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 …

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A GUI timeline and OS retrospective

On one of the forums I frequent there’s been a recent thread about the evolution of the graphical user interface. In that discussion someone posted this link to a GUI timeline that shows screenshots of many of the UIs that evolved over the years. It’s a really cool walk through GUI history and made me …

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The DTV switchover in hurricane country

So the original February 17th deadline for the digital TV switchover has come and gone but only a handful of stations have shut off their analog signals thanks to the DTV Delay Act. Is everyone confused yet? One thing I don’t think a lot of people here in hurricane country have thought of (even myself, …

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1TB of storage at home, nice!

Shortly after the new year began, I started converting all of my DVDs (and even some old VHS tapes!) into MP4 format with the goal being immediate access to my entire video library on any TiVo in the house using tools like pyTivo or streambaby. About two weeks into the project it became readily apparent …

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Merry Christmas! Now go frag someone …

We got back this evening from our trip to Los Angeles, CA where we spent Christmas with my wife’s family. Back in 2004, my brothers-in-law and I started a (somewhat dubious) new tradition: the holiday frag fest. We were all at my in-laws house that year and we all had laptops and my father-in-law had …

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