Topic: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I was just wondering, I can't be the only one....


Who here still looks to their Chumby, out of habit, to see what the temperature is outside?


Every time I do that, I just mentally smack myself in the forehead. big_smile

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Nope, I look about 2 feet to the left of the Chumby for that, where we have two outside temperature sensor displays (and a rain gauge sensor).  ;o)

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Yep. The three main things I do/did with mine was 1) alarm clock 2) nighttime music which for now I can still do 3) temp/weather.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Not me.  When the chumby servers were shut down, i reorganized my varios gadgets and have my chumbies in a location where I don't habitually check it for weather, tempr, radar, and forecast.

In their place is my one remaining dash, android tablets, and unused cell phones.  My chumbies are now serving duty as clocks and media streamers.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Constantly....  That was what I used my Chumby for most!

dead-eye wrote:

I was just wondering, I can't be the only one....


Who here still looks to their Chumby, out of habit, to see what the temperature is outside?


Every time I do that, I just mentally smack myself in the forehead. big_smile

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I think it would boost morale if Duane could just add a weather widget that could be localized on the chumby. I think the NOAA one you could just type in your zip from the settings (gear) page of the widget. Don't know if this could happen but I think it would "appear" like some progress.

Owner of 3 Sony Dash, 2 Info 8.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Definitely miss the weather function.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I'm kind of with songmaster on this one, as far as temp. Granted I miss the weather widgets, especially for radar, and I'm sure they'll be among the first back. For a different approach temporarily, you might try adding a NOAA Weather Radio stream to mystreams. Not all locations are streamed, but a lot of mp3 streams are listed here: http://www.wunderground.com/wxradio/

Some other locations are streamed by local websites, eg skiing or surfing sites.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I wanted to have weather too, but apparently the way the stub server works there's only one widget. However, if someone made a Trekky weather segment to go where the calendar is, and you could switch with the calendar by tapping the side 'tabs' on the LCARS interface (Just a stupid idea here, I know...) then my Infocast's usefulness will increase exponentially. I have no knowledge of flash, but it would be really cool if someone somehow integrated it.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

NOAA weather works for my area on the music section. I have a weather radio with SAME alerts by my bedside anyway so I don't need the one on the chumby. I also have LaCrosse Weather Direct gadgets around the house and get great internet weather predictions and outside temps. It is funny. I started out with the Weather Direct devices and love them. I was searching for more internet capability for weather and time that led me to Chumby.

Owner of 3 Sony Dash, 2 Info 8.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I don't forget that the weather widget isn't available, but I sure do miss it.  In fact, I regularly search the forum hoping for some sort of news/timeline on the "next steps".  I know Duane has more important things to do, but it seems that all of his efforts may be for naught if people start unplugging their Chumbys.  As a representative of the non-technical gadget-lover crowd, I know I have considered shelving mine numerous times since the switch.   Of course, I do appreciate what Duane has done which is to offer a possibility of a future use for the device and community.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I think I covered this in another thread, but here's the issue with weather.

It's not just a simple matter of adding a weather widget to the default channel and calling it done.

Weather widgets require configuration (zipcode, etc), which means that these must be saved somewhere. Due to the security sandbox in Flash (and more importantly, the lack of storage on the CC devices), this data cannot be stored on the device itself without some hacking. This was handled in the old system by storing the configuration data on the server in a "widget instance", which is part of the "channel" associated with the user account.

The stub server doesn't have any of this infrastructure - it serves effectively static data and stores no state information except for some analytics I'm using to determine out the mix of devices in the field.  In fact, the server could completely crash today and be replaced by another one with no data loss except for the analytics.

The only weather widget over which I have absolute rights is the NOAA Weather widget, since I wrote it - however, in addition to storage, it also relies on a backend service that was hosted by Chumby to convert zipcode to NOAA station codes.   That was one of the services that was taken down at the end of February that would be restored if/when the full service comes back online.

