hack the planet.

i always enjoy the opportunity to catch up with my other tech savvy friends and see what they're up to, what portables they're sporting, and what approaches they're taking to hacking their lives. last night, i got to do some long overdue catching up with my friend t, who just happens to be one of the savviest of the bunch.

for all those of you who don't speak geek, here we go. portables could be a myriad of things. in my case, my portables are my mp3 player, my cell phone (pictured above, it's a moto w385 if you're curious), and my digital camera. i also have another camera (this one doesn't come with as much, although it should).

as you may be able to tell by the ghosties chasing pac-man across my phone's lcd, i like to customize my gadgets. i carry these things pretty much everywhere, why not make them mine? this may not necessarily increase functionality of the phone, but the fact that i can now store data on the phone certainly does. i guess i should also take steps to point out that these were most certainly not out of the box features. the lcd originally read out the name of my cellular carrier, and the thing didn't even come with a usb cable. i also crammed a gps program on there as well as a few other little goodies.

here comes the really impressive part. one of my friend t's main portables is a nintendo DS, among a few others. he also recently got a nice new digicam, but we'll save that for another day. like me, t likes to customize said portables, and has done so with his DS. after installing a shell on it, he loaded a VoIP client and was well on his way to free long distance phone calls.

had you asked me 10 (or so, i lost count) years ago, upon my first viewing of one of my favorite movies if i thought i'd be taking part in digital phreaking and hacking of my own, i'd have called you crazy, then asked you to pass the popcorn.