International (European) Keyboard for IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S
A French ZipitZ2 owner, Dom has kindly put together a keymap and font collection for IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S that allows you to enter and display accented characters on the ZIpitZ2.
You can find the download here.
Zipitbot
#zipit IRC channel user nulluser has turned a ZipitZ2 into a nice self contained bot. The Zipit talks to a dsPIC controller board via i2c (originally via the serial mod) and the whole thing is controlled via wifi using a client program on a PC. The bot is a very cool use of the ZipitZ2. He has kindly posted alot of information about it including the client software sourcecode on his zipitbot webpage
[Update: I sent Hack-a-Day a tip about the zipitbot last night and they've posted it http://hackaday.com/2011/01/20/zipitbot/ ]
Valexonline has limited supplies of the $10 ZipitZ2 left.
[Update2: Looks like we are back to full price ($50 give or take) Zipit's. Valexonline seems to be out and the seller who was selling batches of 8 for $100 seems to be finished too.]
[Update: It looks like valexonline have raised the price for the last few they have. They are now $14.99]
I just got a reply from an email to Valexonline. It seems that they have got less than 50 ZipitZ2's left and they will ship to foreign lands (Europe etc.) using USPS although using USPS doesn't allow for tracking and stuff sometimes gets lost so although FedEx is more expensive it is safer.
If you want a $10 Zipit then you'd better order one quickly before they run out.
http://www.valexonline.com/ZipIt_Wireless_Messenger_Z2A_B00115PR2O_s/41.htm
http://www.valexonline.com/ZipIt_Wireless_Messenger_Z2A_p/6001.htm
The state of the Zipit
Things in the Zipit world have been quite interesting in the last year. Not only do we now have a very nice u-boot bootloader and installation script courtesy of marex, mozzwald and geordy. We also have working USB host on u-booted Zipits courtesy of GPSFan, mozzwald and myself (although I only had a small part in it's creation and perfection) as well as two nice serial mods from Foxx and geordy. I've been slaving away on my forks of IZ2S, IZ2Se and EZ2S as well as writing a few utilities and scripts for the Zipit in general and porting a few interpreters and compilers to ARM and the Zipit (OpenCOBOL, 4tH, lua, bwbasic, blassic...). mozzwald, wicknix and wejp has made some nice rootfs for the Zipit. mozzwald and wicknix's are based on ubuntu and debian respectivly and have versions for both u-boot+mainline and blob+.29 bootloader+kernel. wixknix's z2sid comes in two flavours, console only and X and mozzwald's z2buntu is X only. wejp's is for u-booted zipits only and is based on a buildroot rootfs and is console only. A couple of  nice things about wejp's rootfs is that it is really small and it comes with a really nice audio player based on SDL called Gmu. On the hardware side of things, Dom a French Zipit Owner and user has made a nice cable for charging/powering your Zipit from a USB slot on your computer or via an external battery pack. He is selling the cables and it costs 7 euros (about $10 incl postage) to have one sent to the USA. Dom is also working on other nice hardware additions to the zipit like screen protectors and a USB hub that can also charge/power the zipit too. Another #zipit channel user zashi has written a nice key binding utility for .29 kernel upgraded and u-booted zipits called ebindkeys which I am trying to get working in IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S, so far i've not had much luck but i'll keep trying, I suspect I need to do some more fiddiling with kernel modules and /dev nodes
[Update: ebindkeys does work in IZ2S/IZ2Se/EZ2S. As i suspected it required loading a module and creating nodes and some fiddiling, we can't use it for the green power button but it does give us access to all the "normal" keys plus home, options etc. ]
Well that's all that I can currently remember about what's going on in the Zipit world, i'm sure i've forgotten a few things but i'll post about them in the fullness of time.
Happy New Year Zipitians
New tutorial for upgrading the kernel and running debian on a ZipitZ2
designate72 from the #zipit irc channel has written a new tutorial on how to upgrade the kernel on a ZipitZ2. It is more up to date than the other tutorials for this on the web so I recommend that it is the one to follow at the moment. There is an easier way using wicknix's (from the #zipit irc channel) z2sid but the tutorial is good anyway.
Personal Solder Slave
When I was younger I had reasonable soldering skills but 25+ years of letting them slowly rot and a combination of ill health and old age have given me the shakes and terrible eyesight. I can still cope with larger items like resistors on perf board and the removal of the power socket on the Zipit Z2's mainboard but for anything more fiddily i've got no hope. Luckily Foxx from the #zipit irc channel not only lives quite near me but is also a soldering master and i've turned him into my personal solder slave. I tell him how great he is and he does my soldering tasks for me 
. He's especially very good at doing the serial mod on the Zipit Z2 and making USB connectors for the rear expansion port of the Zipit Z2. He's told me that he's willing to do the serial mod, usb connectors or any other soldering tasks for people for the cost of parts, postage (or travel if you are in the NYC area and want him to do it in person) and a reasonable fee (depends on the difficulty of the soldering task). You can either contact me or look for Foxx in the #zipit irc channel.
serial terminal for IZ2S/EZ2S
I've eaten thanksgiving dinner (and cooked it too and done the washing up) and the wife is being a TV hog so rather than watch the rubbish she wants to watch I put on my headphones, fired up a belle and sebastian cd and looked for something useful to port to a stock zipit z2 running IZ2S or EZ2s. I finally decided that a serial terminal program would be useful. So here in all it's glory is a IZ2S/EZ2S compatable binary of ssterm.
The binary is here and you can just drop it into the bin directory on the sd card.
$10 Zipit Z2
I recently stumbled across a seller on fleabay selling what seems to be a seemingly infinite number of Zipits (after each sale there was an immediate relisting) for $9.99 + S&H (to NYC it is $5.95). The only problems were 1. they were on ebay 2. they were only available one at a time 3. they were on ebay.
However I did a little digging and found the seller has a "real" online store and are selling Zipit Z2's on there too. You can order multiple units and the shipping is combined and much lower than using ebay. I have passed this information on to one mailing list I am a member of and a few people in the #zipit irc channel has bought a few and they say they are the real deal and they arrive quite quickly.
You can never have too many Zipits so it might be worth picking a few up at that price. If i had a spare $60 or $70 i'd definatly buy a few as they make great christmas presents for nephews and neices.
USB charging cable for the ZipitZ2
I've made a usb charging cable but my efforts were terrible. a mass of electrical tape holding together a spliced plug off a broken power supply and a usb cable. It does work reasonably well though but recently a comment in my post about clocks for the zipit led me to a blog by a french zipit owner who has made a much nicer cable. my french is terrible, it's been over 30 years since I took french at school but from what I can workout he's selling them for 3 euros. I am tempted to send him a few euros and getting a couple myself.
Another console/tty clock program for the Zipit Z2
I stumbled across a program called tbclock this morning and decided to see if it would run on the ZipitZ2, there is no reason why it shouldn't as it is ncurses based but i've come across quite a few ncurses based programs that aren't too keen on the default character resolution of the ZipitZ2's LCD (changing to a smaller font normally fixes the problems but my eyes aren't as good as they used to be so alot of fonts aren't exactly usable for me, others might be able to cope with smaller fonts than the default 8x8 font). There were no problems with building it using the instructions on the webpage and it runs really well on the Zipit console and via an ssh session. tbclock is not only a binary clock, it is also a game and a "stopwatch". You can download the IZ2s/IZ2se,EZ2S compatable binary here and it's manpage is here. just drop the binary into the bin directory on your sd card and all should be good.