Those of us here who were early adopters of the Chumby already know this pain. They were a great bedside gadget, killed off when the servers went dark.
RIP Chumby.
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I’d suggest hackers will find a way to bring them back to life (even if it means replacing the computer entirely) but I’m not sure whether the hardware is even interesting enough to make the effort worth it.
I remember seeing this thing doing stuff on a lab bench at IPC (safety/standards testing company) and assuming it was just another Internet of Shit product and I guess I was right.
This reminds me of the old Model 500 telephone, which, if you’ll recall, Ma Bell would not allow you to own – you had to lease it for some absurd price per month. One thing they did in order to deter reverse engineering was to immerse the main circuit board (which was really in that nether world between what we think of as a circuit board and a “wiring harness”) in a thick, resinous nuisance gel. Nothing, I tell you, NOTHING rinsed that shit off. It was probably full of PCBs too. I’m sure I’m fine.
I’m talkin’ about this little fucker here:
Crack that baby open and it’s full of a viscous, sticky, translucent gel that sticks to everything, especially the interior components and human flesh.
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There really ought to be a law that turns abandonware into an open-source playground.
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Whereas modern phones contain the other kind of PCB.
Ugh, Howard Johnson’s, though.
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the juicero of robots
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I blows my mind that someone would pay US$899 for that. What’s it even for? What does it do that Alexa doesn’t also do without taking up way less space? I don’t even want Alexa.
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Wait … you mean the users or the robots?
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Both.
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Someone unloaded one of these on us. She couldn’t be bothered to wipe it so it’s effectively bricked at my level of knowledge. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it.
Did you know that Chumby’s servers are running again?
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I look forward to our new cyberconnected cloud enabled future when stories like this are commonplace.
Only is not a stupid toy, is your pacemaker.
And by forward I mean I look forward to drink a lot to forget I live in the crappiest cyberpunk future possible
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In both cases we are talking about devices that came out with terrible timing. Chumby came out right before the advent of smartphones, and people who wanted a touch-screen device with apps went with the mainstream smartphones instead. Jibo, despite the robotic head, was basically an Amazon Echo before the Echo made by a tiny company.
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At times I’ll lament that we’ve got the overbearing megacorporations of the cyberpunk dystopia but I’ve still got to use my meat arms like a chump, but stories like this make me see the bright side of the latter half of the complaint.
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Man, I remember encountering one of those. I was so young and innocent at the time that I didn’t even think of it being a likely antifeature rather than some engineering decision born of old-school Ma Bell’s “evil; but you’d better believe we’re reliable” ethos. Thanks for making me feel old.
Definitely closed that part of the device up in a hurry and focused on the more palateable electromechanical bits…
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HJ’s ice cream and fried clams (best not enjoyed simultaneously) were pretty good, actually. I mostly remember them from their twilight years in the late 1970s when they used to have the franchise for the Illinois tollway rest-stops (“oases”), but still they were more interesting than the fast food chains which are there now.
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I have one of the “infocast 8” units(Best Buy livery, Chumby software, somewhat larger and no battery) and it lives on to this day(albeit with only the default clock face).
While it’s definitely too bad that chumby got buried(very bad timing shortly before misc. Android widgets pretty much buried the entire category); I’m more sympathetic to them because of how supportive they were of adapting the devices to life away from the mothership. Enabling SSH is a built in menu option, the root FS lives on a removable MicroSD card on many of the models; and there’s actual toolchain documentation(though the SoCs aren’t getting any younger, so I’m not quite sure how up to date you can get things).
Doesn’t really help people who don’t want to bother with that; but that’s the sort of good faith that makes “yeah ‘the cloud’ is just here to enforce your recurring revenue model” much less likely.
The only model that is pretty much lost is the one that Sony was involved with. They wanted to add video features, and protect their precious ‘premium content’ so most of the ‘tinkerers welcome!’ features quite specifically do not apply; and the device will resist.
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What a Gypo!
