I made a number of purchases from different companies to get all of the necessary parts; waiting for them is a massive pain, but it gives me time to do the harder, hardware hacks (audio out, touch screen, etc..)

I got the Netpliance first, well before the 3/27 drop dead date when Netpliance began modifying the units. Mine is virginal, with no epoxy, modified BIOS, or broken IDE pins.

Side note: It's unfortunate that Netpliance feels they have to take these measures, because most hackers would pay $300-500 for this unit. As an open message to them, it is not your server we intend to defraud; you have created a wonderfully engineered piece of hardware, and we feel that you're not taking complete advantage of it. Support us. We are open source, and this is becoming an open hardware movement. This has ignited the fires of many people, in a way that hasn't been seen since the early Apple ][ days.

The LinkSys 100TX USB interface arrived next, which looks quite cool, it's red and black, and will probably find itself velcroed to the back of the iOpener's screen, as it'll fit nicely to the left or right of the display. This will be linked into our home network via a Lucent wireless Ethernet Interface, effectively giving us a flat-panel computer with few wires and access to the in-house 1.5MB/s SDSL network.

A day or two later, I got the 2.5" Fujitsu drive. Good god, this thing is small. 4.6GB, and 240 heads, only 9.5mm high. I'm lacking a metal shop here, so I decided to go for a mount directly to the RF shield (click to zoom):