At this point I’m not ready to spend a smooth half grand on electronics, which is why #2 was the answer. The problem with this is that now we have no good way to watch DVDs. There’s a slight chance that Abi and I both brought portable DVD players into this marriage…but the real issue (finally stated) is that neither of those DVD players has a digital audio output for the 5.1 Bose surround sound system in the house. This means I am unable to get some sweet surround sound effects while watching movies with the sound cranked up rattling the walls, and that’s what I’m really looking for.

I held out for a while but was really inkling to watch something with a lot of explosions. After all, THIS IS MY HOUSE AND I CAN BE AS LOUD AS I WANT TO BE BECAUSE THIS IS MY HOUSE AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME TO BE QUIET!!! Last week I made the decision that I would find the DVD player with the cheapest retail price I could find just to hold us over until Blu-ray was a bit more reasonable.

Let me take a moment to explain a few things about my buying habits. When I buy things, especially electronics, my philosophy is to buy very high quality products. There are a few reasons behind this:

1. I take good care of my things. When they break, it’s not my fault.
2. I have found that nicer things last longer; therefore when I buy nice things I don’t need to replace them because they don’t break.
3. This philosophy was pretty much followed out by my father (at least in terms of electronics), so it’s hereditary and I can’t help it.

Anyways, I decided that in my current situation that buying a cheap DVD player to keep me satisfied until it was replaced by a new Blu-ray was acceptable, even though it was against my core beliefs. I mean, come on! DVDs have been out since 1993…even a cheap DVD player should be decent, right? Abi and I stopped by Best Buy one day last week and found a $30 Insignia DVD player, decided it was acceptable, bought it and took it home. We plugged it in and watched a movie. Everything went surprisingly fine: good sound quality, good picture quality, remote worked…this thing was actually going to work out. Sweet, $30, not bad.

Saturday we were doing some work around the house when I decided to take a break and watch a scene from a movie with a great surround sound scene. The office building lobby scene from the Matrix came to mind, so I popped the DVD in. You know the one I’m talking about:

Anyways, I was fiddling around with things trying to skip directly to that chapter, but the remote wouldn’t work. No matter how hard I pressed on the buttons, the selected menu would only go up. Different buttons did the same thing. Hmmm…maybe I can program my Sony receiver remote to work with this Insignia DVD player. Good thought Lepolt, but Sony spits on that crap.

To conclude this long story, I took back the $30 POS and picked up a nice Sony $80 upconverting DVD player, which still works like a champ even after using it twice. So there you have it: 30 reasons I don’t buy crap.

Who would have thought that 6.5 years later [as I perform research for my Master’s Thesis] I would be playing with LEGOS again? I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

So before you think I’m just going to build a robot and get it to drive around in circles and then write a paper about the whole deal, just relax for a minute. The latest version of the LEGO MINDSTORMS robot was introduced in 2006, and the brick is now called the NXT. There have been some significant improvements over the RCX including better motors, better sensors, a better programming environment, and wireless communication via Bluetooth technology.

The Bluetooth communication is really what I’m after. I’ve had a difficult time trying to explain to people what exactly I’m doing my thesis research on, so I’ll just summarize it with this: let’s say that you have a personal handheld device with a lot of sensitive information on it…I dunno, let’s take Steve Job’s iPhone for example. It has private emails, telephone numbers, contacts, business plans, and I’m sure a whole slew of other stuff that he wouldn’t want to be compromised. It may be possible to password protect this data, but let’s be honest here, passwords always get cracked.

The solution that I am proposing (and this is where I’ll skip a lot of technical detail) is that before any of this sensitive data can be accessed it should be required that the handheld device verifies the validity of the access by contacting an external device. Phew, that’s a mouthful of jumbled crap, but bear with me for just another minute. I’m utilizing the Bluetooth in the NXT to act as my verification device, ie, the handheld will send some data to the NXT, the NXT will translate it and then send it back to the handheld. The handheld will then determine whether or not the access is acceptable. It’s a little more complicated than that because I’ll be watermarking some memory addresses and checking for sequential data access, but you can read about that in the final paper.

The Big Idea that I’m trying to portray is that without the external Bluetooth device, the handheld is basically worthless if it is lost or stolen. Okay, okay, I understand the NXT is pretty big, won’t fit in your pocket, and requires 6 AA batteries, but this is a proof of concept that I’m after. The end result will demonstrate the grand idea of a disconnected key. For more reading on key-based encryption, I point you to Google.

In observance of me fooling around with LEGOS during my thesis research, Abi insisted that we buy some LEGO Fruit Flavored Snacks from Sam’s Club. No, I can’t build robots with them, but they are fun to eat.

