Two christmas disasters averted with hacks!

Having purchased a secondhand Nintendo Wii + games (of which I believe Metroid Prime Corruption shall become my biggest life-waster) -for the kids, we stupidly left it until 4am this morning to set up and test it before wrapping. We got so far as setting up an internet connection before hitting the parental lock screen, which had obviously been accidentally left in place by the store we bought it from.

Like anyone reading this probably would, we consulted Google results and discovered that the Wii parental lock can be reset by:

1. At the parental lock code input screen, choose "I forgot",
2. at the security question screen choose "I forgot".
3. Type the displayed code into a form on a Nintendo webpage.

-Aaand at this point we notice that we have to wait until office hours for an email reply due to the call centers being closed. At 4am Christmas day, kids primed to wake in roughly an hour. More Google combing required, it would seem..

Then we saw this.

Input the security code from your Wii then put the resulting code back into the Wii. Done.

Thank you marcansoft.com. You saved (part of) Christmas.

Onto part two.

The neighbours bought one of their kids an MID 7" Android tablet.

I nearly got one of these for my girlfriend as an ebook reader before settling on a Kindle 3 instead; The hackable nature of this device makes it perfect for me, and I have no doubt that when (yes, when) I own one the first thing I'll be doing is installing linux. Having used one now I have to say I was impressed with the build, which I assumed must be the nice side of the chinese ipad rip-off market, and the occasionally terrible framerate improves as soon as animations are turned off and better firmware is on there.

This beast however, had a problem. Hours after first use, transfer of a few photos somehow led to the device becoming stuck at the loading screen even after hard shutdown (holding the power button for 5 seconds), and without any more specifics about how it happened my assumption was that either the device had been turned off while transferring or its internal memory was full.

A detailed search on the problem turned up nothing but recommendations to either reflash it or get a refund, and having the slightly tearful new owner standing over me meant a judgement call of epic proportions:

Reflash a brand-new malfunctioning device, the main present of a tech-happy young'un on Christmas day, risking completely bricking it and voiding its warranty, or hand it back to her in the same sorry, spirit-destroying state that it was handed to me in and tell her to get her mum to send it back?

Of course the reflash worked.

It's an Android device. When you first power it on it displays the firmware version in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen, -this was WMT2.1.2_105- I found firmware version 2.1.6 for download, unzipped it, copied the folder titled "Scripts" to the root of a microSD card, put the card in the tablet and rebooted it. After a few screens of "Copying ROM files..Please wait" blahblahblah, the device reset and greeted us with a fresh install of a newer operating system than what it came with.

After 20 minutes of "testing", I found nothing that didn't work with the new install.

Winner.