as days pass by

Chris Metcalf has built a digital picture frame out of an old laptop. Very cool. I’ve heard about people doing this before, and thought it was cool (in a, well, heavily spod sort of way), but it’s triggered off a thought or two. Somewhere on my list is a telly in the bedroom; I wonder whether I should do this instead? I’ve got a Toshiba Tecra 520 here: it’s only a P166, and I don’t use it much. However, pretty much anything should be able to watch telly with a hardware TV card, no? PLus, it can be a picture all the time that it isn’t being a TV. This would be startlingly cool. I’m not sure that the laptop’s up to the challenge: what I really need is to get hold of a PCMCIA hardware TV tuner card (without, y‘know, paying £200 for it) and check it out. This would be a pretty neat Christmas present. I shall ask Jon at work: he knows about this kind of thing. I’ll bang a noddy Debian install on it and then freevo, perhaps. It’s only got a 12.1” LCD screen, but then it’s a bedroom TV so that’s not too unacceptable. Interesting idea.
I really need a “projects” category here so I can put all these cool ideas in it.