Chumby, the open hardware and open software information/entertainment appliance, now allows users to create and play with a "virtual chumby." Chumby is an alarm clock sized embedded Linux device with a Flash widget player. The widgets are selectable, configurable, and automatically flip cycle. This is something I wanted on my Internet Tablet for some time as the tablet can still feed me information while I am at my main computer.
To turn your tablet into a virtual Chumby, follow these steps:
- Register at chumby.com
- Create a channel and choose/configure some widgets. There are a lot, so have some fun with it.
- Create a virtual Chumby using the channel you chose. Keep in mind that interactive widgets ones that require clicking or shaking) do not work on the virtual Chumby.
- Create a simple web page that displays the chumby. It's as easy as dropping the embed code into an empty html file and adding normal html and body tags around it. Centering it would be good too.
- Put the web page somewhere on your own site and visit it from the tablet.
6 comments:
That is exactly what i mentioned on the maemo IRC channel when asked why there is no FLASH on the maemo "desktop" available!
Just in case you missed that session, you can view the "chumby-like" thing i made for "my maemo desktop" here: http://www.cyberholic.de/maemo
If you know how to, you can download the SWF to your device and use it whenever you want!
Mail me back at endorphinum@googlemail.com if you have any questions.
Hugs from Hamburg in Germany,
Carlos
Sure would be nice if we could fullscreen the widgets in full resolution. I'd use it all the time.
If I dont have my own webstie what would you recommend as easiest way to set this up? WOuld I sign up for a free blog somewhere and do it that way?
It's simple enough just to create a site with a series of pages at 480x800, host them on your own webspace and view them full screen. There are hundreds of widgets and Flash stuff out there that is embeddable. I'm assuming you could even run something on local host if you don't want to put your widgets out in the real world.
Someone should start a project to collect a stack of N800 sized webpages... I suppose that someone could be me.
Neat. I followed these steps and now have turned my N800 into a virtual Chumby. I used the embed tag to create the most basic of html files, then uploaded that single file to my Libsyn account, pointed my N800 browser to that address and presto! One Chumbied N800! I gotta admit though, a full-screen full-rez widget would be awfully sweet on this thing.
Hi, and thanks for the article.
I managed to get 'almost fullscreen' working on the N810 using CSS as follows - the code could probably be improved it relies on negative margins and the "-moz-hidden-unscrollable" property. You'll need to change the value "YourProfile" value to your own, and this works in Browser full-screen. I can't paste HTML code here, so I'll try to explain:
body tag:
body style="background-color: #C8C5BC;"
div tag:
div style="margin-left: 95px; margin-top: 15px;text-align: center; width: 680px; height:450px; border: 0px; overflow: -moz-hidden-unscrollable; "
embed tag:
embed style="margin: auto; margin-left: -310px; margin-top:-210px; margin-right: -100px; margin-bottom: -100" width="1180.8" height="972" quality="high" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" wmode="transparent" name="virtualchumby" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.chumby.com/virtualchumby2.swf" FlashVars="_chumby_profile_url=YourProfile;baseURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chumby.com" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
end
embed tag
div tag
body tag
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