Anyways, can I really come up with a better storybook ending than this? I’m leaving school in 2008 the same way I entered in 2001: playing with LEGOS.

Here is a picture of the laptop before disassembly

With the top row of buttons removed

Heat sink and fan removed (this would prove later to be quite deadly)

Removing the motherboard from the case, attaching the screen, and firing it up

The donor PC

Foam board was used to hold the LCD screen in place. I cut out a rectangle that was a perfect size for the screen. It’s secured in place with some duct tape.

Soldering some wire to the [old] power button. Turns out it was too small for my skill so I have a cold solder…some hot glue and electrical tape should be okay…

I drilled a hole in the top of the shadowbox frame for the pushbutton switch, ie, the ‘On’ button.

The power brick is right in the middle of the entire length of cord, so I decided to keep it inside the box out of sight.

Here it is hung on the wall, without a matte.

From this point forward I will explain the howto software aspect of my new digital picture frame.

Requirements:

1) Unused laptop capable of booting off USB, with Internet access
I used a Pentium III, 850MHz, with 256MB of RAM. This is probably complete overkill, but it’s what I had laying under the bed collecting dust. Internet access [for my particular case] is only required to download software. The ethernet jack on my computer was broken, so I actually set up almost everything on another PC, then transfered the flash drive to my laptop for the final product. I have read other posts in which people used wireless internet to update the photos, and/or SSH into the machine to make modifications…but I will not touch on that here.

2) USB drive
64MB is needed for the OS, and you can add as much onto that as you so desire for photo storage. Keep in mind that most [older] laptop screens are probably only 1024 pixels wide, so the photos don’t need to be ultra high quality (ie, there is no need for 10 megapixel pics). I used a 4GB flash drive, because that’s what I had laying around. I think I have about 2GB of free space leftover after installing the OS and shrinking the photos.

3) Damn Small Linux (link)
This was the best Linux distribution that I was able to find to install on a flash drive. Damn Small Linux (DSL) provides a very small installation, and offers an option to install directly to a thumb drive without any hacking around. I also tested out Ubuntu and Debian, but wasn’t ever able to get them to boot off of the flash drive. Those two distributions also required ~1GB of space so my install would have been extremely bloated, and the extra software would have been pointless for a picture frame. I did get Slax to install and boot up with no problems, but I was not able to find a good image viewer to use for a slideshow. I found that a lot of these “pen drive Linux” versions don’t come with a whole slew of applications…and they shouldn’t.

4) feh (.dsl package can be found here)
This is a very lightweight image viewer that I used to implement the photo slideshow. There are probably other software options available, but I found a pre-built package for my situation. It has a few nice scripting features that I was able to take advantage of.

5) Unclutter (.dsl package can be found here)
This program is used for hiding the mouse cursor after a certain period of inactivity. By default in DSL and with the feh slideshow, the mouse cursor never goes away. In order to avoid an annoying arrow in the middle of the screen during a slideshow, I used Unclutter to take care of this.

Setup Steps:

1) Install DSL on the flash drive. Additional details, if you need them, can be found here. Boot off the Live CD, then “simply open the Main menu, go to Apps then Tools and select either a USBZIP or USBHDD and follow the prompts.”

2) Upgrade to GNU Tools: (link). “from the system menu select Apps->Tools->Upgrade to GNU Utils.” This will allow feh and Unclutter to work.

3) Download feh and Unclutter .dsl files, and place them in your mydsl folder so they are loaded on boot. gnu-utils.dsl should already be in that directory. For me this was in /mnt/sda1/mydsl.
feh (http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/mydsl/feh.dsl)
Unclutter (http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/mydsl/unclutter.dsl)

4) Create script to run the slideshow. I used bash for this because the script is extremely basic and simple to implement. I also decided to store my script file in the $HOME directory…for no real reason. You could move this around if you wanted to.
   file:$HOME/start_slideshow.sh
   1> #!/bin/bash
   2> feh -rzF -D 60 /location/to/your/photos/
   3> sudo shutdown -h +1
Line 2 will start feh searching the directory recursively, displaying images at random, full screen, and at 60 second intervals. The script will not continue past line 2 since I didn’t use the ‘&’ at the end of the command to run the process in the background. This is good, however, because then we can gracefully shutdown the system with the second line by exiting feh. I exit feh by pressing ‘Q’ on the keyboard…not the most beautiful solution, but it works. Line 3 will halt the machine in 1 minute, giving you time to kill the shutdown sequence (sudo shutdown -c) if you would like to gain access to the desktop again.
Download my example

5) Comment out the line in .jwmrc that opens the root menu. I did this so that my full screen slideshow was really full screen.
   file:$HOME/.jwmrc
   comment out: RootMenu height=”20″ onroot=”123″
Download my example

