Picture Frame Mashup Taps Subreddits For “Deep Thoughts”

Remember “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”? We do, and we always enjoyed the quirky mix of soothing music, soft-focus nature images, and random absurd thought scrolling across the screen as bumpers between segments on Saturday Night Live. Clearly, [tvm78] remembers them, because his picture frame mashups of the r/EarthPorn and r/ShowerThoughts subreddits could have been written by Jack himself.

While [tvm78] shares no photos of his build and offers no tutorials, he makes it clear that this was his first build of any kind. He does offer a few details, like the fact that he’s driving a display with a Raspberry Pi, and he handily references a similar build that includes the code he borrowed to make his frame happen. While we feel that the original mashup works well, several helpful redditors offer suggestions for other combinations, like r/ArchitecturePorn and /r/nocontext, or r/abandonedporn and r/onelinehorror. Of course a straight grab from r/demotivational could be fun too.

We’ve seen tons of web-enabled picture frames before, and plenty of “magic mirror” builds that display useful information on a two-way mirror. But this one appeals to the cynic in us, and would make Jack Handey proud.

17 thoughts on “Picture Frame Mashup Taps Subreddits For “Deep Thoughts”

  1. Jack is actually US Senator Al Franken (MN-D). I met him once back stage at a debate with Anne Coulter (R). Met her too. The debate was BRUTAL! He is a funny man!

    Any way I just purchased a couple of frames at a local thrift store. One is dial-up and I’m trying to figure out how to reverse engineer it’s modem port to duplicate it’s handshaking to the pay-for-use BBS. Not even sure CIEVA even does that any more. So I wanted to supply my own pictures on my local server. Then I got lucky and found another unit that takes Bluetooth or USB wifi adapter to link to Google Picasso. However, Google just released that they are shuttering Picasso for a different image/video server. So I have my work cut out trying to figure out how to get the frame to point at new service. It may be seamless but I haven’t looked yet.

    Ideally my XYL is a Luddite and I would like to send her pictures while I’m on the road (i.e. waterfalls, meadows, mountains, cities, people, etc.). Since she is a Luddite (like most of her family) she can not use a PC/Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone, so I just wanted to automate it and put the frame on the end table and she can just look at it and the photos magically appear without any user interaction. You can even send text too. “Hey Honey look at this weird chick!” (I got one of those Chinese periscope prisms for my Smartphone so people don’t know I’m taking their picture…)

    1. Pretty sure that’s not true:
      Jack Handey

      Jack Handey (born February 25, 1949) is an American humorist. He is best known for his Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey, a large body of surrealistic one-liner jokes, as well as his “Fuzzy Memories” and “My Big Thick Novel” shorts. Although many people assume otherwise,[1][2] Handey is a real person, not a pen name or character.

      Sure, Jack and Al worked together, but Jack lives in New Mexico now and is still writing.

      1. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darnit [sonofthunderboanerges], people like you!”

        Wonder if Senator Franken gazes in the mirror in the Hart Senate Office building every day and affirms himself.

    1. Hirudinea – Not sure what you desire… however… if you code in JavaScript you could build a script that pulls in numbered images (1 .jpg, 2 .jpg 3 .jpg etc) from somewhere on Internet in a sequence and then either display them in a browser screen in a predefined blank image placeholder or in the browser’s background with document.body.style.backgroundImage = "url('img_tree.jpg')" You could even do randomization of numbered images.If you don’t use numbers then you’ll have to have a database of desired image proper names and making it harder to do for next loops or random number image assignments.(i.e. rename your cache of images to be just numbers not proper names)

      If you have Visual Basic (like 6.0?) and a PC with Windows XP (higher versions have crippled SendKeys() and all you get is “permission denied”), you could pull in numbered images from an internet source via a VB browser command, then do a SendKeys() to do a “Set As Desktop Background…”. The app would run minimized and your wallpaper would just sequence through the Internet images chosen. You may be able to get around the “permission denied” by using a Windows Shell command.

      Unfortunately you can not use JavaScript to get at the “document.execCommand()” to get at that particular right-mouse-click wallpaper command. If so you could write the whole thing in JS from your browser. Let me know if this is not correct or needs clarification.

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