The Chumby One , much like the original , is an interesting beast. For all intents and purposes, it’s a mod-friendly box that sits on your nightstand and pushes out real-time information that it pulls down from the web. That said, the inbuilt display may be too small to be considered “glanceable” in some scenarios, and if you’re ferociously nodding your head up and down in agreement, we’ve a hack you should probably see. One xobs recently discovered that a composite video output could be added to the Chumby One, enabling it to output its information onto any display with such an input. Granted, the device can only support a single display at a time, but hey, who ever said you could have your cake and eat it too? Chumby One gets composite video output via marginally difficult mod originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink   MAKE  |  Bunnie Studios , ChumbyWiki  |  Email this  |  Comments

2009 is coming to a close, which means it’s time to reflect on the events that shaped the last twelve months. And there’s nothing like a whirlwind animated musical to put everything into perspective. Cue JibJab , which has just released their annual Year In Review : a two minute video romp that recaps the last year in all its glory. The video is packed will everything from momentous events like the induction of our first black President to moments of unparalleled stupidity (Balloon Boy). Even Three Wolf Moon made the cut. This is the fifth year that JibJab has produced their Year In Review, and we’re told it will be seeing airtime on a number of national television networks tomorrow. For those wondering how the video was made, the company has put together a thorough blog post detailing its production. Aside from the video, CEO Gregg Spiridellis tells us that JibJab is having a very strong holiday season. The entertainment portal, which offers customizable Flash videos, greeting cards, and a variety of other content, drew 33 million unique visitors in the last month according to Quantcast . Spiridellis adds that the site has served 90 million video views this quarter alone (which was likely helped in part by its always popular ElfYourself feature). Watch the video in the embed below: Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today! CrunchBase Information JibJab Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Peek devices are usually quite resolute in their single-purpose ways , but it looks like things are starting to change — the company is beta testing Facebook integration called PeekSocial. Once you install the app on your Facebook account, you’ll be able to update your status easily, and you’ll also receive periodic emails that pull content from your newsfeed. Yeah, it’s a little hacky — how about enabling support for a real Facebook app, Peek? [Thanks, Devon] Peek gets a Facebook app, sort of originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |  Peek  |  Email this  |  Comments

We’re still not about say the e-book reader industry has branched out beyond the infancy stage, but one of its flagship products certainly has reason to celebrate. Amazon has announced it’s hit some pretty big milestones with the Kindle . The two bullet points it’s currently touting loudest is that the reader has become “the most gifted item” in the company’s history — quite an achievement given the size of the online retailer, but what’s missing here is any quantitative sales data to give us even a ballpark of the number of units sold. The other big news is that on Christmas Day (we’re guessing not Christmas Eve, else the press release surely would’ve mentioned it, too), e-book sales actually outsold physical books. Those brand new Kindle owners needed something to read, right? It’ll be interesting to see if that momentum is maintained through next year, especially with some major publishers starting to show some teeth with digital delays. The Kindle bits were all part of Amazon’s annual post-holiday statistical breakdown, so in case you’re wondering, besides Kindle, the company is claiming its other top-selling electronics were the 8GB iPod Touch and Garmin nuvi260W, and in the wireless department the honor goes to Nokia’s unlocked 5800 XpressMusic, Plantronic’s 510 Bluetooth headset, and AT&T’s edition of the BlackBerry Bold 9700. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Kindle most gifted item in Amazon’s history, e-books outsell physical tomes on Christmas Day originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |  Amazon  |  Email this  |  Comments

If you’re on Twitter , that means you registered an account with a password that isn’t terribly easy to guess. As you may know, Twitter prevents people from doing just that by indicating that certain passwords such as ‘password’ ( cough cough ) and ‘123456′ are too obvious to be picked. It just so happens that Twitter has hard-coded all banned passwords on the sign-up page . All you need to do to retrieve the full list of unwelcome passwords is take a look at the source code of that page. Do a simple search for ‘twttr.BANNED_PASSWORDS’ and voilà, there they are, all 370 of them. This isn’t a security issue, of course, and in fact it’s helpful to distribute the list so you can check if your favorite password that you use for other services might not be as fail-proof as you’d like to think. For the full list, simply download this TXT file , but here are a couple: – password – testing – naked – stupid – twitter – 123456 – secret – please – beavis – butthead – internet – hooters What would be interesting to know is if Twitter got this list from somewhere else, or if they actually analyze which passwords were most commonly chosen by its tens of millions of users in the past, rendering them ‘too obvious’. If the latter, that means this list is probably representative of most Web services. (Thanks to Dario Manoukian for the tip; a quick search turns up a post on The Wundercounter featuring the list too) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors