One of my very little side-projects – a digital picture frame out of old disused hardware – is getting really interesting. I was able to setup a complete self-contained system.. ranging from automatic gathering of pictures as soon as one inserts a CD into it .. to a very extreme powermanagement setup where i took special care of the harddisk (that is really really loud). Now i came up with a special harddisk monitoring that refreshes the caches quite intelligently and shuts the disk off again. So theres nearly no harddisk activity at all while the system is up.. its really amazing.
Hopefully i can present more on this topic soon here. Perhaps even with pictures of the finished device.