RIP Chumby

So if you've never heard of Chumby (or the Sony Dash for that mater) it's fine, neither has anybody else.  The Verge just let me know that they are going the way of the Dodo bird and have no longer have any employees.  It's sad in a way, the device as envisioned was really a neat idea, and I wanted one in theory I just wanted everything about it to be different.  I heard about the device because of my interest and admiration of Andrew "bunny" Huang, MIT PHD that wrote Hacking the XBOX.  You can keep up with bunnie on his blog, dude does really interesting security research and just general messing with commercial products.

The gist of the device was an wifi connected alarm clock that can interact with different widgets.  Sounds cool right?

Well it wasn't.

It was slow, the touch screen was of a bygone era and cardinal sin of sins it only supported flash widgets you had to load on their servers.  In short it sucked.  I wanted to love you, and I hope someone tries again in this category of devices because it was really a cool idea. I currently use a discarded HTC EVO 4G i resurrected from the grave (it got run over) and to a lesser extent my Nook Color tablet for this type of a device.  If you want something that's fun and connected to the internet and does tons of stuff and doesn't make you into an iDouche, I love Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0).  It appears the android devs finally listened and support advanced network setups and proxies so I can actually use these devices in my workplace now!