MacBook Air SuperDrive, $9 and solder = works with any PC

I’ll bet those Apple hardware designers thought they were pretty clever by making the MacBook Air SuperDrive work only with its namesake. Ahh… but they never met the mistress of mods: tnkgrl! She deftly determined the reason for the optical drive to work only with the Mac. It’s not a power issue as some suspcected. It appears to be custom firmware in the conversation between the IDE and USB interfaces. Since firmware hacking proved to be a big challenge, tnkgrl just took it out of the equation by replacing the small circuit board with a $9 equivlient! Now she has a sweet optical drive that works not only with the MacBook Air, but with Earth, Wind and Fire all other PCs too. Now that’s what I call putting the "U" back in USB!