Things God forgot to mention

My take on the creationist nonsense is this: Completely independent of any theological argument, just as a practical matter, where should you look for advice about the world we live in? The self described omniscient God, or to modern Science. Consider that God forgot to mention a few pretty important things.

• Geography: The existence of 4 entire continents, with people on 3 of them.
• Cosmology: The existence of a billion billion additional stars in the universe, in addition to the few thousand you can see.
• Medicine: the existence of living things too small to see, but which can kill you.
• Natural History: Dinosaurs, and almost everything else.
• Engineering: Anything beyond muscle power.

You get the idea.

Digital Frames

Digital frames started out a few years ago as expensive novelties, but the prices have plummeted and I’ve joined the movement. I place mine on my desktop, within arm’s reach but not in the direct line of sight. I like mine so much I’ve bought more and given them away as gifts.

So far I’ve bought four different frames from different manufacturers. They’re not quite idiot proof yet, but anyone advanced enough to photoshop his own digital photographs will have no problem getting them loaded and running. The hardware is pretty solid and standardized – basically a small LCD, USB interface, some amount of internal memory, slots that accept most of the common camera memory cards, and of course, a power brick. Some have WI-Fi. Some have remote controls. It all works.

The on-board software is pretty awful now, but is bound to improve. Part of the problem is the no computer required requirement, which currently also means your computer is irrelevant. Everything about what the frame actually does is controlled by pushing combinations of buttons to scroll through multiple levels of menus. Yuck. Other things are just inexplicably dumb:

• The “random” slide show always starts with the same picture. Sure, it seems to diverge eventually, but some photos are seen much more often than they should be.
• There is a low, unpublished, absolute limit on the number of different photos that will cycle through the slide show. Each model seems to have it’s own limit, and none advertises what their’s is; but don’t bother cramming all 20,000 of your digital pictures onto one card. For now.
• Frames accept and store huge images in their internal memory, although they can only display limited scaled down versions.

The software can only get better.

I predict that the days of the traditional photo-of-wife-and-kids on the desktop are numbered. The photo-on-the-wall may follow soon. It’s a mystery to me why my expensive flat panel TV can’t double as a digital frame already.