Chumbys released in the wild

What's a Chumby? It's a very cute internet appliance. Looking a bit like a tiny leather-covered TV, it is a box with a touchscreen that connects to the internet and displays all sorts of information - weather forecasts, news, photos. Best of all it's under $200/100 pounds. It has got a touchscreen, a motion sensor, wi-fi, USB ports and loudspeakers and runs Flash Lite. You can install any of the widgets already available or you can write your own.

And you can now buy Chumbys. Well, you can if you expressed interest last year, which I did. But you can't if you live outside the US, which I do. I hope they start shipping them to the rest of the world soon.

last.fm feeds for BBC Radio

Our last.fm feeds are finally official (you can read about the previous incarnations of the feeds here and here). This means that almost all the tracks that BBC Radio plays are sent/scrobbled to last.fm. That's not quite everything we play (it doesn't cover live sessions, vinyl or some overnight shows) but it's the majority of 6Music and daytime Radio 1, Radio 2 and 1Xtra (sorry, still no Radio 3). So on the last.fm profile pages (below) you can see what the stations have just played, top tracks for the week etc. The current feeds are...

BBC Radio 1
BBC Radio 2
BBC 1Xtra
BBC 6Music
Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1
Steve Lamacq on BBC 6Music
Ace and Vis on BBC 1Xtra

Nothing particularly hard here, just some business stuff and Patrick, one of our SEs is currently rewriting my code to make it 100% reliable. And thanks to last.fm for doing some database magic that renamed our "sekrit" feeds.

You'll notice there are some DJs/shows as well, hopefully there will be more soon. The radio networks have started to think about what they could do with these feeds and have some interesting ideas. 1Xtra have already put a recently played widget on their playlist page and there should be some more stuff soon.

Update: User's comment on their compatibility with the Steve Lamacq profile:

"'Very High' YES! *smug*
andrewjackson shouted yesterday afternoon"

This is why we're doing it.