Contiki

Some people acuse me of having too much time on my hands, because I build PCs in picture frames and sometimes do things just "because it's cool." Poppycock, say I. It's not like I've breathed new life into obsolete computers by writing an operating system for them designed to get the on a network, is it?

Not like the people behind Contiki, which is a new networking operating system for severely reduced-power computer systems, ranging from single board embedded microcontroller things to old (mainly Commodore) 8-bit computers. I think it's cool, so it passes the one test, but I can see how most people would point and stare like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

High points, in my opinion: the web browser running on a C64 that has the following user agent string...
User-Agent: Contiki/1.0 (Commodore 64; http://dunkels.com/adam/contiki/)
... imagine finding that in your access logs, geek friends; and the embedded microcontroller-based port that gives you a VNC desktop of 120x56 pixels because that's all the memory that it can spare. (In case you've not guessed, that's the screenshot at the top of this post.)

There's a port for the Gameboy, which is interesting, but not the Spectrum, which is disappointing. Hey ho.