Sneaky blog tricks! Hailing from around the globe, the winners are:

1. Tom Mcleod - Didj Hacking Bundle
2. Nonya Biz - EEE 701 2g surf (bottom half)
3. Aaron Cronk - Famicom Bundle
4. Kea Oliver - Fan Bundle
5. Mike Metzger- Genesis on a chip
6. Geordy Rostad - Infrared Bundle
7. Bob Crichton - Java Bundle
8. Kraig Hoekstra - Laptop Parts Bundle
9. Torin Macbeth - Minidisk Bundle
10. Paul Curtis - netgear zyxel
11. Kevin Thompson -Palm GPS Bundle
12. Yohanes Nugroho - Peek Messaging Device
13. Thomas, der - USB Wireless bundle
14. Bear Naff - Sound Bundle
15. Jon Hawkins - Wifi Bundle
16. Force Multiplier - X10 Home Automation Bundle

Thanks again everyone for making Hackaway 2010 a Tremendous Success!

Here are the rules.

1. Send an email to hunter at hunterdavis.com with the subject line "Hackaway 2010"
2. Include in the message the numbers of the hackaway items you would be interested in receiving
3. That's it. I will randomly select the winners after 7 days or 5,000 entries, whichever is sooner. There are no restrictions on who may enter. Any person from any country could win. Just like last time.
4. If you like, let me know what country and state you are from. Last time we had entries from dozens of countries, and it's always fun to see where they come in from.
5. After the winners are selected, I email them for their addresses, and send out their prizes. There are no fees or restrictions to entry, and I pay all duties, customs, and shipping

And here are the prizes

1. Didj Hacking Bundle - Didj+Claude's custom board with SD adapter, custom loader, source code, etc. Everything you need to start porting software.
   
2. EEE 701 2g surf (bottom half). Was used for the blu-ray player hack.
   
3. Famicom Bundle - Famicom chipset + famicom and nes games, chips, and controllers
   
4. Fan Bundle - Fans and fan controllers
   
5. Genesis on a chip with infrared controllers
   
6. Infrared Bundle - Infrared controller game plus many infrared to ps2 remotes with pass-through ports.
   
7. Java Bundle - Four Spongebob branded Npower java consoles. Follow my previous instructions and links on how to write programs for these. Perhaps enough for a small end-user study!
   
8. Laptop Parts Bundle - Laptop screen, keyboards, batteries, etc
   
9. Minidisk Bundle - A folder full of 74m Sony MiniDisks (all full of data)
   
10. Late 90's era Netgear router with serial console (zxyel os)
    
11. Palm GPS Bundle - Palm V and Tungston with GPS and chargers and serial adapters.
    
12. Peek Messaging Device - Join the peeklinux project and start porting!
    
13. USB Wireless bundle - Rip Roar USB wireless messenger (IM-ME clone) along with UBFunkeys reader and many keys (rfid-like keys based on usb passthrough).
    
14. Sound Bundle - Street Fighter 4 Japanese practice keychain, audio repeater device, and crammer ogg vorbis/wm3 device.
    
15. Wifi Bundle - Netgear N router pre-flashed with openWRT, and linksys wireless-b access point
    
16. X10 Home Automation Bundle - Two X10 PC receivers, wireless receiver, heavy duty appliace module, two light modules, start automating your lab!
    

And that's that! Send me an email! Tell your friends! Good luck! Can't wait to see what hacks you come up with this year!

So here's the plan. We're going to configure our Z2 to periodically check an email address for emails with attachments. When it finds an email with an attachment, it prints the attachment and archives the email. As you can see from the photo, I place a little notecard on the Z2 which states "Email __EMAILREDACTED___ to print to this printer". If you want to print to this device "from the cloud", just email to it. Pretty simple , and the arm in the Z2 takes up a fairly low wattage overhead as a cloud monitor/print server.

