Kids obsessed with video games may be missing out on fresh air and exercise (aside from in their powerful button-smashing fingers), a fact that's naturally worrying to parents. If you're crafty, though, this rowing-machine generator might be the perfect sweat-inducing addition to a living room gaming system.

Banning traditional video game consoles can indirectly boost physical activity in children, according to a new Australian study. However, the same outcome can be achieved by adopting “active” game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect.

Android: You may have jumped in on the fad when the highly aspirational Wii Balance Board promised to get you fit through select video game titles, but now it likely collects dust in sad corner of your house. With an app called FitScales, you can turn it into an internet-connected scale you might actually use.

When it first come out, the world went a bit crazy over Wii Fit and its included accessory, the "Balance Board". A few years on though, and how many people still use the software, let alone the hardware? If you'd like to put the gaming gadget back to work without having to fire up your console, you should check out FitScales.

Your video game console is great for playing games, but you might not realise it's also one of the best media centres around. Here's how to set up all of the modern consoles so you can stream videos and music to them direct from your computer.

Hacking your Wii hasn't been difficult, but it has required a somewhat detailed process. Now we have LetterBomb, which is an incredibly simple way to hack your Wii. It only takes about five minutes to accomplish. Here's how to do it.

If you teach or have to make a lot of presentations, you can make your life a lot easier with an interactive whiteboard like a Smartboard. Instead of an expensive piece of technology, though, you can DIY it yourself with a Wiimote.

When you've got a sweet setup with a projector you're probably doing your best to keep the projection area uncluttered. This clever hack projects infrared dots onto the wall so your Wiimotes work without the Wii IR sensor bar.

Connecting an external hard drive to your Wii to backup and play your games is a simple way to keep expensive discs out of harms way, decrease game load times and organise your collection with swanky cover art. Here's how it works.

If you want to rock out without the expense or bulk of a full size drum set, you can hook a set of Guitar Hero drums up to your computer for an electronic jam session.

If you thought the idea of having Opera on your Wii was a novel one but not if it cost you money, you're in luck. Nintendo has dropped the point requirement for the browser.

Bummed because you've got a new Wii and the Twilight Princess hack won't work on it? Have an older Wii but you don't want to buy Twilight Princess just to install Homebrew? Try the free and easy bannerbomb exploit.

Last week we shared a great hack to let you back up and play your Wii games from an external hard drive. That hack has been made easier by eliminating the need for a Wii downgrade.

A disc that never leaves the case can never be scratched. Save your Wii games to an external hard drive with this handy tutorial for speedier and scratch-free playback.

Video streaming web site YouTube announced a new beta service today called YouTube for TV (if you want to try it in your regular browser, here's how). To begin with, the service is available on Sony PS3s and Nintendo Wiis, offering a "10-foot television viewing experience through a streamlined interface that enables you to discover, watch, and share YouTube videos on any TV screen with just a few quick clicks of your remote control." Sounds good so far, but if you've got a Wii or PS3, let's hear what you think in the comments.

O'Reilly's Hacks Blog points out a way to work around the Nintendo Wii's arbitrary 2GB limit on storing games and save information to an SD card. After formatting the card using the SDFormatter tool, simply fill everything but 2GB with junk data that you can later replace. Useful for anyone who's hacked their Wii for homebrew apps.

Nintendo doesn't exactly advertise it, but the remotes for the Wii gaming console—including the balance board that comes with Wii Fit—have Bluetooth capabilities. That means you can connect your Wii peripherals to your computer to operate the media centre hooked up to your TV, play emulated games with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or even a Balance Board, and pretty much have them do anything you can do with a keyboard. Let's walk through linking up your Wii peripherals and putting them in control of your Mac, PC, or Linux box.

You've hacked your Wii to run homebrew apps and play back DVDs without any difficult hardware hacking and now you want to dive into more of your homebrew options. Let's take a closer look at how to install new homebrew applications on your Wii through the homebrew channel, play back virtually any video or audio format, run old-school video game emulators, and more. Oh, and we'll play a little Doom, naturally.

Despite the fact that it ships with a DVD drive, for whatever godforsaken reason, the Nintendo Wii doesn't support DVD playback—until last week, that is, when a homebrew hacker released a tool that enables DVD playback on your Wii. The best part? You don't have to crack open your Wii or disturb your hardware in any way to install it. Let's take a detailed look at how to softmod your Wii with the Twilight hack to run homebrew apps. Then I'll show you how to install the Wii port of the open source media player, mplayer, to turn your Wii into a DVD (or should I say WiiVD?) player.