Ditching the TV

I replaced my TV with a Mac Mini, an EyeTV 200, and a 20” LCD, and it’s working just great.

One of the unanticipated surprises was that it runs out photo collection as a screen saver. I used to never look at old photos, but now they’re just there in my living room, it’s really really cool. It’s much more useful than having them in either a physical photo album or on my normal computer. This way they’re part of my life, and when we have friends over, they see them and comment on them, too. It’s a real conversation piece. Fantastic!

Now the next step, of course, is to get other people’s photos on there. From Flickr. Specifically, I want it to automatically show new photos from my Flickr friends, so I can see what they’re up to. Or show pictures from conferences like the SXSW, when I can’t go, so it’s almost as if I’m there. Again, the great thing is that it’s unintrusive yet right there.

Alas, even though it seems like a simple task, I haven’t been able to find such a screensaver. I’ve played with 1001, but it just keeps showing the same 2 or 3 pictures over and over, even though I’ve set it to buffer up 50. And the way it is rendering the photos is very ugly, compared with the built-in screensaver from Apple.

So I’m still waiting for that, and have to get by on my own photographic skills for now. Dang!