The Wiki Man | 18 October 2008

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States.

Last month I bought from eBay a strange little electronic gadget called a Chumby, an item not yet on sale outside the United States. It worked happily for ten minutes and then died. I duly performed a hard reboot (that’s the technical term for ‘switching it off and on again’) only for the same thing to happen again. And again.

With hindsight, of course, I should have simply called the government pretending to be a banker and explained that I had bought something that at first looked clever but turned out to be worthless crap. I would then have had my money refunded in full at the taxpayer’s expense while continuing to own a six-bedroom house in Sevenoaks and an Aston Martin DB9. At the time I was unaware of this ruse, so I went out and paid for a second Chumby instead. This one works fine.

Why the persistence? Amazingly, in those few minutes before the original device conked out, I was already hooked. Online readers can click to www.chumby.com to find out why. Those of you who prefer their Speccie in the traditional dead-tree format should read on.

The Chumby is a cuddly little ball-shaped thing; essentially a Linux clock-radio on steroids (or perhaps LSD). You connect it to your home wifi network and then watch as it downloads your choice of elegant Chumby informational widgets and displays them in constant rotation on its cute little touch-sensitive screen. What’s marvellous about these widgets is that they are developed not only by Chumby themselves but also by hundreds of enthusiasts — a practice known as crowd-sourcing.