Joy of Gadgets

I will admit that I’ve thought a device like a Chumby might be kind of a cool nightstand clock. It provides a lot of functionality at your fingertips and has kind of a cool form factor.

The thought of dropping $200 or more on a handheld gadget is not something I like to do. It also seemed quite wasteful when much of the functionality I want can be had with a device I already own: the Nokia N800 tablet.

What you see here is the home screen of my Nokia N800, which has all the information on it I need 98% of the time: the current time and the weather. The clock is a program called cairoclock, which is an applet that appears on the home screen. It’s resizable and movable.

The weather is an applet called omweather, which I configured to pull the 3-day forecast for Gig Harbor (and those temperatures are in Fahrenheit, also configurable).

The IP information is courtesy of the HomeIP applet. Good for “just in case” I need to SSH into the tablet (I have Dropbear SSH installed).

The only other thing I configured on it is a bookmark for the one site I’m likely to need to look at while in bed: the website for the local school district. They post school closure/delay information on the front page.

Granted, the tablet can do a lot more. However, for a nightstand device, that’s really all I want. If I need to do anything more serious, there’s always my office just down the hall

TOKYObay is promising an invasion of robots in the form of clocks–some with alarms, some without. They also have robots (without clocks) that hang on keychains.

The Tokibots are small, as you can see the one TOKYObay sent me standing next to the Nokia 6301 on my desk. They stand roughly 4 inches and are made of metal. The arms and legs move. The head, not so much. The clock works and has a replacable battery similar to a watch.

My four year old daughter loves the Tokibot. She keeps wanting to take it out of my office and play with it. They are a bit pricey for that, at a price of $44, but she can come look at it anytime. Meanwhile, it will guard my desk.

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