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Windows 7’s XP Mode feature seamlessly runs your older applications in a virtualized Windows XP behind the scenes, but if you’re using the Home edition, you’re out of luck. Here’s how to create your own XP Mode for any version.

Over at How-To Geek (my home away from Lifehacker), writer Matthew covers how to use VMWare Player’s Unity feature to create a seamless virtual machine that runs applications alongside your primary OS—and it works for any version of Windows. The guide steps through installing Windows XP in a virtual machine, configuring Unity and related settings, and even how to map your documents folders so the virtualized XP applications will use the same folders as your primary OS.

If you’re using the Professional or Ultimate version of Windows 7 and your PC supports hardware virtualization, you can check out our guide to setting up and using the official XP Mode in Windows 7, and we’ve also got you covered with a guide to using XP Mode on Windows 7 machines without hardware virtualization. If you don’t fall into either of those categories, or you are using Windows Vista—or even XP, hit the link for the full walk-through tutorial.

Windows only: Replacement file manager Double Explorer adds tabbed browsing and a dual-pane view for navigating your files, but unlike a full replacement application, it embeds a normal Windows Explorer screen into each pane.

The biggest problem with many of the alternative file managers is that some of your shell extensions aren’t going to work anymore, so Double Explorer simply loads up the Windows Explorer view for each tab or pane that you are browsing in. Once you’ve installed Double Explorer and launched the application, you can simply start browsing and accessing your files—though you might want to turn off the navigation pane if you’ve got a small screen.

The application also has some nice extra features, like a favorite folders toolbar, and it remembers your latest locations when you restart. Double Explorer is free and open source, available for Windows only. Readers might note that it’s still a little rough around the edges in some places, but definitely worth a look if you’re in the market for a new file management application.

Windows/Mac + iPhone/iPod touch: Not only do videos take up a ton of space on space-constrained devices, but converting videos for the iPhone gets painful quickly. Air Video streams videos straight to your iPhone, converting them on-the-fly if they’re incompatible.

The app is actually an iPhone app plus a PC/Mac app that acts as a server. You can use any videos on your computer, whether they are in iTunes or not—and, if you prefer, you can also add video playlists from iTunes to the list of sources. Once you get the server app running on your desktop, you can start streaming over your home network immediately. Streaming over the internet from outside your home, though, only takes a few more seconds—in the server app, go to the “Remote” tab and check Enable Access from Internet (see below). The app will give you a server PIN that you can type in when you go to add a source on your iPhone or iPod touch—note that your router at home needs a public IP address and support UPnP or NAT-PMP protocols, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people.

As if that weren’t cool (or easy) enough, if you have some videos that can’t be played directly on the iPhone, you can convert them using Air Video as you watch it (as long as you’re running firmware 3.0 and have a fairly powerful computer back at home). If you prefer, you can also convert the file offline and watch it later.

Air Video is a free download for the iPhone and iPod touch, although the free version only shows you a few videos at a time, at random, from your folders. If you have a large video library you want to share, or don’t feel like clicking on the folder multiple times waiting for the video you want to be on the list, there’s a $2.99 pro version available as well.

Ed. note: We’ve shown you how to automatically download your favorite TV shows before, but even if you’ve got your downloads automated perfectly, there’s still a little matter of organization. Productive Geek forum member ejf071189 details how he automates his TV-download organization.

I used to use uTorrent’s RSS feature to automatically download shows via this guide (see “How do I use the RSS feed in my client ?”). This allowed me to automatically have shows downloaded into appropriate folders, which are monitored by XMBC which scrapes thetvdb.com to add the shows to its own library. While XBMC was able to identify episode information with the naming system the torrents used, I preferred to have the episodes better organized using TVRename. Every so often I would run TVRename and scan my library for files that had to be renamed and rename them.

There were problems with this method, though. The obvious problem was that I would have to remember to run TVRename, which really wasn’t that big a deal. The bigger problem was that depending on when XBMC scanned my TV folder for new media, if the files were renamed with TVRename, XBMC would then have to rescan the file with the new name, leading to dead files and dupes in library view.

Here’s the method I used to resolve the issue:

1. Download TVRename 2.1.1a6 here. The 2.1.1 line of TVRename is the only one that supports command line arguments. The 2.2 alphas are supposed to have this feature reimplemented but development is currently on hiatus.

2. Reconfigure utorrent’s RSS feature to download all shows to a folder outside of the folders XBMC monitors. This could be a generic download folder or a subfolder called “Unsorted TV Shows,” for example.

3. In the “Finding and Organising” tab of TVRename, add the same folder that you set utorrent to download your shows to as a search folder.

4. Add your shows to TVRename with settings like this.

5. Create a batch script in the C:\Program Files\TVRename directory called “rename.bat” with the following command:

tvrename.exe /renamingcheck /renamingdo /missingcheck /fnocheck /fnodo /quit

From the TVRename forum: “That will make it check for files needing to be renamed, then rename them, then check for missing files, do a finding&organising check for them, move/copy the files found, then quit. Add “/hide” if you want it all to happen without the window coming up”

6. Go into the task scheduler or other scheduling app and add a new task that runs this batch file at intervals to your liking.

Now files that go into your downloads folder will periodically be sorted into your library with appropriate names and in the corresponding season folders (TVRename should create a season folder when necessary), and will only be scanned into XBMC with the correct name.

More and more you’ll find yourself not being the only photographer at an event. Divvyshot offers a simple way to not only share your own pictures, but to create open albums others can contribute their event photos to.

Divvyshot has a painless one-step signup process—it’s right on their front page, no annoying email confirmation!—and a polished and easy to use interface. Nearly all the settings for your albums are represented as icons across the top of your album page: click the padlock to lock the album so only friends can contribute to it, click the person icon to lock viewing the album to friends, click the globe to share your photos on Twitter, Facebook, Divvyshot, and with email notifications.

