I have gone (and will go back tomorrow) to the BarCampNYC3. The requirement for every person to speak was not enforced, but I figured I have something to contribute anyway. I brought and talked about the Chumby. I entitled my talk “Chumby - Open, Cool, Cute“.

My session must have only had 6 people in it, but I think all those people were interested and asked good questions. I certainly got some queries after the talk and even later in the evening, when I put Chumby on display again. Certainly, the accelerometer-based Chumball widget was inviting; after all, the only other well-known device that supports accelerometer is iPhone. I even got a positive review of the session already.

I also got to speak to some people about my research and allowed for a silly photograph to be taken of me.

I have enjoyed a number of other sessions. Not every presenter had a strong idea of what they wanted to say, but there was plenty of people in the audience willing to lend their understanding and interpretation. I think this must a part of BarCamp’s culture.

Since Dave Winer declared Chumby the next breakthrough device, there has been a small flood of people talking about how cool it is and how much they want one. The usual TechMeme effect, I guess.

I admit, it is a cute device. I have a black one, which I am hoping will work well as a picture frame for less-technically minded parents. It is certainly worth learning Flash for (Flash Lite actually), a decision I kept putting off.
For those just starting with Chumby, I have a list of interesting articles and videos people have already written about their experiences.

Videos:

• Interview with Chumby’s founders on Intruders.tv (UK channel). I believe, the interview was taken a while ago, but it just came up. The second half of the interview has interesting technical details.
• Chumby as an ambient computer - presentation by Chris Hughes at BarCampLA4.

Interesting articles:

• Chumby as a sign of the future of Internet TV.
• New York Times’s blog article
• Chumbys as cultural probes (and another one)
• Possible role of a Chumby in a museum

Interesting technical articles and resources:

• Streaming bee. fm music directly from Chumby, while we all wait for the official Internet Radio support.
• Basic wireframe templates for screens development from Scott Janousek.
• Heated discussion on how open Chumby actually is.

There are many more articles and first experience videos around the web, but they very quickly start to repeat each other.

Bee.fm is an internet radio station that allows to stream custom playlists or individual albums. It is similar to pandora.com, but with full manual control over the playlist.

It uses open streaming that can be listened to from iTunes as well as from its own flash player. It can be also listened to with Chumby’s btplay command.

To get Chumby to stream the Bee.fm’s radio, you need to get the URL for the playlist you are interested in. The URL is in plain text form inside the .m3u file you receive after clicking on larger play button. Normally this file is opened with iTunes or other streaming music player.

The streaming URL can file can be extracted by looking at the entry in iTunes and clicking Get Info, Edit URL. Alternatively, the .m3u file can be opened in a plain text editor.

The URL will be quite long and look like http://77.91.228.2:80/play/46df15a1e4f1 … f/66……

To play it, connect to Chumby via ssh and run btplay URL or btplay URL & ; the later if you planing to do other tasks in the shell. On Windows, if using putty, the URL can be pasted into the shell with right mouse button.

Enjoy!

P.s. Warning: sometimes after btplay is stopped, it does not want to start again, complaining about missing /tmp files and unhappy ALSA device. This may specifically happen if btplay is run in a background and kill command is used. Restarting Chumby fixes the problem. I am not aware of other fixes at this point.

I want to get my parents a digital picture frame. But at the moment I cannot. That’s because I don’t want my somewhat less-technical parents to have to fiddle with memory cards, choosing and transferring photographs or running Vista.

My ideal digital picture frame for them would be one sitting in a living room or a bedroom with new photos to delight my parents every so often.

Such a device would have to be:

• Wi-Fi capable - My parents have a wireless router and there is no point for a picture frame to sit next to the computer
• Able to pull content from private online photo account, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb, to which our extended family could push photos
• No ongoing monthly costs - subscription would make it a gift that keeps taking, rather than giving
• Controllable over the internet
• Ideally with speakers and/or some way to show video to be more future proof

I have been on a lookout for such a device for more than a year and had no luck. Obviously, digital picture frames are still a personal purchase rather than a gift one. Or maybe less technical parents is a smaller niche than I imagine.

But I have hope. Yesterday, I have received a small package that contained a Chumby! Chumby is not a digital picture frame. It is quite small (I think the website’s image is real-size). But it has features that make up for its size.

It has Wi-Fi access, including password-protected; it has no monthly costs; it is configured over the internet and comes with speakers. It also has touch sensitive screen, microphone and accelerometer (like in Wii controller).

Notice I did not say anything about pictures or videos. That’s because Chumby is a more generic device. It allows to choose what widgets run on it and a widget is a program written in Flash, the same environment that allows us to watch Flickr slide-shows and youTube videos, listen to internet radio and play casual games. It can also double as alarm clock and iPod music player.

More importantly, because anybody can develop and share a widget, I am not married to any particular way of presenting photos. Flickr widget exists already, but other photo and video service widgets are on the way.

And, if I am still unhappy, I can write my own widgets. Chumby runs Linux under the covers and Flash Lite 3 interface. And, differently from Apple’s position with iPhone, Chumby Industries encourage people to modify their software, hardware and even basic device shape. Already, there are compilation packages for python, perl and even Java (actually JamVM).

Chumby is not yet for public sale, but that should happen any day now. I was on a mailing list, so got a pre-release invite. That is good, as it means I have some time to really play with my Chumby.

And if all goes well, my Chumby will soon have a new friend or two hiding under the Christmas tree overseas.