Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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This is just HOT.
The other day I ordered an iMate Momento 100 Picture Frame. This is a 10 inch 800 x 480 picture frame that has built in WiFi. It can connect to the Momento Live Service and stream photos that you and your family can share. It can also talk to your Vista or XP Computer using Windows Media Connect and get photos that way. If you lack geekiness you can just plugin a memory card or USB drive with photos on them (boring).
But the best part is, Momento supports Vista SideShow Gadgets (not SideBar). This means that you can download and use a bunch of gadgets on the Windows Live Gallery and enable them for use on the picture frame. The data then renders very nicely (translucent) over the photos as the slide show goes.
Setting it up was a bit of a pain since the device currently only supports WEP and WPA for Wireless Encryption. Since I use WPA2 (who doesn't?) I wasn't able to connect. I had to temporarily downgrade security to connect and register the frame. Once I did that it appeared on my computer like a UPnP Router or any other computer on the LAN. I right clicked and selected Install and it pulled down the drivers from Windows Update and I was able to navigate to the screen below and turn my gadgets on.
I had to turn on SideShow support in the picture frame but that was easy.
This frame is waaay more geeky than the Philips Picture Frame I got last December.
One thing though, this frame is huge. I mean I thought the bigger the better, but now I kinda wish I got the smaller one.
I might have to get one of these for each sets of parents so I can stream them photos of their granddaughter.
If I had infinite time I'd write a SideShow Gadget for SmugMug. I'm sure Scott Hanselman is salivating right now, probably has Visual Studio 2005 already launching to hack this thing up.
BTW - Vista rulez. This is just kick ass. We never get credit for this kind of magic.