Product Review: Pandigital 7-inch Photo Frame
I picked up a Pandigital 7-inch Photo Frame today from my nearby Staples ($89). We bought it as a gift to give to our longtime child care provider, Lori, who is going away to college. I spent the better part of this evening playing around with it and am very unimpressed with the product.

The photo frame includes the common features found on most photo frames: 128 MB built-in memory, slots for a variety of external memory cards, mp3 support, and a slideshow feature. The first thing I tried was to just dump some MP3 files and some full-sized pictures onto the internal memory and see what would happen. The result was a slideshow of some very poorly re-sized pictures on a poor quality LCD monitor. The upside was that the music sounded great! I realized that I wasn't going to be able to do anything about the poor LCD hardware (hey... I get what I pay for), but I played around with the picture sizing so that I could avoid the built-in non-smart re-sizing included in the frame. After a few attempts, I was able to get a decent result - not great, but good enough.

Pandigital's bios/UI leaves a lot (a lot!) to be desired. It is slow, clunky, and less than friendly. Furthermore, the on-frame controls are completely non-intuitive (fortunately the remote works well). I would expect that if I owned or kept this product for myself that I would not change pictures very often, just to avoid the experience of working with the frame. But once the frame is set up, it functions ok... just don't look too closely at the quality. The more expensive pandigital frames probably have better LCD screens, but they all likely share the same crappy UI. Yuck.

I would not recommend this product except to those that are looking for something that is cheap; there must be better options out there.

(Postscript Sun Jun 24 19:07:41 PDT 2007 // Kristy bought another one of these today from Staples for her Dad for Father's Day. It appears that the buttons have been updated with a new revision of the model, but no upgrades to the bios. The LCD quality seems worse with this model than the previous one. Not good.)

Be Happy Sack Lunches
The other day Berkeley and I were in the car coming home from somewhere (maybe it has been two months ago now, I can't recall exactly). At the corner of the freeway exit, a man was holding a cardboard sign and asking for money. We drove past him. Berkeley asked me about the man. I remember now telling him that some people don't have a home or a bed to sleep in, some people don't have food to eat, and that we should help whenever we can because "we are the Berretts and Berretts help people" (or something to that effect).

It must have had an impact. A few days ago, while Berkeley was in the car with Kristy, they were at the same exit and saw a different man with a sign asking for money and food. Berkeley told Kristy that we have to help the man because "We are the Berretts. We help people." And so Kristy drove to a nearby Burger King, bought a combo meal, and then returned to the exit to with the intent to give it to the homeless man. But the man had since left.

So today for Family Home Evening we made some sack lunches for the express purpose of giving to people that we see on the side of the road (instead of giving money). The lunches include a juice box, a bag of trail mix, a package of fruit leather, and some fruit snacks. We had a little assembly line going. I opened up the sack and put in the bag of trail mix, then Eliana put in the juice box, Berkeley put in the rest, and Kristy stapled it shut.

Then Berkeley, without prompting, decorated some of the bags. Here is the result:

We have about twelve of these in the back of the car now for future use.

(Update Mon Jun 25 16:41:37 PDT 2007 // updated for grammatical clarity)