Toad’s Scandal July 12, 2009
Posted by CLibra in Clippings, Games, Geeky.add a comment
“The princess is in another castle” is something Mario players hear all too often, but did you know that Toad’s actually a viscous little guy? Take a look at this.
Turns out he’s had the last laugh all these years. I thought better of you, Toad.
[http://www.sodahead.com/blog/100601/toad-has-been-giving-us-the-finger-since-1985/]
HowTo: Photo Frame to Info Screen July 8, 2009
Posted by CLibra in Geeky, HowTo, Images, Internet, Photos, Tools.1 comment so far
Digital photo frames are the ideal gift for many people; they’re elegant, they show photos without hundreds of physical albums, and they’re easy to use. But for some people, their gets a point where seeing the same pictures over and over seems a little pointless.
The more geeky among us will be glad to know that digital photo frames can easily be extended using their RSS capabilities into an Info Screen, allowing you to flick through image ‘channels’ that keep you updated with what you want.
How we do this? Microsoft’s tool, Windows Live FrameIt. Here’s a rundown of some good ideas for ‘channels’ that I use with my frame.
Weather Channel
FrameIt already comes with a tool for weather forecasts. Simply enter your location in the world, and FrameIt will make an RSS feed of a graphical forecast.
News Channel
Enter the RSS feeds of your favourite websites to receive the latest news headlines. Whilst I’d personally opt for Google Reader for blogs and websites, creating a News Channel on a photo frame can be used to quickly check local news & sports.
Mail Channel
Some email providers allow access via RSS to new messages in the account; whilst you can’t send any messages using it, it’s useful to be alerted of new emails without having to fire up a computer. GMail uses a secure RSS feed, but you can follow this guide from MakeUseOf to create an unlocked feed, which can then be loaded into FrameIt.
Art Channel
deviantART offers a feed of its popular daily art, which can be found here; you can add it as a Photo RSS feed to have different art displaying each day.
Social Channel
Friendfeed works wonders for aggregating social feeds, so you can use it to create your very own social channel to deliver your updates on social networks. Also, FrameIt has a tool to display photos from Facebook that you’re tagged in.
Other Channels
You can essentially create a channel from any website with an RSS feed, but for those without, fear not; FeedYes will create one for you, and you can tweak your channel to your liking with Pipes, trimming down the info in a website to make it graphically friendly for use in a photo frame.
A photo frame can actually be quite useful with a few simple tools, and you can still use it to display all of your photographs. Got any more creative uses for a digital photo frame? Scribble it in the comments.
[http://frameit.live.com/]
[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/read-your-gmail-in-a-web-based-rss-reader-with-freemyfeed/]
[http://www.feedyes.com/]
