I have a cheap photo frame with very little built in memory but it had a SD slot in it so I waited until 8GB SD cards went on sale and bought one.

I exported all my photos from iPhoto in one big drag and drop into a folder. This ended up with about 7000 JPG files in a single directory. When I put this SD card in my photo display simply hung for a long time on the Loading… screen and then gave up and only showed files from the internal memory – not the SD card.

So I wrote a little Python script to spread the files across 10 folders with 10 sub-folders in each folder. Just pushed things around randomly basically hoping the microcode in the photo frame could handle 80 photos per directory. I dropped the Python script in the main folder of the SD card and fired away. I even got rid of some of those Mac metadata files which started with a dot to give my poor photo frame a fighting chance.

import os
for i in range(10):
try: os.mkdir("dir"+str(i))
except: pass
for j in range(10):
try: os.mkdir("dir"+str(i)+"/dir"+str(j))
except: pass
i = 0
j = 0
for root, dirs, files in os.walk('.'):
for file in files:
if file.startswith(".") :
try: os.unlink(file)
except: pass
continue
if not ( file.endswith('.jpg') or file.endswith('.JPG') )  : continue
place = "dir"+str(i)+"/dir"+str(j)+"/"+file
j = j + 1
if j > 9 :
i = i + 1
j = 0
if i > 9 : i = 0
print file, place
os.rename(file,place)

And it worked – a cheap closeout photo frame ($20.00 from Aldi’s) with a $14 8GB SD card and I have 9 years of photos showing randomly! Yay!

I put up my previous blog post about the iPhone keyboard patent this morning – then I went to a meeting and then drove home. Just now (5 hours later) I decided to type the title of my blog post:
“Apple Touch Screen Keyboard Overlay”
Into Google to see how long it took for Google to find my blog post. OOPS – I waited too long. Google already found it and indexed it.
In less than five hours – I am the #2 search result for that set of keywords. Next time I try to see how long it takes for Google to find something, I will not wait so long. :)
Amazingly cool. Maybe they have software that knows what I am going to blog about before I blog about it!

One of the biggest remaining problems with the Apple iPhone (and presumably any Apple touch screen device) is the fact that one cannot touch type on the system. You must watch the keyboard as you type.

My idea is to make a plastic overlay (similar to a plastic screen protector)

Specialized cling plastic overlays can be made for special purposes (i.e. not just the QUERTY) keyboard and they can be interchanged.

This allows Apple (and others) to manufacture touch-screen devices with perfectly smooth glass and allows us to customize the “feel” of these devices to our own tastes.

Note: I originally came up with this idea September 2008. You see the dated picture. I revealed the idea to the University of Michigan Tech transfer folks September 22, 2008 – and they were not interested. I asked Apple if there were interested in any ideas without revealing the idea and their policy is not to accept anything like this from customers. I left the text(above) on my desktop for a while wondering if I could patent it myself – but just got bored and decided to clean up my desktop and post it here. Really I just want such a product to exist so I stop hating my iPhone’s keyboard.

I originally wrote this blog post in MoveableType and then converted it to WordPress – here is my Original blog post before I converted to WordPress.