Want to Run Linux on Your Nintendo Wii?

You can, and it's actually called "homebrew," which is one of those words that always sounds like a neologism (a newly coined word) but in fact originated in the mid-nineteenth-century, meaning "an alcoholic beverage made at home." Go beer, then, and what's more, go who'd-a-thunk-it hacks that let you for-real load Linux and "embrace your inner penguin" on an unassuming white box half the size of a toaster.

You'll need a GameCube SD card adapter, a 1GB (or higher) SD card, a copy of Zelda (for the Wii), and of course, a Nintendo Wii itself. Next, you'll need to make sure your version of Zelda is one of the anointed -- apparently not all copies of Zelda are created equal. Finally, you'll have to do a bunch of extracting, copying, renaming, deleting, saving, etc., load the game, load a hacked save file and actually talk to a guy in-game to trigger the loader, which drops you out to a black and white screen, at which point you get to have fun figuring out how to load Linux itself. I don't pretend to understand it, nor do I have any intentions of trying it, but if you just want the thrill of getting away with something Nintendo doesn't want you to, by all means go for it.