As of this afternoon, my chumby was in Louisville, KY; en route to me from China via Hong Kong, S. Korea, and Anchorage, Alaska. It’s supposed to be here Friday.

I’ve gotten a tad excited, if you can’t tell. *grin* I’ve had to answer the what IS it? question several times in the past few days, and I’m working through a good explanation myself…but it is, I think, A Big Deal. It’s really among the first generation of non-computer always-on Internet tools that (hopefully, anyway) just work, yet are open, hackable, and extendable by the user. The cell phone could have been this device, (and the gPhone may yet be) but the telcos are for the most part unwilling to give the user freedom to hack on these devices to any great extent. I hope that devices like the chumby show regular users what the freedom to make a device truly your own is like…freedoms that those of us who are willing to compile a kernel once in awhile have had for some time, thanks to GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, etc.

Time will tell, but I have a good feeling about this one…