Linda recently bought herself a QuicKutz Silhouette plotter/cutter (a re-branded Graphtec CC200-20, actually), and I thought it would be an interesting project to get the device working under Linux. And it was! After a few days of intense observation (my first real USB-sniffing project) I had most of the protocol pat down, and I hereby present graphtecprint v1.0 (a somewhat odd name, considering it?s not really a printer, but since itself claims to be I?ll just go on and humour it).

So, finally, after close to 25 years of not owning a video game console (the previous one was a Philips Videopac G7000 system from the early 1980s), we finally took the plunge and got ourselves a Nintendo Wii system. It was bundled with Wii Sports and one freely selectable game, so we chose Super Mario Galaxy, which has been getting great reviews. Also, we threw in the Cars game for Marius, which instantly proved itself an enormous success. Ka-chow!It’s been really fun so far (The “physics” in Super Mario Galaxy is a real mind-bender!), with the possible exception of having sore muscles in places we didn’t know existed. Then again, Linda and myself shook hands on trying to stay fit and exercise more this year…

(I didn’t bother with a mod chip yet. And I resent the hardware manufacturers for making me need one. Being able to make backup copies of my legally purchased games to avoid damaging the originals should be a mandatory feature, not something you have to (in their eyes) break the law to enable. Yes, yes, I know it’s meant to hinder piracy, but copy protection shouldn’t be an obstacle to paying customers. So there.)