Last October, Yahoo! held an Open Hack Day where we brought in developers and designers in the Bay Area to work on whatever they wanted to, and invited them to utilize Yahoo! APIs to make cool hacks … and that’s what people did. From Flickr Postcard mailers to a purse cam that sent periodic, geotagged photos to Flickr, there was a lot of great stuff that came out. And of course, there was Beck, the surprise performer.

This June, Yahoo!, in conjunction with BBC (“the Beeb”), are hosting a similar event but this time in the UK. A few of you UK readers probably already heard about this but if you haven’t, you should definitely sign up.

And yes, there will be a band playing. Not that you’re motivated by such trivialities.

I was dead set on working on TransitSF, the hack I worked on with Sean and Jane a year ago at the first hack day. It lets you enter two points in San Francisco and using Yahoo! Maps and 511.org’s Tripplanner, tells you what public transit to take. But it needs a lot of work.

Just as I was getting ready to start, though, we got a Nintendo Wii set up 5 feet from me. Let’s just say productivity was at an all time low. So instead, I decided to work on a hack that used the Nintendo Wii remote (or Wiimote). By the time of hack day, only a week after release, there were already a number of hacks out there as well as some protocols and drivers. For the PC, there was GlovePIE.

So I did a few basic things. First, I hooked up the d-pad controllers to the cursor keys, then some other keyboard mappings. Essentially, this made for the perfect presentation remote (it was bluetooth connected so the range was good as well). But what about the motion? That’s the cool part of the remote after all.

Well it turned out that measuring exact positioning of the Wiimote was difficult but measuring that there is movement, especially along the Y-axis, was not so difficult. So I made the ultimate presentation tool. Whenever your demo or presentation starts going badly or somebody asks you a hard question, just start waving your hands as you “ummm” and “ahhhh” and point out how that’s a “very interesting point”.

Then, using this hand tool from Microsoft, we get…a fake blue screen of death. Sorry, but we’re experiencing some technical errors

[GlovePIE file] [Fake Bluescreen] (you’ll have to change the filename to point it to wherever you put the .scr file)