iGala

A little while back I asked a bunch of friends, and twitter-friends, and woodland fauna and just whoever to send pictures to my living room via the geeky expedient of my magic new internet-attached digital frame. You hipsters succeeded like gang-busters, so here's an update on this ongoing experiment - in review form.

I don't have much use for digital frames, because who in the world ever rotates the pics on them? Plus, if you want pics you didn't take yourself, you have to cart them back and forth through the sneakernet with your own wee flash card - which we all know is a pernicious choking hazard looking all candylicious and technically alluring and such - and, plus, I have better things to pretend to do like understand the tax code, master thighs, withstand peer-pressure or look at pictures of my friend's goofy-ass babies ... er no, not your baby, that other friend's.

Oh, yeah, pictures! Anyway, what sets the frame I got, a shiny iGala, apart from the run-of-the-mill trash from Best Buy is that with a little complicity from your friends, new pictures are beamed by wifi directly into the frame from such convenient sources as Flickr and gmail.

In fact, if you want me to see your pics, go ahead and send them to photos4daniel@gmail.com. I'd love to look at them. Note, I'm not easily offended, but be forewarned that sending me gross and/or pornographic pictures just occurred to everyone else who read this, so it's not even clever no more. I just ask that the pics be a bit interesting, and that if you're at all nekid in them, you try to be correspondingly attractive.

So, the review is that I'm loving it. The frame has its little quirks, and the icons on the user interface are just inscrutable. Luckily they're quite easy to memorize.

Set-up was easy for someone as clever, technical and well-dressed as myself, but as a gift for grandma it might need to be accompanied by fifteen minutes of on-site tech support to get the wifi sorted. The transitions from pic to pic look like they were imported in bulk right from 1980's cinema but whatever, they're still gonna be goddamn astounding to gramps, right? He still has a VCR and it's still perpetually noon at his house.

I've had my frame running for a bit over a week now and I occasionally laugh out loud or get misty at the pics my awesome friends have sent me. On the off chance that you've chosen friends who suck, you can always subscribe to a Flickr group and pretend those people are your friends.

You poor sad monkey.