What’s a Chumby?

I’ve been doing some (work-related) research lately about the Chumby. It’s basically a tiny Linux device with a touchscreen and wireless networking that runs Flash Lite stuffed inside a squishy beanbag (yeah, seriously!). Here are the current specs:

  • 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen
  • Two external USB 2.0 full-speed ports
  • 350 MHz ARM processor
  • 64 MB SDRAM
  • 64 MB NAND flash ROM
  • Stereo 2W speakers
  • Headphone output
  • Squeeze sensor
  • Accelerometer (motion sensor)
  • Leather casing
  • AC adapter included
  • WiFi connectivity
  • Access to the free Chumby Network
  • Over-the-air software updates

I remember reading about the Chumby several years ago before it was a physical product you could purchase (it was more of a hacker project). It sounded neat, but I didn’t really see the point of an expensive internet-enabled clock radio (and I have a gadget addiction problem, so that’s saying something). It reminded me of those Ambient Orbs sold at Brookstone that would change colors based on the movement of the stock market, or the Nabaztag rabbit. Why would I want that? I just didn’t “get” the purpose of ambient devices.

Well, they’ve come a long way since then. Even David Pogue was impressed with the cushy little gadget and the widgets it can display. Basically you buy the hardware, connect it to your wireless network, configure your account on chumby.com, pick and customize the widgets you want displayed (and there are a lot of them!) and for how long, and then sit back and watch the fun as it pulls everything down via the free Chumby network.

Anyone can develop widgets for the Chumby, given you know how to create Flash applications (which I do not). I’ve downloaded the FlashDevelop environment but haven’t really had the chance to seriously play with it (other than compiling a basic “Hello World” app). I found one person’s attempt at a TiVo widget but have no way of checking it out since I don’t actually have a physical Chumby (yet).

The Chumby can currently be purchased in a variety of colors for $199 (which is a little strange since the David Pogue video from early 2008 mentions the price as $179 … better hardware, maybe?). From what I’ve read the Chumby network is “free” (and should remain that way) because it will occasionally slip “ad” widgets in between the widgets you’ve chosen to display. Also, it’s not battery powered and thus needs to be plugged in (it’s not meant to be a mobile device). It does have a 9V battery connector, but that’s meant only as a battery backup for the alarm clock feature.

So far I am resisting the urge to buy one myself, but Father’s Day is coming up in a few months … 😀

To see what it’s like, I created a virtual Chumby. I configured the widgets it displays and then generated the embed code for this post. You can see a larger version of the Flash application here. Go ahead and click on it, you can actually interact with some of the widgets (like the refrigerator magnet one).

Update 10/10/2013: unfortunately, Chumby closed its doors in 2011 and shut down. There is a basic Chumby service still available, but all it shows is a non-interactive clock.

Update: even that non-interactive clock is gone now. No more virtual Chumby. 🙁

Pro Acoustics 2.5″ mini-cube speakers

Pure Resonance 2.5" mini-cube speakersThe week before Easter we painted all of the central rooms in our house (kitchen, dining room, and family room) which had not been painted since we moved in about 8 years ago.

In the family room, where the home theater setup is, we now have much lighter walls, so my old, blocky, and black KLH 9900 satellite speakers (purchased 9 years ago along with my receiver) really stood out and looked … well, old.

I wanted something smaller, and nicer looking to replace those speakers, so I purchased the Pro Acoustics 2.5″ mini-cubes (ceiling mounted version). Installation was quick and simple: I just took down the old speakers and brackets and put up the new ones. Luckily the bracket holes lined up so I didn’t have to do any new drilling. The only minor problem I had was the screw that connects the speaker assembly to the mount pole wouldn’t screw in tightly. This was frustrating since the brackets and speakers come together and should connect seamlessly together.

Once I got them mounted and wired up I did a quick sound test with “The Matrix” DVD and liked what I heard. Our family room has a strange vaulted ceiling: looking at the TV, the ceiling on the left-hand side is about 14 feet tall and then slopes down to about 9 feet on the right-hand side. As a result, the front and rear left speakers are a few feet higher than the right side. Since each speaker consists of two swiveling cubes, I was able to configure the speakers to get the maximum audio coverage of the room despite the strange architecture. I still need to get out my sound pressure meter and Avia DVD to fine-tune the new setup, but for now at least it looks a lot nicer (and sounds about the same).

Finally got into the Trillian Astra beta

Thanks to a tip from Lifehacker I finally snagged an invite to the Trillian Astra beta program. It’s puzzling that the Cerulean Studios guys are just handing out the software now. I “applied” for the beta a long time ago (seems like years) and was never selected or notified. I’ve been a Trillian Pro user since May 2004 (and used Trillian Basic for a few years before that) so I thought for sure eventually I would be picked. Now today I apply again and within minutes I had the e-mail with the download link and my registration key.

The install/upgrade went smoothly: I created my new Astra account and linked it to my existing Trillian Pro account. The software found my existing settings and migrated them all into Astra (aka Trillian 4.0). All of my plugins (like POP3 Mail and Weather) were still there, including my contacts and contact groups. The only thing I seem to have lost was my custom names for my contacts so I had to go through the list and rename them. The new Cordonata skin is slick looking and I like how you can easily change the colors (I prefer darker themes, with transparency).

There are a lot of new features (that I will probably never use) focused on social networking: plugins and widgets for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. My primary use of Trillian is multi-service chat and that’s what it still does the best.

