If there’s anything that I love as much as getting my hands on a shiny new gadget, it’s taking old gadgets and repurposing them to accomplish something completely awesome.  I recently combined a low-end Eye-Fi card, a 2008 Mac Mini, and a little elbow grease to turn my home theater system into a slideshow displaying photos of a party at my home — live, as I was taking them.  Here’s how I did it, and how you can too.

What you’ll need

• A home theater system in the same room as your party
• A Mac Mini (you might be able to accomplish this with a Windows HTPC as well, but there may be limitations — details on that later)
• A home wireless network
• An Eye-Fi card
• An Eye-Fi-compatible camera (most cameras are, these days)
• minor scripting voodoo

Setup

HTMac/HTPC
Fortunately for me, I already had half of this project done before I began, because I had been using a Mac Mini as a home theater PC for some time.  While the 2008 Mac Minis didn’t have HDMI-out, I was able to run video out via a DVI to HDMI adapter, and audio out via the Mac’s mini-TOSLINK jack.  With Plex installed, the Mac Mini becomes a rather formidable living room media solution.  But I digress… the point is that a Mac Mini — even an older one — is ideal for this project.

If you don’t have a spare Mac Mini laying around, you can probably pick one up fairly cheap from the refurbished section of Apple’s online store, or you can try your luck with one of the many Windows-based HTPCs out there (yes, I realize that there are Linux-based HTPC solutions, but Eye-Fi did not work with Linux when I last checked, and that’s a crucial element here, as you’ll see in just a moment).

Regardless of the OS and hardware you choose, you will need a computer of some kind hooked up to your home theater and providing video to your television (unless, of course, you use one of those gorgeous 27-inch iMacs as your TV, in which case you have one less thing to set up).
Eye-Fi
With your HTMac/HTPC set up, now you have to establish a conduit for your photos to get from your camera to the computer.  Fortunately, Eye-Fi makes this easy.  First, you want to use the Eye-Fi manager software to configure your Eye-Fi card to transfer photos to a specific folder on your computer.  It doesn’t matter where this folder is located, but I’d recommend starting with a fresh, empty folder, and placing it somewhere that’s easy to remember and navigate to.

Next, you’ll probably want to configure your Eye-Fi card to use Selective Transfer.  This step isn’t strictly necessary, but I recommend it.  With Selective Transfer active, the Eye-Fi card will only transfer selected photos to your computer, instead of every photo you take.  Selecting a photo for transfer is as easy as pressing the “protect” button while viewing the photo on your camera.  By using Selective Transfer, you ensure that only the best photos end up in your slideshow, rather than including all of those photos of people with their eyes half-closed, which you’d normally just delete and re-shoot.

It should go without saying that you also need a wireless network set up in your home for this to work.  The Eye-Fi card can’t communicate with your computer unless they are both connected to the network.
Slideshow software
Now that you’ve got photos flowing to your HTMac/HTPC, you need to display them.  How you go about this will depend on which OS you’re running on your computer.  While it’s true that both OS X and Windows have a screensaver that can display a randomized selection of photos from a specified location, there are limitations.  For example, I have confirmed that the OS X slide show screensaver does not automatically refresh — that is to say, when the screensaver kicks in, the slide show that it creates contains only photos that were in the specified location at the time that the screensaver launched.  Any photos added to the folder after the slideshow has begun will not be included in the slideshow.  I haven’t had a chance to confirm conclusively that Windows’ “Photos” screensaver has the same limitation, but from what I’ve seen so far, it seems to work in the same way.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution if you’re on OS X.  I threw together a simple AppleScript that addresses this is the simplest manner possible:

repeat
 tell application "ScreenSaverEngine" to activate
 delay 300
 tell application "System Events" to key code 59
 delay 2
end repeat

When launched, this AppleScript will trigger the screen saver, wait five minutes, simulate the pressing of a key (quitting the slide show), wait two seconds, trigger the screen saver again, and repeat until manually terminated.  The end result is that the slideshow is effectively “refreshed” every five minutes (you can adjust the frequency of the refresh by tweaking the delay values).  Save this AppleScript as an application, and you can put it on your desktop or in your Applications folder and launch it whenever you want your self-refreshing slide show to run.  Now you need only set the slide show as your screen saver, point it at your Eye-Fi photos folder, configure your display options, and you’re set.  When you want to quit the auto-refresh, just press a key or move your mouse to exit the slideshow, and quit the AppleScript from the dock.

