You are very quick to do what you seem to condemn. There are plenty of people who would come to the same conclusions as nathanm. This doesn't seem to be the place to try to defame people because they have a seasoned opinion. I have not gotten the impression that nathanm is a dishonest person but was trying to use zurk's firmware and give an honest appraisal. A kind thing to do would to actually point out in a civil way where you think he went wrong and give assistance in actually making it work as you envision it can be. Thanks for your consideration.

FWIW, I see this on the standard firmware as well.  If there's no network traffic for 6 or 7 minutes then it stops responding until the next WLAN group key renegotiation, when it _sometimes_ wakes up again.  I think it's an ARP issue; I can see my desktop doing an arp request, but the chumby doesn't respond.  From another machine that still has an ARP entry, I can ping the chumby without problem.

It's _possible_ this is a router issue, but I've seen it with 2 different routers (WRT54G, TP-Link) over the past couple of years and it's only the chumby that's affected (both of them), so I think it's likely a driver issue in the chumby kernel.

OK, I've got the zurkware running on my Classic. It took a long time because I ran into a number of tangentially-related problems.
1) My new Chumby was still on the 1.7.1 firmware. I found the link on these forums to the newer versions and upgraded it.
2) I couldn't get the zurk download to work properly on Firefox. It did work on Chrome.
3) My USB stick was formatted FAT16. The zurk Read Me says it needs to be FAT32. I didn't know if the difference was important or not, so I reformatted it. This took longer than you might think because I have a Mac and I don't know how to make Disk Utility format in FAT32 - I think it makes up its own mind depending on the size of the drive. Anyway, I spent some time trying to work out how to do this before just doing it in Windows.
4) My USB stick was only 1GB - the Read Me says this is sufficient but after a very slow unpacking I got a message saying there was not enough space on it.
5) So I started again on an 8GB USB.
6) This didn't work when I put it in the Chumby because I had forgotten to take the files out of the top level folder.
7) Once I did this, then it worked.
Obviously, none of these problems has anything to do with faults in the zurkware itself - but they will, perhaps, serve to illustrate the type of problems that people can encounter even within the seemingly simple task of ''unzip it onto a USB drive, plug it into the Chumby and reboot".
The next thing to do is to tackle the configuration of all those weather widgets. Although maybe it won't be necessary - the AccuWeather widget is telling me it is 60 degrees, mostly cloudy with calm winds in Pitt Meadows, BC and, amazingly, it is also 60 degrees, cloudy and calm here in Sydney, Australia.

Well if you guys have a huge number of problems unzipping a 400 meg file to a 1GB USB stick and plugging it into your chumby then I apologize.
Obviously your technical abilities are far inferior to my present opinion of your abilities so I shall readjust my expectations accordingly.
Sorry but Zurk's firmware is too difficult to install or use for you. Please continue with the Space Clock and avoid trying any offline firmwares on your chumby. You might brick it.

MODERATOR:  Please be nice. There are a number of reasons it might not be working. The zip file might have been corrupt, there could be a problem with the USB stick, or his Chumby just might not like that USB stick. I am sure there are other possibilities other than PEBKAC.

Like!

Yes. That's all you need to do. Because EVERYBODY needs to view the weather radar for the other side of the US, view the weather forecast for Pitt Meadows, and know what the day of the month is in German. The fact you have to understand is that not everyone is msharp42. Instead of telling me and other members of the forum what they're doing wrong, you're taking the same route as him.

I was an old-time advocate of zurkware, and I still believe it's potentially valuable. The problem for me now is that the documentation is so fragmented, because zurk's made basic changes to the architecture over the versions. Things mentioned above like USB size and changing weather parameters are good examples. A forum member made a handbook once but it was quickly outdated. To fine tune a lot of the settings, you'd have to read through a lot of his forum topics, and find the most recent method.

I did have a couple of early, simple versions of zurkware that worked. Since I could copy info from my own channels, I even got the weather for my own town, not Pitt Meadows. Since there's no legitimate source of widgets now, I guess for new members it's a moot point. I never tried using stuff off the octopus download, but I'd guess that's the cause of things like wrong-sized widgets.

Honestly, if there was comprehensive documentation,  I would like to try newer zurkware. Since only about 40 people have downloaded his new C1 version this week, I'd guess others have found this "progress" too much for them, too.

delaney99,
just looked at the thread, from my experience I would ask  real professionals to try to react different, and be more helpful to fellow chumby owners

Same here

Thanks for your blog entries, Rich. Like you, I have found Zurk's firmware to be full of unrealized potential. I especially love your description of the time sinks. I have also spent some time trying to modify various files, assuming they would do something, only to find that nothing happens.

For now, I do have one version of his firmware running on a Chumby 8 and another running on an Infocast 3.5. Both are running widgets that access the web quite successfully (various weather images, Yahoo weather, and a Clock/Temp widget). The C8 runs the same widgets all day with no problems. I configured the I3.5 to run different alarms that  trigger different channels at various times. But, it also reverts randomly (or at least I have not been able to identify a cause) to the offline channel. I have never been able to figure out why. I hope you have better luck.

Sounds very similar to my setup. I have an Infocast 3.5 in the home office -- mostly for internet radio streams while I'm working -- and a leatherbound Chumby by the bed as an alarm clock. Both run an old version of Zurkware, both have Yahoo weather and some clock widgets. I managed to get a new clock .swf installed as a widget, remove the weird clock overlay and that robot voice welcoming me to Zurk's Offline Firmware, all of which took days and days of experimentation and searching the forums.

My final modification was to alter the CBS podcast HTML files so I could listen to my favorite podcasts, and I decided that's enough. I'd like to have multiple channels, but I weighed the potential results against the time I'd have to spend on it, and I decided against it.