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/]
Music Shop FAIL January 17, 2009
Posted by CLibra in Fun, Humour, Images, Music, Photos.1 comment so far
Found this whilst digging around on my PC.
It’s from December ‘07, found it in Zavvi.
Easy Tilt-Shift Photo Generator January 10, 2009
Posted by CLibra in Images, Photos, Tools, Websites.2 comments
You’ve probably all seen a tilt-shift photo – a real scene that is edited to make it look like a smaller model. This is usually done by trial and error with a tilt-shift camera, or digitally with by blurring & enhancing colours of certain parts certain parts of a picture in PhotoShop, but both ways are cumbersome and take a long time to do.
Lifehacker have recently found a free online tool, tiltshiftmaker, that can automatically tilt-shift photographs for you. All you do is upload from your computer (or provide a URL of a photo on the web) and move the image band until the preview looks right. That’s all! Have a look at one I made of a photo taken on the Paris trip in Novemeber.
Yup, now it looks like I have a Moulin Rouge model. tiltshiftmaker is free and extremely simple to use, whilst producing high quality results. Check it out, see who you can fool with it. Also, have a look at TiltShiftPhotography, which has lots of examples of tilt-shift fake photos, and tutorials of how to make your own.
[http://tiltshiftmaker.com/]
[http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/]
Someone forgot to resize May 14, 2008
Posted by CLibra in Clippings, Humour, Images.add a comment
I found it in a Science textbook.
Why oh why do these people use computers?
What’s a Twitter to you? April 17, 2008
Posted by CLibra in Images, Web 2.0, Websites.add a comment
To me, Twitter can be several things.
- Letting people around me know what I’m up to.
- Showing people the cool stuff I find
- Sharing links without writing loads
- Sloppy blogging
- Announcing things to lots of people
- Messaging a person’s web/IM/email/phone to get their atention
- Procrastination
HowTo: PhotoCast without .Mac April 6, 2008
Posted by CLibra in Creations, Google, HowTo, Images, Software, Technology, Web 2.0.add a comment
Got some Holiday snaps? Wanna share photos without email? How about accessing photos on more than one computer?
Then PhotoCasting is for you.
PhotoCasting is a bit like a PodCast, only that instead of Audio files, Images are sent.
To view them, you just need an RSS reader (IE & FireFox both work fine), or if you’re using a Mac, iPhoto can organise your subscribed PhotoCast in many ways.
So how do we do this, without shelling out a .Mac subscription? Our good friend Google of Course!
You will need –
- Collection of photos
- Internet connection, Broadband recommended
- A Google Account
- Picasa Uploader (Mac) or Picasa (PC)
This guide is for PC users, but is essentially the same for the Mac.
Assuming you’ve already got your photo library into Picasa/iPhoto, let’s start.
- Highlight the photos you want to include in your PhotoCast. Click the Web Album button.
- Log in with your Google Account if prompted. From here, you can chose to create a new Album or Upload to an existing one, as well as other settings. Each Album will become a PhotoCast, so sort them however you like.
- Click OK, and wait. Depending on the amount of photos, it could take a long time.
- When that’s done, go to http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/home and navigate to your album. Scroll down to the bottom right hand corner, and click the little link labelled RSS. Distribute this link however, it’s your PhotoCast.
That’s all there is to it! One drawback, however, is that you manually have to add new photos to the PhotoCast, but the subscribers receive them automatically, and the maximum size of each PhotoCast is 500 photos.
Grow your own town, up their PageRank March 25, 2008
Posted by CLibra in Blogroll, Clippings, Fun, Games, Images, Websites.add a comment
What an ingenious game that gives a site a ridiculous amount of backlinks!
MyMiniCity allows you to create a city (although, there’s no signup, so it isn’t really *yours*), and the population grows every time you get a new visitor, but after each day the same visitor can qualify again. After the population expands to a certain point, you can use different links to change the city (ie /tra/ would increase transport).
I had a go at creating my own, CLibraville, although it isn’t very much at the moment. I’ve seen one City with skyscrapers! Support me, become a citizen
And just think, people will link to their cities, in turn giving MyMiniCity a huge PageRank.
Viral? Yes! Cool? Yes! Great Concept? Definitely!
Microsoft’s eBay Hacker?! February 17, 2008
Posted by CLibra in Clippings, Humour, Images, Microsoft, Websites.2 comments
If you visit the New Hotmail website, you’ll be greeted with a flash player that will tell you all about the new ‘Windows Live Hotmail’
Whaaaat?! Hotmail now comes with an eBay Hacker? I can see the slogan now;
Connect to your friends with Windows Live eBay Hacker, and never miss another auction.
Microsoft have really done it this time.
Albumart.org – iTunes Grabber Replacement January 1, 2008
Posted by CLibra in Clippings, Images, Music, Tools.3 comments
A while ago, I posted about the (now defunct) iTunes Artwork Grabber.
A new tool has surfaced, Albumart.org, which does exactly the same job as before, although I personally think that it works faster.
Reader Tip: Cinema Style OneManga.com December 11, 2007
Posted by CLibra in Code, Images, Internet, Tools, Websites.1 comment so far
Chulian has made a cool GreaseMonkey script that removes ads and gives a fullscreen view to each manga scan, preloading them and allowing navigation with arrow keys. Ace, I love it.
Firefox users, click below to install it.
[http://chulian1819.googlepages.com/fullimagesonemanga.user.js]
![[Click for full size]](http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4658/paristiltshiftgv0.jpg){kind=link}