Unfortunately, Here is where the OS X and Windows roads diverge.  Windows does not provide any reasonable equivalent to AppleScript, so Windows users will need to find some sort of slideshow application that will get them around this limitation, or some sort of scripting/macro utility that will let you mimic the behavior of my AppleScript.  Being that I no longer use Windows unless I really have to, I’m afraid that I don’t have any suggestions that will help Windows users over this last hump.  If you have suggestions, please add them in the comments.

Putting it all together

Once all of these ingredients are in place, you’re basically done.  Insert the Eye-Fi card into your camera and fire off a few test shots to confirm that the photos end up in the correct folder (remember to protect the photos if you’re using Selective Transfer), start up your AppleScript (or whatever you’re using for Windows) to launch the slide show and confirm that the correct photos are displaying, and that’s that.  The HTMac/HTPC can do double duty as your party’s jukebox while it’s displaying your photos, if you like.  You could even take this to the next level by using iTunes’ DJ mode to provide your party’s music, and allow your guests to request or vote on tracks via their iPhones.  Welcome to the future.

Now… go get some beverages and snack foods, invite your friends over, snap some photos, and enjoy!

Filed in categories: Articles, Digital Cameras and Gear, Do-It-Yourself

Tagged: DIY, HTPC, Photos

Geek Up Your Party With a Live-Updating Slideshow originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on July 19, 2010 at 10:00 am.

I don’t have very many 35mm negatives, but I know that my Dad has a lot of them. I’d love to get copies of all the old family snapshots from my childhood. The ImageLab FS-5T12 12 MegaPixel slide and negative scanner looks like a great solution. It can scan up to 2575 x 1932 pixels and has a built in LCD to preview images before it saves to an SD card. Can be used with or with out a computer.

Filed in categories: Digital Cameras and Gear

Tagged: Photos, Scanner, Spotlight Gadgets

Scan your old 35mm photo negatives to an SD card originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 22, 2009 at 6:59 am.

How would you like a 22″ widescreen wireless digital photo frame that can display up to 150,000 images on its 1680 x 1050 LCD screen and hang on  your wall? You can even choose from different frame styles made of wood, metal, and leather. Sounds pretty sweet right? But would you pay $999 for it? The folks at Photovu sure hope so.

Filed in categories: Digital Cameras and Gear

Tagged: Digiframe, Photos, Spotlight Gadgets

Spotlight Gadget – 22 inch Digital Photo Frame originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 20, 2009 at 6:01 am.

OK, for everyone who remembers Part 1 of this review from way back last year, you should recall that SplashData’s SplashWallet is a package of four great utilities for $59.95- SplashMoney and SplashShopper, reviewed last time, and SplashID and SplashPhoto, which we will look at today.

These two applications really live up the idea of a ‘digital wallet’ in that they bring to your Palm functions that your wallet usually does, but better. For example, SplashID not only holds your private info but it encrypts it and SplashPhoto can show photos as slide shows.

SplashID

SplashID Password Screen

SplashID Data Screen

SplashID is basically an encrypted database. While not as visual as the previously reviewed eWallet from Illium, it is very user friendly and flexible. Like other parts of the SplashWallet, SplashID has a desktop element that really simplifies everything.

SplashID Record View

Using SplashID is so easy even a cavem… well, maybe not quite THAT simple. It IS simple enough to master in a couple minutes. Choose a category, enter the data in the proper fields, and done. A few minutes of fidgeting on the settings and everything is secure.

SpashID Record Form

A nice added feature is a password generator with lots of options, so if you tend to use a few passwords over and over like some people do (stop looking at me!), you can finally use secure keys and have them safely recorded.

I also appreciate that the system is easy enough to use that you can store clothing sizes, gift ideas, and more- stuff you don’t really need to be secure, but want in a safe, central location.

SplashID Pros:

• Easy to use
• Secure without being annoying
• Password generator included

SplashID Cons:

• None

SplashPhoto

SplashPhoto Thumbnail View

I have had one photo manager or another on my PDA since they had color screens (yeah Handspring Prism!). There is not much remarkable about photo managers- most allow you to view the photos on the Palm and memory cards, and do some simple editing- often resizing, captioning, etc. However, the newest version 5.03 of SplashPhoto has a couple twists up its sleeve!

