Appletell

Apple today rolled out a Time Machine and Airport combo update. It’s fixes some stuff, blah blah blah. But as soon as I saw “Firmware Updates,” I had a gut feeling that Apple had restored a long lost feature: backing up to Hard Drives attached to the Airport Extreme Base Station.

It turns out my gut feeling might have been right. TUAW is reporting that reader Peder was pleasantly astonished to find that “after downloading the latest Airport-update I checked for updates for my AirPort Extreme. After upgrading to version 7.3.1, Time Machine recognized the attached USB-drive.”

This means that those of you who rushed out to buy an external drive for wireless backups only to get shortchanged when Apple pulled the feature can now use that drive.

Please sound off in the comments with your results. Here’s hoping that this works for everyone!

Read [TUAW]

Apple has always been one to do things differently. Apparently, they made the external MacBook Air Superdrive different as well. It sounds like this drive can only work with your MBA, and not any other Macs or PCs. Now Apple didn’t do this to be mean. They wanted to create a Superdrive that could be powered by USB, instead of having to be plugged in the wall. In order to do this, they and to make the MacBook Air’s USB port “specially powered” to support the Superdrive. This probably means this won’t work on other Macs in your house. At least Steve Jobs wasn’t joking when he said they were made specifically for the MBA.

Via [Macuser]

We all knew it was coming, we just had no idea when. Someone has developed a patch for the AppleTV that will allow you to connect an external hard drive to it via the extra USB port, thus expanding your storage. The hack gives you the ability to sync your whole iTunes library to an external drive, so you don’t have to worry about streaming content anymore.

To do this hack you will need: an ssh-enable AppleTV, Intel Mac or Intel-based Linux/Unix system, installed version of Mac OS X 10.4 Intel, an original, unmodified copy of the ‘mach_kernel.prelink’ file from your AppleTV, and a USB external hard drive (formatted in HFS+). Not to mention a whole lot of Cojones.

Read [Apple TV Hacks] via [TUAW]