Gadget lust

Chumby is an open, hackable, network-connected gizmo. It's a little hard to describe, because it's designed to be extensible -- the closest one can come is a clock radio that can display images and play streaming audio.

What we decided to build was a really low-cost, wireless (WiFi), Internet-connected device that will sit on your bedside table (or in your bathroom, or kitchen, or living room, or maybe even plug into your car somehow...) that could do a lot more than this old clock radio (or your cellphone, if that\u2019s what you use to wake yourself up.) And we named it "chumby."

Oh, and it has a mostly-cloth "case" for which they provide patterns. Not available yet, of course; they're aiming for $150. Yes, of course I've put myself on the list.

Shiny!

Just transferred about 1.3GB of concert data (two Audacity projects) from my MacTel laptop to my fileserver. Took under 5 minutes over gigabit ethernet. Yay for shiny new network hardware. (Had to sit the lappy on top of the laser printer because all I have in Cat6 or Cat5e at the moment are a couple of 1m patch cables.) Split-up concert pieces Real Soon Now.

The Mac has been a distinctly mixed bag. Sure, everything "just works", provided you drink the Apple KoolAid and haven't had over 20 years' worth of Unix experience setting your expectations. And we'll ignore the fact that I had to discharge the battery and leave the thing turned off and charging overnight to convince the power applet that it had anything other than an 83%-charged battery. I expect it'll make a nice Linux machine.

Meanwhile, the departure two weeks ago of our group's summer intern has freed up a lovely Dell widescreen (1920x1200) monitor, which is now sitting on my desk. I wasn't expecting to be able to get one until next fiscal year, having burned up this year's hardware budget on the Mac. It remains to be seen whether my desktop machine will drive it, but I'm hopeful. (Update: just added 1920x1200 to all the mode lists in xorg.conf, and it worked. You wouldn't think 320 pixels would make that much difference, but it does.)