You can easily view the photos in the album in a variety of ways like by who uploaded them, what activity is going on at the event, or view the whole album. Uploading is fairly standard unless you’re sporting a browser that supports HTML 5 like the new version of Firefox, then you can—as the screenshot above demonstrates—drag and drop pictures right out of folders on your computer and into the album.

The strongest selling point for Divvyshot is the ease-of-use factor. The interface is simplistic, the next step needed to complete a task is clear, and it definitely passes the non-techie relative test—if Uncle Bill can check his email he should have no problem uploading pictures to Divvyshot.

Have a favorite service for sharing event photographs? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Filed under: Odds and ends, Freeware

There have been some other utilities that turn your iPhone/iPod touch into a flash drive, but this one is free and very easy to use. It’s called iPhone Explorer. You install the app on your Mac, or your PC (there’s an app for each platform) and you’re ready to go. You’ll see your iPhone appear when it’s plugged into your computer. You can view the folder structure, and drag and drop items to or from the iPhone to your desktop or back the other way.

You can create, delete and rename folders on your iPhone. If your iPhone is jailbroken, you can access the real root and then recover things like your address book, emails and SMS messages.

if you want to do this over a wireless network there is Discover and Air Sharing. Discover is free, Air Share is U.S. $2.99.

I’m not really sure why Apple didn’t allow this functionality to begin with, but that’s Apple just being Apple. I tried iPhone Explorer on my desktop Mac and it connected to my iPhone 3GS in a split second and I was good to go. Don’t expect to be able to interact with your iPhone with this app in any complex way. It’s really just giving you flash drive capability, and if that’s what you want, this is a good place to get it.

TUAWUse your iPhone and your iPod touch as a flash drive originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Macworld, Video, Interviews

Steve Sande visited with Kevin Garton of The Neat Company today to hear what the scanning superpower is up to at Macworld 2010.

The company is about to go live with a beta of a new version of NeatWorks for Mac, and Garton noted that Mac users will be able to join the beta program. Just in time for the tax season, the new version will provide the capability of flagging receipt scans with taxing categories, as well as creating numerous levels of folders and subfolders for organization of your receipts.

If you’ll be at Macworld Expo 2010, drop by the Neat booth (#847) to see the software and several of the company’s other products in action.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TUAW video interview with The Neat Company originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If somehow you’ve become concerned that another iPhone might not be on the way to market, you can now rest easy. Our ingenious tipsters have discovered yet another fascinating factoid deep within the Frameworks of the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK, namely: the codename of the next iPhone. Buried way inside the platform simulator lies a set of folders dedicated to specific models of iPhone OS-ready devices, including the iPhone 3GS, second generation iPod touch, something called the “K48″ (yep, the codename we were told was the internal name for the iPad), and… the “N89.” Sure, it sounds like a Nokia phone just waiting to happen, but this is — according to our extremely knowledgeable and trusted sources — likely the codename of the next iPhone (previous versions were called the M68, N82, and N88). We can’t take too much away from this beyond the fact that the model exists, though we’re certain that with a little more digging, some detail is sure to rear its head (attention hive-mind). Interestingly, Apple’s just released firmware (3.1.3) also includes another new model, the “N80,” which we’re told will most likely be the next version of the iPod touch. We’re going to keep researching here, so stay tuned for more.

Next iPhone codename, new iPod touch revealed in latest SDK and firmware originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows only: Explorer extension Lammer Context Menu adds a number of very useful features to the right-click menu, from standard stuff like Copy Path all the way to wild cards, batch rename, and mounting virtual drives.

Once you’ve installed the extension, you can simply right-click on a file or folder to access the new utilities—you can open a command prompt, copy the path, search, mount folders as a virtual drive, register DLL files, or use the very useful feature to select all files of the same type in the current folder. There’s also some more advanced dialogs, like the path operations screen where you can move, copy, delete based on wildcards, or the batch rename files dialog.

Lammer Context Menu is a free download for Windows, works in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, and is compatible with UAC in Windows 7 or Vista.

iPhone/iPod touch: Ever since the FeedDemon/ NetNewsWire RSS readers announced exclusive Google Reader syncing, we’ve been waiting for that anywhere-you-go goodness to arrive on iPhones. Now it has, and NetNewsWire 2.0 is almost certainly better than Google Reader’s mobile site.

To be fair, Google Reader’s mobile view is still a great option for Android, Palm Pre, and other non-iPhone browsers that want a look at what’s new in their RSS collections. But the NetNewsWire app doesn’t require a new browser window, won’t lose your place if you venture off to read a link, stores items for offline reading, and offers some great navigation and sharing options, while all the time syncing what you read and star back to your Reader account. Of course, if you’re using another reader for your feed needs, NetNewsWire can easily work from your OPML file (assuming you’re okay with creating a Google account for backup syncing).

Want to post an item to Twitter, save it for later text-only reading in Instapaper, or simply jump to the next unread item in a full item view? NetNewsWire has you covered. Are you an overwhelmed blog editor who, on a frantic Monday morning, only needs to see items from the last 24 hours? Yeah, that’s in there as well. You can customize which feeds are shown or hidden on NetNewsWire’s home page, collapse folders and categories with a single click, and star items from a convenient button that doesn’t require your finger to tap around the very tiny space between a star icon and your left screen edge. The only thing missing is Reader’s Share/Like/comment tools, but it’s our guess that it’s a small subset of users who really need those from a mobile device.

NetNewsWire offers a free download with (not too annoying) ads for iPhones and iPod touch models running at least 3.0 firmware, or a $1.99 version with no advertising.

Originally posted 2009-09-23 18:25:20. Republished by Old Post Promoter