dreadedmonkeygod . net

These days, it's all about the home improvement projects. The stovetop "grill", or the electric? Do we put the bikes in a giant cabinet, or do we put the boxes in the cabinet and put the bikes where the boxes used to be? Or do we just throw out what's in the boxes and save some cash?

Of course, with all that complexity crashing around in my head all the time, my inner programmer seeks to impose order and simplicity. He can't do much about bike storage, but he can do spiffy things with rsync and a digital picture frame, so a few little programming projects have occurred to me.

First, I want to set up my electronic picture frame as a networked drive on the house wifi. That yields some convenience right there.

Then I'd like to write a bit of code that grabs a bunch of photos from a source directory, crops them so they fit the digital frame, and then loads them into the frame's memory. No more black bars.

Then, I'd like to write a bit of code that pulls photos off friends' blogs, Flickr feeds, etc., then crops them as above and shuffles them into the mix.

And then, I'd like to get another frame. On that frame, I'd load a rotating series of auto-generated infographics. Weather, maybe, then our Netflix queue, then reminders.

And I'd really like a running "scoreboard" of my debt, credit score, bank balance, etc. But there are security issues there. I'm not about to leave a running cron job configured with the login information for all my accounts.

And now that I have these written down, I'm done. I can concentrate on what's in front of me now.