Hosting your own website comes with challenges and benefits. Finding the right hardware and software to bring everything together can make all the difference when it comes to performance. However, sometimes you just want to cobble together a project because it's fun — not because you necessarily should. That's the impetus behind Alex Haydock's Infected Systems blog, which runs on an old Nintendo Wii.
Haydock says he likes the idea of using old hardware to play around with open-source operating systems, which led him toward this project. It all began when he was researching NetBSD on the official website. While perusing the different editions available to download, Haydock came across an option to download a version for the Nintendo Wii.
If you're not familiar with NetBSD, it's an open-source Unix-like operating system that is totally free to use. It's also regularly maintained and has been made available for a handful of different CPU architectures and devices — including the PowerPC that's used in the Wii. The Wii edition's most recent release came out in December of 2024.