SplashPhoto Info View

OK, a view of each photo with basic info about it nothing new, nor are thumbnail views, list views, etc. Tree View, shown below, is new and does a good job of showing files in relationship to each other.

SplashPhoto Tree View

The basic job of the photo manager is to show photos. SplashPhoto does this nicely, as you can see with one of my daughter’s recent wedding photos- normal, and zoomed…

Regular-sized photo

I’ll refrain from typical fatherly ‘isn’t she gorgeous’ comments- after all, I am showing off the software, not my kids! I will point out another great feature of SplashPhoto here though- the desktop editor.

Imagine you have just had a wonderful, photo-filled event in your life that you want to remember and share. The SplashPhoto desktop editor is there for you. With new, powerful features it can grab photos from Flickr, Picassa, and FaceBook as well as from your camera and desktop. With a few keystrokes, you can zoom, crop, resize, rotate, caption, and categorize your photos and they will be put on your Palm on the next sync. You can even do some of the web operations directly from your Smartphone!

New feature- Web integration

The SplashPhotos desktop element empowers your Palm to be a wonderful tool for storing and managing memories, not just a digital photo frame.

SplashPhoto Pros:

• Great desktop editor
• Web integration
• Easy to use editing tools

SplashPhoto Cons:

• None

SplashWallet

As I said in the first half of the review, the cost of Wallet is such that if you buy two of the programs, you may as well spend the nickle and get all four. I am always surprised by how often I use one of them that I think of as one of my ‘free ones’! Overall, solid, easy to use and easy to master programs that I heartily recommend.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: ID, Palm OS related, Photos, Software

SplashData’s SplashWallet – Palm OS Utility Review Part 2 originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 3, 2009 at 4:49 pm.

The days of carrying around your family photos in your wallet seem to be over. Now when we want to show someone a picture of our new baby, puppy or house, we whip out our mobile phone or laptop. But, not everyone has a mobile phone or laptop. That’s where the Insignia Digital Picture Keychain can help keep your snapshots ready for viewing.

Hardware Specifications

Display: 160 x 128 pixels
Screen size: 1.8 inches (45.7 mm)
Capacity for up to 40 photos
File format: .jpg

Package Contents

Photo keychain
USB cable
User Guide

The Insignia keychain is a non-symmetrically shaped 2.3 x 1.7 x 0.4 inch plastic module that is available in Red, Blue and Black.

The metal keychain can be easily detached from the viewer. This makes it more convenient to let people view your photos without having your keys or other items hanging from the chain. It’s also nice to be able to detach the viewer when you need to charge its internal batteries with the USB cable.

Along the top edge there are four control buttons for the viewer that allow you to toggle power and cycle through your photos.

On the Left side, is a mini USB connector that is used for charging and transferring photos to the viewer from your PC.

click thumbnail to see full sized screenshot

Putting your images on the keychain is an easy task. Just plug one end of the included USB cable into the keychain and the other into your Windows PC. Sorry Mac users, you’re out of luck. You can’t drag and drop photos to this device as you would a USB drive. The keychain contains software that will automatically run when you plug in the keychain to your computer.

The software allows you to see or delete the photos currently installed on the viewer and add new photos.

With a resolution of only 160 x 128 pixels, the image quailty for this little viewer is pretty ummm… how can I be kind here… crappy. I mean you can’t really expect to see much with that small of a photo, so don’t use the viewer for landscape type pictures. The images are also sort of fuzzy and I thought maybe it had to do with the way their software was resizing the original image before transferring it to the viewer. So I used Photoshop to resize some images down to 160 x 128 before copying them to the viewer. It didn’t make any difference in the image quality though.

It does a better job of displaying close up face pictures.

When it’s all said and done, I would really only recommend the Insignia Digital Picture Keychain for someone that does not already carry a cellphone or a PDA and has a Windows based PC.

What do you use to display your personal photos?

Manufacturer: Insignia
Retailer: Best Buy

Price: $19.99

Pros:
Easy to use
Charges via USB
Software for copying images is stored on the viewer

Cons:
Low resolution
Can only hold up to 40 images

Filed in categories: Miscellaneous

Tagged: Keychain, Photos

Insignia Digital Picture Keychain Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 2, 2009 at 10:21 am.