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David Pogue Gushes Over the Chumby
stoolpigeon writes "IHT is running a David Pogue review of the Chumby. The Chumby is a small computer embedded in a soft case. The Chumby hardware and OS are open, and the review mentions that the device already has a large developer following, cranking out new widgets for owners. Pogue is obviously quite taken with the Chumby and gives a good introduction to a device that may be the inspiration for a new generation of hackers."
...and love it. About the only problem I have with it is the fact that in "My Streams" (an area where you can manually put in net radio stations you want the Chumby to play) long URLs simply cannot be entered in on the device itself, so I have to SSH into it and use VI to add any long URLs for streams manually. It came in a nice burlap bag (which I still use) and alternates between telling me the time, feeding me news, playing net radio, and displaying a friends photobucket account.
Earlier than that, actually. February was the official launch, meaning they had the software (Firmware/Control Panel) in what they considered to be a state which was stable and feature rich. You could buy one earlier, it was just made clear that your device was not running final software (although the update was painless).
Two words:
goatse spam
You can begin the giggling by looking at this help page entitled "Handling your Chumby". Some highlights include:
How do I clean my chumby?
Why is the squeeze sensor stuck?
I won't post the one about children handling the Chumby, because that would just be over the line.
For $40 more, you can snag yourself the Nokia N800 Iternet Tablet. The N810 drove its price way down, and the only differences are a built-in GPS, slide-out keyboard, and a 2GB SD card. The rest of the hardware is identical, and you can flash the latest N810 OS on the N800. The thing is highly hackable, with as much open-source software as Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's open source director, could get them to embrace (about 2/3 of the base system). With a very bright 800x480 display, Firefox and mplayer, it renders everything almost perfectly. It's got a thriving open-source community behind it with a bunch of apt repositories and ports. It's also the nicest e-book reader I've ever used.
:)
I don't work for Nokia. I just love mine.
Consumer-oriented reviews tend to emphasize its lack of pre-installed PIM apps and synchronization, but that's not a problem for your average technophile.
To give you an idea of how hackable it is, I hacked the init scripts to set up swap and mount my home directory from an SD card's ext2 partition. I SSH into it when I want to do this kind of stuff.
Parts of the hardware (and thus some of the drivers) aren't open. If you're a purist, this might put you off. Which brings us back on topic: the Chumby is completely open. Maybe this'll push Nokia to open more. Ari Jaaksi has even said that the open source software on the N800 is of far better quality than the in-house stuff - it's just convincing the suits that embracing it is a good idea that's difficult.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
The "email a photo" functionality is implemented by a third party as a widget. If you don't want to receive photos that way, simply don't choose that widget for display on the device. It's not like the device blindly accepts email photos and displays them.
Not only that, the hardware is open too - you can get complete schematics and it has an expansion card designed for easy addition of your homebrew electronics. You need an account (no Chumby required) and to agree to a not-too-onerous license to get the hardware docs. It's intentionally designed to be easy to hack, both hardware and software.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Got to play with it a maker faire and bought one the same day.
She currently uses it to listen to news and music streams and get weather reports and such. I don't think she's discovered the alarm features yet.
Nice and small and is excellent for the bedside, easy to operate, comes on quick and the touchscreen size is good for its purpose. The widgets are getting better more information feeds and stuff - even slashdot articles (not reply chains though)
I too wonder what happens if the parent co goes under what would be left, though I know it is flashable, as upon first power up it downloaded and installed a system update.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
They already do. Originally it was mostly just PSA videos that would just be a single frame until you clicked "play". They must have just signed a pretty big deal with CBS because just today, I started seeing a bunch of ads for CBS shows, and the videos play on their own (you have to click to turn the sound on.)
The user has to PICK the widgets to use on their Chumby - the company provides an initial set, which can be completely deleted. We have one and I've never seen or heard of the manufacturer altering the device other than flash OS upgrades. Get your paranoia straight, man!
Be Obscure Clearly
There are visual errors in time as well as in space.