Old PowerBook + Hot Glue = Cheap Digital Picture Frame
option8 writes "Have an old laptop gathering dust? Here's another fun hack from Applefritter - this time utilizing an old Mac laptop (a Duo 280) but could be applied to pretty much anything with an LCD, and turning the guts into a cheap, flexible digital picture frame. Now, off to the flea market to pick up one of them cheap Duos I keep seeing..." As the author points out, this isn't a new idea -- but it's a great step-by-step.
Great article. I'm working on a laptop to picture-frame conversion too.
Mine is an old Toshiba 205CDS with 24 meg running Debian and hooked up to a new flat-panel display, so the display itself is the frame.
The software is Mozilla 1.1 in full-screen mode. It simply tunes into a page on a web server (could be the same server, but in my case it's not) that serves up refreshes are regular intravals. My friends and family have access to a web page where they can directly upload their pictures into my frame and provide captions. They can also build pages of their own and just sent the URL (this is a big advantage of having a real browser running in the frame).
The poster was a lot more ambitious than me in many ways. I never even thought of chopping up the laptop and making such a professional-looking package. Now I think at least I'll get rid of the laptop's LCD panel.