Chumby, Midomi, and other cool things

I'm back. I was talking with Kristen the other day and she was commenting on how I don't write to my blog anymore. I said that I just didn't have a whole lot of new things to say or any new insights to add to the world. And that might be right. But... I figured I'd just keep going on about things that interest me. Maybe you'll find some things that interest you as well.

The Chumby...as I read my Popular Science last week, I was introduced to a fun little device (not on sale yet) called the chumby. Apparently a bunch of independent Linux (interpreted free) developers decided that they had experienced just about enough of the single use electronic devices. They were sick of alarm clocks that only told the time and woke you up in the morning... sick of these things called "ipods" that did nothing more than play music... sick of the portable game systems that only played games and on and on and on... So, they decided to make and "open-source" device called the chumby. For those of you who don't know what "open-source" means it refers to allowing the users to modify the device in any way they want. Including the ability render the device unusable. If a programmer wants to change the way Windows works (internally), they need to write a separate program to run on top of windows. No one can change the way Windows runs without breaking it....That is the opposite of open-source. Open-source also usually means free.

Basically, the people at Chumby made a device who's sole purpose is to do what you tell it to do. Call it a calendar scheduling, alarm clock ticking, news ticking, weather monitoring, mp3 playing, movie playing, calculating, currency converting, measurement converting, recipe storing, shopping list storing, paperweight :) It's at the top of my new want but don't need list :)

Midomi - another fun site that I found in my adventures through cyberspace is a fun little site called Midomi.com I haven't used it yet, but it's gotten a pretty good response so far. The basics of the site are if you can remember the tune of a song but can't remember the singer, title, or words, you sing the tune into a microphone and it will search and tell you the song. It's like a google search of tunes :)

JustBreadMakerRecipes - for all you people who need 1,432 recipes for your breadmakers take a look at http://www.justbreadmakerrecipes.com/. You can have a different loaf of bread every day for four years and go through approximately 2,800 pounds of flour :)

Well, that's all for today. Until next time....