I’ve got an electronic image frame on this Xmas.

What photos should I put on it? It looks like this typical frame people usually have on their tables in the office. But I have neither children nor wife, and I see my parents almost every day in person anyway. For some reason, I don’t have a lot of photos of my friends, nor I have my own pictures I’d like to see constantly rotating on my table.

So I’ve decided to put chinese characters on it. Patrick Hassel-Zein has compiled The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency, so the only thing I had to do is to pull the info from that page and generate Jpeg images out of it. The result looks like this:

It is far from perfect aestetically (black on white looks better, and the SimSun font looks lame in this size), but unfortunately my frame has a backlit that cannot be turned off, so putting a white image on it transforms it effectively to a light source, and I don’t want to have additional light sources on my table.

Here are all 3000 Chinese Characters (70 Mb).

I’ve used Visual Studio 2010 b2 for the generator, and my first impression is positive, although is was pretty slow on my notebook. The UI looks more professional than VS2008, and the builtin IDE tools could possible spare me installing Resharper, which is ridiculously expensive for those two features I’m using from it. So I’ve enjoyed the experience.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the image frame (Rollei DF-10.4). Sorry, dad, but its firmware makes it almost unusable, and there is no update because the firm seems to be bankrupt now. Can’t recommend it at all.