For my next few blog posts, I'm going to be writing about the dark and murky underworld of gadget hacking. Okay, maybe not so dark and murky, nor really much of an underworld given you can find all of the information through Google.
But still. Gadget hacking isn't something that most people think about or are even aware of, but it's a cool way of giving your old devices a new lease on life, letting you do things with them that the manufacturer never intended you to be able to do (and not in a dirty or perverse way, but hey – whatever floats your boat).
I'm not talking about chipping an Xbox 360 or PS3 – those are things you need to be handy with a soldering iron to be do. The hacks I'm talking about are software-, firmware- and operating system related, and all you need is a USB cable and PC to be able to apply them.
So let's get started. First on the menu is the venerable iPod. For an MP3 player with such a massive following, it's seriously underpowered. But you can fix that. Take your pick from the open source firmware Rockbox (which you can actually load on other MP3 players like certain Toshiba Gigabeat, SanDisk Sansa, iRiver, Archos, Cowon and Olympus devices) and iPodWizard. Neither of them support the iPod touch, iPod classic or second and third-gen nanos, so if that's you, sorrrryyyy.
iPodWizard gives you unprecedented ability to change everything about the iPod's graphical user interface, but if you don't have the patience or graphical prowess to tweak everything individually (I have neither), you can download a theme that changes everything in one yet. I used iPodWizard to flash an iPhone look-a-like theme onto my 5.5G 80GB iPod awhile ago, back in the days when I was iPhone-less and not nearly as fulfilled in life. These changes to the GUI aren't permanent; if you decide you want to go back to the standard look and feel, iTunes will happily flash it back to the original firmware.
Rockbox comes at it from an entirely different angle by letting you do more with your iPod or other compatible MP3 player, including play more sound codecs (including the FLAC lossless for the audio purists out there) and run all sorts of little plugins – most of which are games (including Doom!). Rockbox also supports graphical themes, so it might be worth trying this hack first as it can do more than iPodWizard. Disclaimer: I haven't tried Rockbox yet, but I have friends that have who swear by it.
Coming up: hacks for your PSP, Canon compact digital camera, Windows Mobile smartphone, wireless media receiver and Asus Eee PC.