Insomnia

I have been taking digital photos for a while and I rarely print them. This weekend I gave in and bought myself a digital picture frame (Smartparts SPDPF84M).

It has a nice wooden frame and an crisp 8.4 inch LCD screen. It has 128M of internal memory and can also handle a wide selection of memory cards.

Unfortunately, I was never able to make it connect to my computer using the USB cable (computer running Windows XP) . So I had to transfer all my pictures using a CompactFlash card. Also, the company supplies a software to automatically scale and prepare the pictures for the frame's 800x600 screen. That was also a disaster. It is a horrible little piece of software that just didn't work and tried to reinvent every principle of UI design ever invented. I finally decided to use the GIMP to resample and fix my images before I transfered them to the device.

Overall I am happy now that it works. It is proudly displayed in my living room on the end table and I can finally show my friends my pictures without booting my computer. Two thumbs up for the hardware, two thumbs down for the software.

Labels: fun, tech

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