runs Windows 2000 Professional. I know
that's not very exciting. I wanted to use a cool customized
Linux distribution like I've seen others use (
Damn Small Linux is a popular one)
but I don't know much about Linux and I didn't want to
spend more time learning how to use and troubleshoot
the software than I was going to spend on the rest of
the project. The computer already had a working copy
of Windows 2000 Professional installed so I got rid of
all the junk I didn't need (extra services and
installed programs) and decided to stick with ol'
Win2k. Who knows, maybe I'll end up using this as a
file server or FTP server or something in the future
and I'll be able to easily set it up since I'm
familiar with Windows 2000. You have to admit that
you've never seen such a cool FTP server.
At first I wanted to use a great screensaver called
Slickr, which pulls images from the
popular
Flickr image sharing website. The
screensaver has options to pull pictures from people's
public albums using keywords. For example, I could
type in "flowers" and have a never-ending slideshow of
flowers. It also has a way to display just my own
Flickr pictures. It was perfect except for one thing
-- the screensaver is OpenGL-based and the video
chipset in this laptop does not support OpenGL. The
CPU has to do OpenGL emulation to display the images
and this drives CPU usage up to 100% constantly. That
meant that the CPU would get really hot and the noisy
fan would kick on frequently. That won't work. I could
have used one of the many freeware slideshow programs
out there but they all displayed pictures stored on a
folder on the computer and I really wanted to pull
pictures from the web.
Finally, I discovered Google's Picasa beta
screensaver. It displays images that I have uploaded to my
beta Picasa Web Albums account.
Apparently this screensaver is more efficient than
Slickr because, while running this screensaver, the
only time the CPU usage spikes is during image
transitions. The CPU doesn't get too hot and the CPU
fan never runs. The downsides are that there is no way
to display other people's pictures based on keywords,
the longest image display interval is 10 seconds
(Slickr could do an hour, I think) and the Google logo
pops up on the screen every once in a while during the
slideshow. I plan to keep my eye open for a better
alternative or see if Google changes any of these
things in its next release. If any readers have a
suggestion, please leave a comment or
e-mail me!
When I need to make changes to the computer, I don't
have to take it off the wall and plug in a keyboard and
mouse. I installed
VNC on it and can access it via its
IP address from another computer over the wireless
network. The response times are slow and it's a little
annoying but it's a lot less annoying than having to
remove it from the wall. VNC is free and works with
other operating systems. I can connect to this Windows
2000 picture frame from my
Mac mini running OS X.
