History Rhyming (Flickr, Chumby, BarCamp…)

During today’s IndieWeb HWC Europe meeting the topic turned to old hardware and hardware hacking. I said “on the topic of old hardware…” and got out my Chumby with a few weeks ago took out of a storage box with the intent to… hack it? Sell it? Recycle it? It was a hit and fun to turn on and think about.

I started it up and it works. And the Chumby website at www.chumby.com works too. It’s at least a clock that can look like Star Trek.

I first heard of Chumby in 2007, at the fourth BarCamp Los Angeles: BarCampLA 4. That was the first BarCamp I ever attended. And I attended 5. 5 was really great. I met Dan Kaminsky there. I remember asking him questions about security for community sites. I somehow got him talking about the security of uploaded files and he mentioned one thing most people underestimate was that image files could be a nasty vector for intrusive payloads onto systems. He was very nice about it. I also went to 6, and 7.

I have old blurry photos for both BarCampLA 7 and BarCampLA 6. Fun to see these old photos and energy.

BarCamp is probably why I’ve taken to IndieWeb events like the Front End Study Hall I host so well. And I’ve stuck with events like that. I went to one BeCamp (I only have tweets to show for that event, alas) in Charlottesville and I’ve been to a few UXCampDC events.

And London is having a new BarCamp next month. I didn’t notice they had one in 2023 as well. But I’m noticing now. I’m happy to see this returning. And in December I’ll help organize another IndieWeb Camp here in San Diego as I did in 2023.

Anyway, the Chumby. At BarCamp, the creators were showing off how it worked. It ran Flash Lite. I won that Chumby in 2008. I last fired it up was in 2012, when I did software updates on it. I took it into work at Slacker Radio. Here’s that blog post: Still Life from Dayjob

I have some emails related to Chumby saved, still. One is an email to myself, it has the subject like Chumby RSS Video Viewer and the body is a url, http://www.youtube.com/rssls. Don’t bother visiting that url, it gives the status code 410, which means “Gone.”

At one time I used it to display tweets of people I followed on Twitter.:

I have a lot of photos in Flickr that are not explicitly mentioned or copied to this website. But Flickr also provides the ability to search for photos with more open copyright licenses. That’s what the Flickr Foundation. Today I learned about two great free photo sites I’d not seen before: Unsplash and Openverse.

It’s good to see that the spirit of the open web still in action. That theme of slow web, small web, indie web lives on. And when the big silos are so frustrating to use it’s hard not to see the appeal.

But it does take some effort to homestead a personal website. To maintain it. It can be technical. There’s a real opportunity to make personal websites easier to do. It used to be every ISP gave you some hosting space along with your internet connectivity. I had a site under users.aol.com and at home.earthlink.net back in the day. They provided pathways to imagine that website.

And now we bitch about Instagram shadow bans and imagine we might get a million followers on YouTube.

Here’s 3 recent missives I saw from artists just trying to keep in touch with fans and follows related to this on social media apps I follow:

1.

The dystopian bs workarounds that these corporations put us through each time something changes or is discontinued.

2.

every minute i spend on this app is agonizing and yet i have to keep using it because people decided that this is the only way to contact me for music-related opportunities

i am begging you to just email me

3.

this is what my only real facebook fan page looks like

i heard there’s a weird fake one contacting people so please be aware that i will never message you on facebook. don’t get scammed

That’s in the last 10 days. I am inured to these now. I blogged about the Ken Klippenstein post I put up on Facebook getting removed last month. He was reinstated.

Man alive, the horrendous and bad decisions and bad moderation, inadequate customer support, capricious decision-making we take for granted.

There’s absolutely an opportunity for a better way to do this for people who want to learn a minimum amount and not be price-gouged.

I’m very glad to have a website I control myself and to have the skills to maintain and manage it.

That’s why I’m IndieWeb and I was IndieWeb even before I knew it existed.

I feel like we’re at a very interesting historical moment with history rhyming.

Time for some new stuff.

Update, 1 day later: The Verge has a huge package about 2004 being a pivotal year in culture, I am not alone in noticing!