Bitshift

For those of you living under a rock, you may have missed the news that Apple launched its assault on the world's living rooms last week: The Apple TV was released. True to form, the community rose to the challenge, and hacks and mods a-plenty sprung from the ether.

There's a Wiki set up to collect information on hacks and mods and a forum thread detailing the progress people have made adding functionality to the Apple TV. There are a few other sources, but these two seem to be the main thrust of the development work being done.

So far, people have managed to add larger hard drives to the Apple TV, get Xvid and Divx files to play on it, get the Apache webserver running, get SSH running, enable filesharing, enable remote desktop, and in the forum thread above, someone's managed to write some Objective C code and add their own items to the menus.

Several groups are working furiously to fully-enable the USB port on the back of the unit, to allow keyboard use and -- perhaps more importantly -- allow the use of external USB drives as added storage space, or as alternative boot devices.

Strange days we live in!