6) Edit .xinitrc to automatically start Unclutter and the slideshow when the X Desktop starts
   file:$HOME/.xinitrc
   x1> /usr/X11R6/bin/unclutter &
   x2> $HOME/start_slideshow.sh &
   x3> xset s off
Line 1 starts Unclutter, line 2 starts the slideshow, and line 3 turns the screensaver off so the slideshow will not be interrupted.
Download my example

7) Prepare photos. In my case, the flash drive partition that didn’t hold the OS was located at /mnt/sda1. This was the perfect place to store my photos, especially since this partition could be accessed by my Mac. I created a subdirectory called ‘photos’ and copied 4000 files in there.

So there you have it, the gory details on how I set up the software for my digital picture frame. I’ll discuss the hardware aspect at a later date.

Here are a few additional links that I used for reference:
http://www.thewares.net/item/33
http://www.frontiernet.net/~pictureframe/
http://linuxbrit.co.uk/feh/wiki/FehHelp

Edit (July 31, 2008): Apparently the links for the .dsl packages of feh and unclutter don’t work anymore, so I’ll post them here:

• feh
• Unclutter

Here is a good processor compared to a bad processor:

As fate may have it, Abi’s old laptop (also 6.5 years old and worthless) used the same chipset as my computer. This meant I was able to simply steal the processor out of her computer and place it [carefully] back in mine. I lost 50MHz in clock speed, but let’s be honest: that is not going to make a difference for what I’m using it for.

Here’s a photo of the current state of my new digital picture frame:

As you can see, I’m missing the frame and any sort of real structure to this thing, but holy crap it works, and it works great! The computer takes a minute or two to boot up, but immediately begins the slideshow. I have a 4GB flash drive in there now (which is pretty much complete overkill) and about 4000 pictures at medium/low quality. Since the LCD screen is only 1024 pixels wide, there’s not really much point in displaying super high quality images. I’ll probably find a smaller flash drive at some point, since I am currently only using about a gig. Pressing ‘Q’ on the keyboard will shut the whole thing off gracefully…not exactly the best and most elegant solution to use the keyboard and all, but I think it will work for now.

Next up: frame it.

My laptop is/was 6.5 years old, so it was pretty much worthless. To make laptop operation even more worthless, the battery had been completely dead for probably three years. Laptop – battery = very small desktop. Also, the power jack was not in the best condition, so if you moved the computer in the wrong direction or nudged the power cord, the darn thing shutoff immediately (when I said the battery was dead I really meant it). So if all of this didn’t make my laptop worthless enough, icing on the cake is that the Ethernet jack was also busted, so I couldn’t even plug it in to get on the internet. Who cares about wireless internet when you still have to plug the thing in to the wall?

Case in point: the computer worked (sort of), but was practically worthless. I don’t even know the last time I turned it on.

Making a do it yourself (DIY) picture frame should be easy enough, right? It seemed that all I needed to do was strip out all the unnecessary hardware (CD-ROM, floppy, battery, hard drive), slap a small version of Linux on a bootable flash drive, and write some scripts to run a slideshow once the computer started. After that all that needed to be done was disassemble the laptop, and mount the final results in a form suitable to hang on a wall somewhere.

I may go through the gory details later, but for now I’ll stick to the basics. After installing multiple versions of Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Slax, Damn Small Linux) multiple times and even attempting a Windows install, I kept running into stupid issues which mostly came down to not being able to boot off the flash drive and not being able to load the software I needed/wanted for the slideshow. After some “research” that consisted of a lot of Google, cussing, and burning CD-R’s, I finally chose Damn Small Linux (DSL). I’m not kidding, that’s the name of this distribution, and it’s really damn small. The download is about 50 megs, and even after I installed some additional software it’s still under 75 megs with no problems. As a comparison, Windows Vista requires over 250 times that much free space before you can even install it.

Cool, right? My laptop now boots off a flash drive, starts a slideshow, and pressing the ‘Q’ key turns the whole thing off. Perfect! Time for disassembly. I should mention that before I began this project I didn’t care about this computer. If I broke it, oh well it was collecting dust anyways. I never realize how many tiny screws held that laptop together. It took a few hours, but I finally managed to strip it all down to the LCD screen, motherboard, processor, USB connectors, power button, and some LED’s that light up when the computer is on. Now for the moment of truth: will this thing boot up after all the destruction? I present to you an abridged script of what transpired:

<----Begin transcript---->

Jonathan takes a deep breath as he presses what’s left of the power button. Some LED’s on the motherboard light up, signifying that the boot process has begun. He looks delighted. The LCD screen displays the BIOS, and then begins to load the operating system.

Jonathan
“Sweet!” he says out loud, thinking to himself that he’s a complete genius and this contraption sitting on the desk, as ghetto as it looks, it actually going to work.

The operating system continues to load, stepping through all of the required steps for Linux to start up. Jonathan is thrilled. The complexion on his face is one of excitement and satisfaction. After about two minutes a loud “POP!” comes from the computer, and a piece of something shoots towards Jonathan.

Jonathan
“Oh s—!!! No freakin’ way!!! Are you freakin’ kidding me?! Son of a b——!!!”

The computer shuts off, the screen goes blank, and Jonathan sits in his chair dumbfounded at the previous events.

<----End transcript---->

Ladies and gentlemen, that “pop” was the sound of me frying my processor chip, and it flying off of the module it was formally soldiered to. For whatever reason, be it ignorance or apathy, I had decided that I didn’t need the heat sink on the processor when I booted it up. For those of you who don’t know, computer processors get very, very, very hot when then are running. 200 degrees is not unheard of, especially for a desktop machine. If the processor doesn’t have any way to dissipate this heat (like a heat sink and fan), it will keep getting hotter and hotter until it fries, burns out, explodes, kills itself, catches on fire, etc. Once a chip does this, it’s game over. This video will show you some examples. I should note that I don’t have volume, so I have no idea what is being said. (EDIT: Turns out it’s just a little techno music)

So this is the current state of my do it yourself digital picture frame from my old laptop computer. I’ll post some pictures later. I’m checking eBay to see if I can located a new processor, but originally I really didn’t want to spend and money on this project. Isn’t $2500 for the computer enough?

Maybe you don’t like history, but you should really know about these things. Especially the date of my birthday (November 18). Cash or checks preferred.

I don’t want to go into details about the CD, and how it was the best thing since the cassette tape, and then mention CD-ROM drives on computers and how they were the best thing since the floppy disk, because we all know these things. Well, if you grew up in the 80s and early 90s you know these things. Kids these days hardly know what a floppy is.

Then we got the DVD which was basically a movie on a CD, but it held a bunch more stuff than a standard CD (like, say, a movie?), and CD-Rs which enabled people to create their own custom CDs. Cool, right? We’re not done yet. CD-RWs came out shortly after that, allowing users to write on the disc more than one time. This works out great in the MP3/CD player in my car. Writable and re-writable DVDs are [obviously] the best thing since CD-RWs, but the price per disc is still pretty expensive.

This brings us to about the year 2006 when the newest discs were introduced for high definition video: HD DVD and the Blu-ray Disc. These guys hold a ridiculous amount of data when compared to a CD or DVD, especially depending on the format of the disc (single layered, double layered, triple layered). HD DVD and Blu-ray essentially provide the same end result: high def video in 1080p. How could the consumer lose?

A format war. Toshiba (HD DVD) and Sony (Blu-ray) couldn’t agree on a standardized format of the disc. And why should they? Each company stands to gain huge sums of revenue if they win the war…the loser will be forced to concede and begin producing hardware for the winner’s technology. Last check Sony was holding 75% of the Blu-ray disc market. Meanwhile the consumer was sitting back waiting to buy because who wants to buy an expensive piece of technology that may not even be around in a year?

So where am I heading with all of this rambling?

The optical disc is dying. The optical disc provides us multiple types of content including [but not limited to] data, audio, and video. There currently are multiple methods of obtaining all of this content without using an optical disc. Some detail:

Data: When is the last time you have purchased a piece of software that you were not able to download directly from a webpage somewhere? Some companies don’t even provide optical media, or if they do they charge extra. When you give files to your friends, do you put them on a CD, or do you throw the stuff on your flash drive instead? You can buy 4GB flash drives these days for $40. 4GB is over 5 times more than your standard CD.

Audio: iTunes, Napster, Amazon MP3, Walmart music downloads, and others.

Video: iTunes, NetFlix, In2TV, and others.

All this stuff to your computer without leaving your house. How great is that? “But Jonathan, I use my CD-ROM drive all the time on my computer! All the time!” Are you sure? Did you take the time to burn that CD last week or did you throw those data files on your flash drive…or maybe just email them to yourself?

Flash memory is getting cheaper everyday, so why can’t we give our friends a small thumb drive instead of a CD? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but this stuff is getting cheap. Remember when floppy drives started disappearing from computers? We got over that. We’ll get over the lack of optical drives soon enough. These computers don’t even have CD-ROM drives:
Fujitsu LifeBook (certain models)
Levono ThinkPad (certain models)
MacBook Air

You’ve heard it here first, folks.