Well, they loved it !

But there were a few, teeny tiny problems;

It can be quite loud, due to a) the hard drive whirring up every six minutes and b) the fan whirring up every two.

It wasn't particularly stable on the wall.

It wasn't angled enough on the wall, so only tall people could see the image, due to the LCD sweet spot viewing angle.

Read on to find out how these were solved ....

So, I've picked a project. For christmas I'm goign to build a Digital Photo frame out of an old Dell Latitude CPi 300Mhz laptop that' been living somewhere in the loft ! It seems from my friend Google that several otther people have also tried this, so it can't be completely useless.

From this; , to this; !

There are 5 more parts to this story (at the moment) so read on;

Part 2: Base O/S

Part 3: Configure the Software

Part 4: Infra-Red Control

Part 5: Cron, what a tool !

Part 6: We can rebuild it...

(Update) Part 7: We can Re-Rebuild it, better than ever !

(google sketch up model, assembled and exploded !)

I've found a new, hobby, one that is possibly int he ultimate geek league - OpenStreetMapping.  This is an attempt to create a freely available, freely editable source of map data to all, in the same way Opensource software works (free as in beer).

There are several ways people can contribute, there's an online map editor, a downloadable java based client for editing, and a system to upload GPS tracks of areas, Yahoo have also geenrously allowed the project to use it's aerial photography to generate maps from.

You can see my tracks here and my userpage on the wiki here.