Open Source. Squeezable.

I drove down to the US today to pick up my new clock radio.  Why, you ask, would I drive 40 kilometers of Canada’s worst roads and suffer the American border patrol enema just for a clock radio?  Why, because my new little gadget lovely is a Chumby.  So new you can’t even buy it from Canada, I asked Tom to pick one up for me and we met in Newport, VT today for lunch and to exchange the goods.

Chumby is  an embedded linux wireless device in a cute, soft, squishable form factor.  It has a touchscreen interface, a squeeze sensor, an accelerometer and a 350 MHz ARM processor.

It does not have a manual.  I mention this because Linux, for all the progress its made in the last 16 years, is still not the user-friendly wonder that it could be.  I persist that user-friendly and simple should be the default functionality and that we should not have to sacrifice functionality for this.  There are advanced modes on the Chumby whereby I can do just about anything I’d like to do on a linux system….SSH in and configure a separate web server…no problem!

So the first thing I did this afternoon is wrote a module for it (the base programming is delivered by Flash widgets that can be written by anyone) to display my home security camera…took me all of 10 minutes.  I also added modules to watch YouTube videos, view my friends’ Flickr photos, display xkcd comics, review tech blogs and Google News and some internet radio stations.

So far it looks awesome.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it in the next while.

~ by deltacow on March 29, 2008.