Me and my Chumby
For my birthday this year, my husband Dan bought me a Chumby. If you’ve never heard of a Chumby, it’s because they are new…just started shipping to people who signed up via email about 6 months ago to buy one.
So, what’s a Chumby? It’s a little device (computer) that connects wirelessly to the internet and runs small applications called Widgets. At first glance, I thought it was a GPS (and was a little disappointed that my husband would buy me a GPS since we already have a Garmin and he has GPS for his Nokia Tablet). When Dan explained the features of the Chumby to me, I wasn’t quite sure how or why I would need one….and I immediately gathered that this might well have been something Dan wanted for himself.
Find out more about it by going to www.chumby.com
I’ll give you the nutshell of it here. First of, if you don’t have a wireless network available, your Chumby won’t connect to the Internet. Secondly in order to configure the Chumby, you must have a computer with internet access, as the Chumby is configured through their website. It is motion sensitive (which is pretty neat, although I’ve not yet used anything that required that feature) and also receives user input through a touchscreen.
WIDGETS: there are tons of widgets available on the website. If you are not faint-hearted, they have instructions on how to hack the Chumby and also create your own Widgets. I have no doubt that Dan is going to attempt one or the other (knowing him, probably both).
CHANNELS: Channels serve as categories (think “folders”) which store the Widgets. The Chumby is initially configured with a Default channel. If you don’t care about organization, you can just dump all your widgets in there. Being somewhat anal retentive, I felt compelled to create different channels, one for News, one for Games, one for Webcams … you get the idea.
Each widget can be configured to display for a certain length of time, according to your preferences. For instance, I have two news RSS feeds in my NEWS channel, each set to display for about 30 seconds. So, if I set my Chumby to my news channel, it will cycle through the two news widgets, displaying each for 30 seconds at a time. Dan says you can also lock a widget so it is the only one that displays in the channel.
WHAT’S ON MY CHUMBY:
I managed to incorporate some neat stuff into my Chumby. The really cool thing about it is that you don’t actually store the widgets on the Chumby – they actually run from Chumby.com’s website. So there are no storage limits on widgets.
I have newsfeeds, weather reports, games, social networking (Twitter) and Webcams.
The newsfeeds are from my local newspaper and CNN.com. Weather forecasts are from NOAA. I have two games – one a space type game, the other a Halloween game (like Whack a Mole) and a third widget which is not really a game, but a weird little monster called Raa! If you poke him with your finger, he opens his mouth and lets out a loud RAA! It’s so weird you can’t help but laugh at it.
The webcams are pretty much on display on my Chumby all the time because our son loves to look at them. The three webcams I selected are all located in
Being that you can only run one channel at a time, if you have several channels set up like I do, you have to manually select which one you want to be “on”. I wouldn’t necessarily want to put everything into a single channel because with an array of 12 Widgets, I may want to see only certain ones when I use the Chumby. If I want to see news feeds, I wouldn’t want to have to cycle through all the Widgets, so that’s why news is in its own channel.
Am I glad Dan bought me one for my birthday? YES! It’s a neat little gadget to have. And while it probably won’t be in great demand before Christmas (because it’s brand new), I have a feeling that this will be one of the “cooler” toys in the near future.
Am I worried about Dan “borrowing” it? No, not for now. His workplace doesn’t have a wireless network. hehehe
