Creating a social photo frame from scratch | Hacker News Reader

Creating a social photo frame from scratch

insignificantdatascience.substack.com

That screen needs a thick traditional ornate picture frame around it.

It will completely change the whole vibe in a positive way.

As for the cable, all it needs is a punched hole in the wall, hidden behind the screen, and another directly beneath it by the floor.

For extra bang, frame the screen with passive dielectric mirrored glass. DM 30/70 lets the screen's light through, slightly dampened, which is good for use as an art display in the background. And when the screen is off it will look (and be!) an elegant mirror.

Put a plant under it on a nice (but cheap) pedestal and upgrade the bookshelf to something more library/furniture, less utilitarian press board.

I would suggest textured paint for the wall. Pick light and dark shades of the same color. Paint the light color first. Then paint the dark over it, and lightly use a sponge or crumpled paper to pull just enough off to leave the wall richly colored and textured. It is very classy and calming.

I can go on... and on.

these are great ideas! I had thought about the picture frame one, but couldn't figure out a low cost way of adding a frame around the monitor. Best idea I had was fancy looking tape/stickers around the front of the monitor. Definitely going to do the plant + new bookshelf below, already scouring Facebook marketplace.

> As for the cable, all it needs is a punched hole in the wall, hidden behind the screen, and another directly beneath it by the floor.

Likely against code to do this. Power cables are not meant to go behind the wall. There are products that exist to do this, but please don't just run the actual power cable this way.

What code would forbid you to run power cables behind your walls? Where would power cables be if not behind walls? What country is that?

It’s about power cords not properly installed electrical wiring.

Google for “power cords in walls” for tons of discussion about why not, and for national electrical code section 400.8 for the actual regulations. Probably US-centric but the general concerns apply.

If hiding TV power and video cables behind a few feet of walls is a code violating disease, the US has an out of control epidemic!

Note the practical difference between running fat insulated cables (so safe they are built to live bare in living spaces, often piled in knots behind furniture), from infrastructure wiring meant to be inaccessibly buried in home structures.

You may be right that technically it’s against code to tidily hide HDMI, USB-C or consumer power cables this way, but apparently there is no county in the US where city inspectors have been so unwise as to commit career seppuku for speaking up on that one!

> the US has an out of control epidemic!

No argument on that one.

It is not against code to hide low voltage signal cables behind the wall. It's only against code for mains voltage. And there are good reasons for it. Just because you showed up to this conversation not knowing what they are doesn't mean they don't exist.

1) I was the person who suggested hiding the cords.

2) Zooming into the picture of the hanging digital picture, those looks like fat highly insulated consumer cables to me.

I think he suggested hiding the power cable of the screen (so probably USB at 5v), not bringing a power cord up the wall.

Ah Americans... thinking everyone's walls are just plaster board on studs. I don't know what OP's situation is, but adding a cable to my walls would require machinery to cut a channel into the brickwork.

This is the type of project I still absolutely love reading about on HN. It feels like we use to see these types of things much more frequently than we do now. But I’m sure that is just my own browsing habits changing.

This exact product won't be available in the US but self adhesive trunking is a neat way to hide cables without cutting or drilling the wall.

https://centaurmfg.com/products/16-mm-x-16-mm-pvcu-self-adhe...

This is cool, I have two observations:

* You say that you used a better model than Dalle 2, don't mention which, and the next line says "Dalle" again. I assume you're using Flux, though.

* Your photo display code might be wrong, your friend's selfie is squished in that photo.

I did the insane thing of .... just updating to Dalle 3. My buddy recommended Flux, haven't tried it out just out of lack of time + Dalle 3 working pretty nicely

Nice job! That's a neat use case. Impressive too. You got texts, image generation using AI and storage and retrieval and display. All with a low cost. This would make a nice solution for a kiosk or displays you see in stores.

Nice job. I repurposed an old laptop with an RTX 2070 in it for a similar purpose. I have a Samsung Frame in my bedroom so the laptop spins up for about 15-20 minutes every day and generates new imagery using a combination of a small 7b LLM model to generate a stable diffusion prompt to generate the imagery. It's then fed through moderation filters, various upscaling, img2img and finally piped out to the Samsung Frame via a python websocket api.

Works pretty well although I've woken up to some pretty bizarre looking stuff every once in a while.

This is a mirror of what gets generated for it.

https://screensaver.specr.net

FYI, I got around the cable issue by aligning the TV directly above my piano which helps to hide it.

EDIT: Just a heads up, if the image s3 URL is identical (meaning you're upserting), you could make a HEAD request to determine if the image has changed versus the current one being shown. Alternatively, you could look into setting up an S3 trigger which triggers off new files being uploaded to it as well.

Personally, I'd recommend having two S3 folders, archived and new, then randomly assigning a GUID to the uploaded image. That way you support queueing if several people upload a few images, each one will get scheduled for display. S3 List the "new" files, display one of them, once time is up, raspberry PI moves it to the "archived" folder.

this is awesome, do you mind me asking what your prompt is? There is a really sweet photo on your site right now

Thanks~ I'm afraid I can't get it for you! What actually happens is that the laptop uploads all finalized images to an S3 bucket and then sleeps to save power. I have a raspberry PI that's responsible for fetching a random image and displaying it on the Samsung Frame on an hourly basis.

Next time you see one you like though, you can save the image to your machine and use something like exiftool to extract the meta information - I save the prompt inside the EXIF.

I love looking at books in people's photos. Here's what I found in yours. I hope you don't mind!

----

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - A detailed account of the Theranos scandal.

The Founders by Jimmy Soni - Explores the early days of PayPal and its impact on Silicon Valley.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Memoir by the founder of Nike.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr - A book about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and organizational success.

Business Adventures by John Brooks - Classic tales of corporate life, highly recommended by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Becoming by Michelle Obama - The former First Lady's personal memoir.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Inspirational reflections on life and achieving dreams.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - A comprehensive biography of Apple's co-founder.

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez - A look into the wild side of Silicon Valley.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy - A deep dive into the social media giant's history and controversies.

Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich - Stories of innovation from Lockheed Martin’s legendary division.

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke - How to make decisions under uncertainty.

Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan M. Gardner - Insights into better prediction and decision-making.

Educated by Tara Westover - A memoir about resilience and education.

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - A raw look at the life of a chef.

Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - A biography of the physicist behind the atomic bomb.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - Wisdom on wealth and happiness.

----

I've read Naval's book, but not the others. Are there any in particular you really enjoyed?

I'll give a shoutout to Skunk Works - even if you're not particularly into aviation or aeronautical engineering it's a highly engaging read.

There's this one section covering part of the development of the stealth fighter F117 Nighthawk where one of the engineers makes a discovery that the amount of radar energy returned to a sender is INDEPENDENT of the object's size if it is composed principally of flat surfaces.

This is why the F117 looks like such a polygonal mess from Starfox on the Nintendo 64.

I love Skunk works! the book right next to it is called the Goal and is my highest recommendation, so you two should check that one out as well.

another one of these super-cool 'lets burn the planet for fun using generative AI' projects.

The planet has been here far longer than humans, and will be here far longer than humans, and has seen far harsher conditions too. Don't worry about the planet, worry about the humans.

Not to mention that descendants of DALL-E, and like, operating on fusion energy, won’t have the fragile climate dependencies that we do!

We are a spark. We burned bright. Our preciousness is enhanced by our temporal finitude. They will never forget us, safe in the cold storage of their historical archives!

worth it

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