| A couple of years ago, I picked up a cheap Fuji tablet computer with an 8" touchscreen - and made a semi-functional digital frame out of it. It had no CD, no ethernet and no keyboard. It was really loud, only ran Windows98, and the only way to transfer files was through wireless. Now doing any sort of wireless networking on Windows98 is a minor miracle - let alone trying to file share with OSX - so I sold that piece of crap for a nice profit and eventually got a cheap old G3 Powerbook instead.
I wanted two things from this new custom-built frame - to have a device that would cycle randomly through all 15GB of the digital photos in my collection, and also to serve as an additional digital backup (ie at the full resolution, not downsampled) for my images, should I ever need to restore them to my main computer..
The quality and features of modern digital photo frames are still sorely lacking compared to what you can get with a 12 year old Powerbook (14" 1024x768 nice sharp LCD, CD, USB, Ethernet and WIFI available, ability to run any software I want, scheduled startup & shutdown). The worst part about most store-bought digital frames is they just look like cheap plastic shit. For about $60 and some scrap wood from the garage I put this together:
Of course the hours put into this project have been rather excessive but the end result is superb.....and still retains the full functionality of the computer (I could hook up a microphone and record some ProTools tracks into the frame if I wanted to)
Using the guide from MacFixit, I took the laptop apart far enough to detach the screen and reroute the video cables so that they could stretch around to have the LCD screen on one side of a piece of plywood, and the rest of the computer on the other. I found a few spots in the laptop case where I could drill through the bottom for new screw mounts. Two notches were cut to allow the cables through without rubbing against the bottom edge. The screen was mounted using the existing holes, with just a scrap of bicycle inner tube under each corner to provide a bit of cushioning and keep things from slipping around - I certainly didn't want to overtighten anything around the edge of the (now very unprotected) LCD panel.
Looking back, I wish I had mounted the computer part about 1/2" higher - there was not enough clearance to plug in the mouse, power plug or ethernet without cutting an additional hole at the bottom of the wood frame.
The Powerbook frame is running OS 8.6....I couldn't see any advantage of using a higher OS version as they just consume more memory without giving me much else in features. I have virtual memory turned off, with 192 MB ram.. The original noisy 4GB hard drive was swapped out for a 30GB.
So how to transfer the files?
There's no USB built in (PCMCIA cards are available, but the one I had previously would only work in OSX 10.2 on this Powerbook - USB support is OS8&9 is sketchy at best), and due to a design oversight, the CDrom drive is blocked by the side of the wooden frame. This laptop also didn't have a wireless card (this is before Airport of course) but I did have a similar Powerbook previously with a Lucent Silver PCMCIA card that successfully gave it WIFI - I think even with OS 8.6. So for me, the only option left was to just run a long ethernet cable down the hall to my OSX 10.5 iMac. Networking between 8.6 and 10.5 is in fact possible and I give great credit to Apple for somehow managing to keep this intact.
Appletalk over ethernet support was discontinued after OS 10.3 I believe. At one point I though I might have to resort to transferring everything to an intermediary computer running OS 10.3, and then connect back to the 8.6 Powerbook.....but there is a way to network directly.
Perhaps compounding the difficulty was the fact that the only ethernet cable I had long enough to reach down the hall (the power adapter for the laptop is behind the fridge and very difficult to unplug) was a "crossover" ethernet. Newer Macs have some sort of auto-sensing built in, so they can tell whether the cable is straight through or crossover - not sure how the 1997 Powerbook dealt with it.
Regardless, each time took several reboots and fiddling on both computers until I happened across a sequence that worked. Under the OS 8.6 Control Panels, the TCP port must be set to "ethernet", and Appletalk must be set to "ethernet." Several times when I tried it, the connection would not be made until I had toggled TCP to a different port, saved the change and then toggled it BACK to ethernet again.
A computer running 10.5 cannot "see" other computers filesharing older than OS 10(?)....but if you start from the Chooser in OS8.6, and manually type in the IP of the 10.5 server, you can get a connection. When I tried it it gave no option for username and password, only let you join the OSX "public" folder - which was fine, I just copied everything there.
Eventually I got the connection made and was able to directly transfer files at a reasonable speed (about 5 hours for 15GB of photos).
Software was a bit of a concern, my first choice was the classic all-purpose JPEGVIEW....however when I started the slideshow function with a test folder of a few images, one annoying trait came up - every time a photo would load, the screen would flicker black for a split second and it looked like the image loaded twice.
I then tried the following slideshow applications : Oink (sucked), Jade (worked okay but wouldn't read subfolders or actually do random order even if you clicked that option) Slideshow Freebie (which worked great except in the manual it said it maxed out at 3500 images....and if i was going to go to all this trouble I wanted the whole damn set on there (approx 6000). So then I decided on Graphic Converter 5.95, which had tonnes of options, the random fuction actually worked and even had smooth Quicktime crossfades inbetween images. The first few times it bogged down with out of memory errors, but after manually setting the program's memory allotment (ah those were the days, almost forgot how to do that) to 140MB, it's been working flawlessly.
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