Pandora on the Chumby from Anywhere

I got myself a Chumby recently, and this nice device can play Pandora radio as well, so I don’t need to turn on my computer every time I want to listen in. It can even wake me up with Pandora radio.

Outside the US, however, Pandora refuses to play due to copyright restrictions. I guess if you are reading this, you are aware of the usual workarounds. Here’s what I did to make it work on my Chumby:

• installed Tor and Privoxy on my NAS device, which runs 24/7 anyway
• configured Tor to use exit nodes in the US only
• configured Privoxy to only forward requests to pandora.com to Tor, all other traffic will be sent directly to avoid unnecessary overhead
• created a userhook0 script on my Chumby to set the http_proxy variable to point to my proxy

Now booting is a little slower than before due to the indirection through my proxy server, but it still is good enough. And Pandora plays fine through Tor – it is slow to load, but after that it works like a charm.

Update: I tuned Privoxy a bit more, now it only forwards www.pandora.com and tuner.pandora.com to Tor, everything else is sent directly. This is fast!