One interesting side effect of switching all of the Chumby and Infocast devices over the stub server is that there are still thousands of devices still requesting weather data from the now defunct weather data server.  They can't be my NOAA widget on any platform, since I changed that almost two years ago to get the actual weather data directly from NOAA (but still doing the zipcode lookup from Chumby) - and the NOAA widget isn't even available on the Sony dash because they have an exclusive arrangement with another company for weather data.  This is chewing up about 10% of the total bandwidth.

As a side note to everyone - I'm in exactly the same boat as all of you.  I'm not "cheating" and somehow running all sorts of fancy widgets on my devices because I have them.  I'm seeing exactly the same clock on my devices that you do, and I want my old widgets back as much as you do.

We've only been on the stub server for a bit over two weeks - if that's all it takes to prompt a mass exodus away from Chumby, then we should probably rethink this.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Thanks Duane for the explanation.  Sorry you had to repeat yourself.  Good to know you are the creator of the NOAA widget at least that gives us another ray of hope it will make a reappearance.  You have the analytics to know if the device population expands or contracts.  I am just speculating based on my particular frame of reference and what ultimately will happen depends on the types of Chumby owners out there.  From what I have seen there are 3 types of chumby users.  1 - developers/diy types who bought the device to hack and program. These types of folks visit this forum typically 2- Gadget lovers - people who liked the idea of an internet based clock with widgets. These types of people are generally followers of gadget centric blogs or other gadget news soures and likely knew about the demise of the chumby 3 - Family and friends of groups 1 or 2 who likely got a Chumby as a gift. These people may look for Chumby info on Facebook or may just be totally clueless about why there device is not working like it used to.  So the question is how many of the 40k or so are in each group. Obviously there is no way to know without some sort of survey and because of the potential diversity we may neverknow.  The best chance would be to send out a survey widget, but obviously that cannot be done with the current stub server. 

So I guess the best you can do is to continue to monitor and perhaps create a  internet based survey on something like Survey monkey?  Perhaps a link could be put on chumby.com, this forum, and Facebook.  Then you would have some semblance of another central data point. 

I am just a member of group 2 and don't have any expertise that can help with the guts of the system but I can help get some survey questions together or give input to a set of questions if you think such an effort is worthwhile.  As I have said numerous times I appreciate your efforts to date and hope we can leverage your investment to get a new chumby service off the ground.

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

I have a Chumby One which I did use for weather. Now runs a Space Clock but hopefully will be restored to its former glory (10 widgets!).

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

Well, my Chumby One was apparently happy... until suddenly it's Space Clock.

I don't even remember which things I had running, but it was cycling through a bunch of my local network webcams (all dynamically updated jpegs at 192.168.x.y URLs) as backgrounds to a simple clock and a local weather report, with the alarm playing the local public radio station. Set it up years ago and looked at it each morn, but never touched the setup since starting it.  Until today, I did not even realize Chumby had died as a company.

So, the question is now what should I do with my Chumby?

I've been using Linux forever, currently on about 500 machines (did I mention I'm the professor who built the world's first Linux PC cluster supercomputer back in 1994?), but I've avoided using flash. I didn't see this coming, so I didn't make a local backup of anything for the Chumby -- which I gather would have saved me with a switch to Zurk's firmware. I'm not feeling particularly inspired to switch firmware and write my own flash scripts just to get my alarm clock back to health. For now, I guess I'll leave it as Space Clock. It will still wake me in the morn.... ;-)

Re: Just a quick show of hands, if you please....

profhankd wrote:

Well, my Chumby One was apparently happy... until suddenly it's Space Clock

Hi profhankd --

For now, the service is being maintained as a "stub" on a single server with somewhat limited resources.  I believe the database of all user accounts has been preserved and cleaned up. For now, we just have the clock and some of the music, alarm functions. It is hoped that the service will be rising again. It's just that for now, only Duane and a few volunteers are using their own time and resources to slowly regain (and hopefully enhance) some of the functions.

Check this section of the forum:

http://forum.chumby.com/viewforum.php?id=27

Best,

Brian

Brian, #1 Joan Jett Fan