In the summer, I bought a nabaztag for Kevin as his birthday present. Within a couple of weeks he had figured out how to intercept its web requests and replace them with instructions of his own. The little creature has five lights – one under his feet, three across his tummy and one on his nose. He also has moveable ears (he can waggle them but you can also grab them and move them around) and a speaker.

We called the rabbit Naz for short, as Nabaztag is a long name for a little guy. We both enjoyed writing little programs which loaded different colours onto the LEDs and moved his ears around and stuff. Remember that this relationship kind of grew out of Kevin teaching me assembler at University!

So on Friday, after a hectic day, I got home and “Naz” was in the middle of the floor and Kevin was playing with him, doing some more on the proxy he wrote and whatever. I started telling him about my day, all the while thinking how shiny Naz had got, wondering if something had happened to him. Mid-sentence I cast my eyes across the room and saw the other nabaztag sitting on the ironing board!!

Yes, we have a new Nabaztag. He’s a newer model and works differently to the old one. His name is Tag and he’s shiny. Maybe I’ll post some photos of them, what do you reckon?

Kevin’s proxy and the little programs he’s written so far are at nabaztag.magicmonkey.org, I’ll write a bit more about the whole project another day.