1. First, we'll want to connect the Zipit to an existing printer. As I've got a network printer at work (fairly common situation), I'll use that as the example case. Using one of the linux (I'm going the debian (easy) route) Z2 distros that's popular, boot your Z2 up and get it connected to the net/up to a state where it can update via apt get. Then apt-get install cups for printing., and apt-get install gmail-notify to install all the relevant pre-reqs for python. That's one thing that's great about python on embedded, if you know another popular python program uses all your libraries, just install that first and you've got your prerequisites covered...or at least all the ones I can remember You can set up cups to handle various filetypes for printing, but it should come with postscript by default and that's enough for me
2. Next, we'll configure the Z2 to print to a network printer. This will be your "drop target". You can either use one of the gui printing configuration tools (select IP Printer from the drop-down list), or the cups command line or web tools. From the debian wiki, cups runs a web daemon locally than can be used to configure new printers. After installing cups, you can elinks http://localhost:631/ to get to an administration website. From here it's pretty trivial to print, as your apt-get should have pre-configured a lot of cups for you i.e. samba, workgroups info, etc (interactively in my case).
3. As this'll be an open source solution, there's no need to re-invent the wheel. Suresh Kumar wrote an imap attachment handler in python that's fairly compact, we can use that as an excellent base to write our script. It's PSF licensed, so you know it jives with our GPL sensibilities.
4. Now in this script it stores all attachments into their own hierarchical directory structure. You can remove this if you like, but I kind of like having a print backup, at least for a few weeks. This is the write_file() function. Wherever this is called you can add your own os.system call to print the file. For the lazy, if your printer is named "JACKBAUER" at the end of this function just add sysCommand = "lpr –P JACKBAUER –#1" + filename . This fills a string buffer named sysCommand with our command to print using the lpr function (cups standard printing function). Follow this line with os.system(sysCommand)
5. Now that your python script is finished, create a script to execute the attdownload.py with the proper variables (username, server, etc perhaps make it a background process with nohup etc). Make the script executable, and you're good to go. Either add it to your rc.local so it runs on startup or add it to your bash.rc so it loads on login. Congrats! You live in a world with email capable printers

As I head out to my usual electronics warehouse (the venice women's council thrift store), I had envisioned building the nes from the necessary parts pulled from old consoles, pda's etc. I ended up finding a children's keyboard to tv adapter which came with a plug-in mouse and controller. For 10$, it seemed like a good candidate for chips. Ripping it open, before my eyes appeared a cartridge connector. My NES carts did not fit. They were the wrong size.. by about 12 pins.. Sounds about like. a famicom! Yep. Some company decided to save a $ and implemented a learning device based on the now insanely cheap to produce 1mhz famicom. I slapped it back together with a little hot glue, and that's that! Abolut the size of 3 famicom carts stacked, it's been fun playing the few famicom games I can understand. The hackaway pile for this year is getting bigger all the time!.

1. Upgraded to Search Unleashed - now comments are automatically searched and search terms are highlighted on clickthrough
2. Upgraded to a theme (LightWord by Andrei Luca) which splits trackbacks and comments!
3. Wide-width theme, better for widescreen displays and photo posts
4. Recent posts/comments widgests, view recent activity at a glance
5. Dropped to a 2-column layout, and removed adsense from front page bar

About time right?

The animation on the games is pretty good, better than I was expecting. The "touch screen" is actually just a 4-way rocker. Pretty fun way to control games, but obscures the screen for no good reason. It takes 3x aaa batteries, no word yet on battery life as they're still holding a good charge. You can pop off the battery case with a small screwdriver or coin. After which you can pop off the front blue bezel, which exposes 4 small screws holding in the mobo. You pop this out just like an eee mobo (one pin, careful with the ports). Looks like it's running a samsung-831 firmware, K9G8G08UOB pcbo nand. No transistors between the battery compartment and the mobo, taking straight 4.5v. Plays mp3, wav, and ogg. Another potential rockbox target?