When released, the Pro version of Astra will cost $25, or $10 for upgrading users.

Presidential TiVo?

Does Barack Obama have a TiVo on Air Force One? This article seems to imply that, when talking about the president’s TV viewing habits:

For less R-rated fare, he tunes into “Hannah Montana” or “SpongeBob SquarePants” in the White House with his daughters. Aides said he would have watched Monday night’s NCAA championship on TiVo on his way home from Iraq Tuesday night.

I wonder what kind of WishLists he has set up. 😉

WIJFR: Childhood’s End

The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city — intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? With the advent of peace, man ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a malaise settles over the human race. To those who resist, it becomes evident that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. As civilization approaches the crossroads, will the Overlords spell the end for humankind … or the beginning?

The latest book I just finished was Arthur C. Clarke’s classic “<a href=”https://www.amazon.com/Childhoods-End-Del-Rey-Impact/dp/0345444051/175-8959758-0201461/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp&amp&amp&ref_=as_li_ss_tl&amp&linkCode=ll1&tag=chmod64409-20&linkId=024c2bc7f417adf33a07fe59c4311ef4&language=en_US” rel=Nofollow”>Childhood’s End.” Like a few of the other books I’ve read lately, I picked this up as a recommendation from Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson on their Security Now! podcast (it was their Audible pick-of-the-week back in episode #172).

I’ve decided I’m pretty bad at writing these kind of reviews. I can think of all sorts of things to write about while I’m reading, but then when I’m done and it’s time to actually put words down, I come up empty. There are plenty of reviews of these books out there, so what’s the use of another one from me? I’ll just stick to my random thoughts and observations.

I saw a lot of things in Clarke’s book that might have influenced later works, such as:

  • In the opening pages, enormous spaceships suddenly appear over every major city of the planet. Picture the opening sequence of “Independence Day” (Clarke even mentions that in his Foreword).
  • In the second part (“The Golden Age”) there is a community of people living on the remote island of New Athens who are trying to bring the creative arts back from its pre-Overlords heyday (basically a new age commune). This reminded me a lot of the Dharma Initiative in “Lost.”

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the book (I actually marked the page when I read it so I would remember to mention it here):

Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges — absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives anymore. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!

Keep in mind that was written in 1952. Today, of course, the average daily viewing time is much higher (we have DVRs, cell phones, the internet, etc.) making that last line more true than ever.

April Fool’s Day

Google’s annual April Fool’s day joke was pretty creative: AutoPilot to automatically respond to your e-mail messages. There was also PC World’s article about the new TiVo that can record shows before they air (the TiVo SuperAdvance) that I thought was cute. Other than that, I really didn’t see a lot of other tom-foolery.

However, when I turned on my Wii this evening to do my Wii Fit body test:

Do schools still need computer labs?

I was sad to hear (on TWiT episode #188, via Ars Technica), that the University of Virginia has decided to dismantle their student computer labs. Apparently there’s not much of a need for them now that just about every incoming freshman has a laptop.

I have lots of fond memories of my college’s computer labs. As a Computer Information Systems major, I spent a lot of time the various departmental labs: the VAX lab, the word processing lab, the UNIX lab, the programming lab, the multimedia lab, etc. Even once I finally had my own IBM-compatible PC (my freshman year I still had my Atari 800XL), I still spent a lot of time in the lab. It was a community … a place where you could go to work on assignments, get help from other people, or give assistance to others. Some nights, when the “homework” was done I would spend time playing multi-user games like Galactic Trader on the local VAX, or any of the various MUDs on the internet (like AmberMUSH or the one hosted on the Cleveland Freenet … man, those were some serious time sinks for me back then). I even ran my own MUD on the university VAX for a while, a heavily customized version of Monster, written in Pascal.

Later on in my college years I actually worked in the various school computer labs as a lab monitor. I’d have to help the engineering majors with their FORTRAN programs, or the comp-sci majors with their Ada, or C, or COBOL homework, or the math students with their SAS assignments … I encountered a wide variety of people and problems in those labs. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

So it’s sad for me to see that social part of computing starting to disappear. I’m sure not all schools will follow UVa, but I’ll bet this is the start of a trend. Like the UVa post says:

Lab software usage statistics from 2008 reveal that out of a total of 651,900 hours spent using software in the ITC-provisioned public computing labs, 95% of the time (over 619,500 hours), students were running commodity or free programs such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Microsoft Office. All of these software programs come pre-loaded on student laptops or are available at low or no cost to UVa students.

In contrast, just 5% of the time spent running software in ITC-provisioned public labs was devoted to specialized packages such as MatLab, Eclipse, Mathcad, or SPSS.

It’s hard to argue with statistics like that.

Unfortunate warranty timing

My wife’s 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid starting having problems with the radio and CD changer this week. It was doing strange things like trying to switch discs when you were changing the radio station, or randomly ejecting CDs.

It occurred to me this morning, out of the blue, that this would probably be covered under the car’s warranty. So we look it up in the documentation and it’s the standard 36 months or 36,000 miles. We check the car’s mileage: 35,993! And the Toyota dealership is 9 miles away! 😮

My wife calls the dealership and explains the situation, asking if we bring in the car first thing tomorrow morning, will they honor the warranty even if the car shows 36,002 because the probem started before the 36k mark? Nope!

Arrgh! 😡 If I had thought of the warranty angle before we drove to Disney yesterday we would have had some buffer mileage to work with to get this fixed. Oh well!