A Word on Hacking

In the year since I last wrote a meaningful post, I have had a few excellent experiences in the world of hacking. I will in the next few posts be explaining these, but I thought I would first get something out of the way up front.
Yes, I'm a hacker. I'm not a hacker in the sense you think though. When most people think of hackers, they think of the groups that deface your Facebook wall, take down the Playstation Network, and publish volumes of sensitive government documents just to show how powerful they are.
While these types of people are indeed hackers, I like to think of my type of hacking as a hobby. Wikipedia defines this type of hacking as

a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software (software cracking, demo scene) or electronic hardware (hardware hacking, modding), either to make it better, faster, to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do.

This is what I like to do. I like to modify any and all electronics I have to make them be better than originally planned, or to do something they weren't intended to do. I haven't done much with hardware hacking. Mostly this is because I'm too chicken. I'm worried that I'm going to break whatever it is I am working on. I like to stick with software hacking, and I'll be posting some examples and even some how-to articles in the near future.

A couple of items I'll discuss are