Friend of the site Erica over at TUAW has been feverishly hacking away at her AppleTV and has “successfully” loaded iTunes on the unsuspecting box. Success can be defined as the application actually loading, but strangely missing its fonts.

She advises:

For the most part, you need to run iTunes over a VNC connection from a normal Macintosh, but once you get going you can stream the audio live from any radio station for an indefinite period of time. Make sure to use the Apple Remote about once every twenty-to-thirty minutes to keep Apple TV from automatically going to sleep.

When the AppleTV came out we were exchanging emails on how ‘hackable’ the little gizmo would be and we both agree that it has exceeded all expectations. Wonder how long until somebody ports linux to work on it?

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Seems that Apple is striking back against AppleTV Hackers

Several of us over in the Awkward TV IRC(l0rdr0ck, myself, and others) have had our Mod’d Apple TV’s played with over night(SSH/VNC disabled), our guess is apple has started to fight back the mod’d Apple TV’s. This is a warning to all of you to block your Apple TV from the internet by going into your routers settings and denying it internet access! This does mean Apple may have the power to update your Apple TV, without you knowing it!

Apple, WHY?! You could sell tons more of these little boxes if you allow developers to come up with all neat little hacks.

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The growing trend of poking fun at Apple using their own simplistic attitude has finally met its match. Check out these video spoofs on lauriemcguinness.com. They’re top notch and hard to beat. I’m having a difficult time finding anything to compete with the these four clips. If you have any, drop the links in the comments.

With iTunes giving you the ability to share your music library I’m left wondering WHAT people are listening to when they are connected. iTunes Monitor, a Mac only program, does it show you who’s connected to your shared music, it also tells you what they’re listening to. Unfortunately it is complied for the PowerPC processor only, so on an Intel Mac your processor usage soars using this neat little utility.

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Ok, we promise to make this the last AppleTV post for today – but I think it is really cool that you can get the Apple TV os running on ordinary Mac hardware. No Instructions as of yet, but they are sure to follow!

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Is that paltry 40GB hardrive in your Apple TV filled to the brim yet? Could you use a little hardrive upgrade love? Check out TechRestore – they’re offering "overnight" service for hardrive upgrades. Understand that your warranty will definitely be null and void but who cares! This thing is so damn simple it should never break!

The base upgrade will set you back $99 with the max upgrade option of 120GB setting you back $99 + $120. Of course, you’ll need to calculate shipping costs into that final price and you end up pushing the checkout cost over the actual price of a second Apple TV.

Personally, I think a the streaming capabilities of the TV work well enough. Regardless, would you upgrade your Apple TV?

Fresh off the AppleTV is the “FloatingPhotos” ScreenSaver. Obviously it doesn’t work on OSX in its current form. So, here is the raw Quartz Composer file that any enterprising hacker can take apart, poke, prod, and try to port to work on regular OSX machine.

Anybody up for the task?

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Yesterday we mentioned the disheartening news that the next major Safari release would do away with InputManagers. In the comments, Kuswanto provided a useful tip for managing and accessing your bookmarks with multiple browsers on the same machine. Doing so would allow users to move between Firefox, Safari, or any other OS X internet browser without missing any of their favorite bookmarks.

The useful utility is called bookit.

Bookit now supports Shiira, as well as: Safari, Camino, Firefox, Omniweb, Opera, Mozilla, iCab, Internet Explorer and Netscape web browsers. Written in Cocoa, Bookit natively supports Mac OS X so it works just like all your other Mac OS X applications. Complete with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, like sheets, drawers and toolbars.

There is a $12 registration fee, but some users may find the fee acceptable if they are constantly moving between different browsers.

Sad news for Safari browser users. According to an article by Ars Technica, Apple is disabling the use of InputManager plugins.

One more tip we got regarding Leopard, is that InputManager plugins are no longer allowed. That’s right… no more little hacks from anybody besides Apple. No more Apple menu hacks. No more Safari plugins.

Follow the post and comments on hicksdesign. Personally, I find this news unfortunate and discomforting. I will no longer enjoy the blazing speed of Safari + the multitude of "enhancements" provided by various developers. Farewell Saft, Inquisitor, and scores of other useful bits of add-ons for the Safari browser.

I’m going to save some time and start moving all my browsing habits back to Firefox. It will save me the hassle of moving bookmarks and settings later down the road when Leopard comes through. What’s this latest rumor that Leopard may not show until October! The reason being something about providing support for Vista?! Boo to that. Release and patch support later!

Apprehensive to purchase an Apple TV due to the fact that well… its stripped / watered down nature? Rest assured that others share the same mentality. Fortunately, a few good hackers have spent some time figuring out how to make the Apple TV usable for video hungry users with XVID encoded libraries.

1. Open it up (4 screws on the bottom, small Torx bit)
2. Put the 2.5″ drive into a USB enclosure or whatever you want
3. Mount the HFS filesystem
4. Install Perian in /Library/Quicktime (as you normally would)
5. Install Dropbear (or enable SSH if you know how… we gave up and used Dropbear)
6. Add a startup script to disable the firewall or open up the ports you need for SSH
7. Put the drive back in and boot it, ssh login as frontrow, password frontrow (or add an ssh key for yourself)
8. Use a reference movie (use QT Pro to save a reference movie) to bootstrap your xvid file

The full instructions can be found on here [via]. So who’s going to try?