Note: For a more automated way of accomplishing this, check out ievms. I haven’t personally used it, but it looks like it automatically does most of the steps below.

Microsoft makes free VM images available for testing IE. They expire after a few months so you’ll have to periodically repeat this process, but it’s not too bad once you get the hang of it. There are plenty of other guides on how to use these, but I never found an up-to-date guide for using them in VirtualBox on OSX. (This guide was made using the “Publish Date: 8/16/2011″ VMs and VirtualBox 4.1.2)

(Note: I’ve only used the XP image to test IE6, 7 and 8, but the Windows 7 image should be similar)

1. Goto https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11575 and download the Windows_XP_IE6.exe file
2. This exe file is actually a RAR wrapper, so add a .rar extension and use a program like Keka to extract it. (You should end up with a “Windows XP.vhd” file)
3. Also download the iso from https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/ (my version was 0.1-15)
4. Start VirtualBox and create a new VM. (I give it 512MB ram). Give it a new hard disk (choose VDI, dynamic, 64GB). Do NOT use the existing VHD you downloaded, it won’t work!
5. Navigate to the new VM directory in Finder and copy the Windows XP.vhd there.
6. Open a terminal window in that directory and run VBoxManage clonevdi "Windows XP.vhd" --existing IE6.vdi (Substitute the name of your VM instead of IE6)
7. (Optionally) delete the Windows XP.vhd so it doesn’t take up space and we don’t accidentally use it in the VM.
8. In VirtualBox, navigate to your VM’s settings and uncheck ‘Enable Audio’, in the Network Tab, change NAT to ‘Bridged Adapter’ and under advanced change the adapter type to “Paravirtualized (virtio-net)”. I also uncheck ‘USB 2.0′ from the ports/usb tab. On the storage tab attach the virtio-win iso as the CD
9. Turn on the VM and login (the password is ‘Password1′). It will prompt to activate within 3 days, choose ‘No’ for now.
10. Whenever it prompts for CmBatt.sys hit cancel. It’s going to show the ‘Found new hardware wizard” a bunch. Each time choose ‘No, not at this time’, and pay attention to the following screen. If it’s looking for the driver for “Ethernet Controller”, choose “Install the software automatically” then “Continue Anyway”, otherwise choose “Cancel”.
11. Close the notepad window and windows should finish loading. Choose “No” for restarting your computer now.
12. Try running IE, it should be working with internet access. The rest of this tutorial might not work if it doesn’t.
13. In the VirtualBox titlebar, select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions”. Proceed through the wizard in the VM and click “Continue Anyway” whenever prompted. Choose “Reboot Now”
14. After rebooting and trying to login again, you’re forced to activate windows. Choose “Yes, active over the internet”, “No” to registering. It should successfully activate.
15. You’ll be prompted to install more drivers and find more files, just cancel these.
16. You now have a fully functional Windows install with IE6. If you prefer IE7 or IE8, choose one of the installers on the desktop. (I don’t choose to install the latest updates when installing them). Only one version of IE can be installed on a VM, so you’ll need to repeat this whole process for each version you’d like.
17. Just to save bandwidth and disk space, I then go in the control panel and disable automatic windows update.

Technical Notes:
- The key steps in this guide are the virtio networking and the ‘VBoxManage clonevdi’ command. (The clonevdi part wasn’t necessary until the 8/16/2011 Microsoft VMs, which is why most guides are out of date)

A (mostly) exhaustive list of the data I’m considering:

• Home Photos
• Home Videos
• Ripped/Downloaded Movies
• Ripped/Downloaded Music
• Personal Documents (emails, tax returns, chatlogs, scanned receipts, bills, etc)
• Downloaded applications/games etc (E.g. through services like Steam)

Factors to consider for the above data:

• Primary storage (where it can be easily accessible by multiple users, both local and remote)
• Backup (both local and offsite)
• Ensuring data integrity
• Easily searchable
• Cross-platform accessibility
• Storing cloud data locally

There’s a forum thread on the issue – http://www.pctools.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65000

Enter: Google docs. I have a spreadsheet named ‘Shopping list’ that I can very quickly edit from *any* PC connected to the net. On my phone, I use Opera Mobile and have a bookmark directly to that specific spreadsheet. With saved passwords enabled, it’s only a few taps total to bring up the list. The mobile version also supports limited doc editing, although it’s too slow be all that useful.

*Bonus* – If you share write access to your shopping list doc, your significant other/housemates can add to the list without your intervention!

I’ve been using this system for a few months and found it to work wonderfully. Of course you won’t be able to access your list if you don’t have cell coverage at the store, but that’s never been a problem for me.

I’ll start off by mentioning my requirements and the apps I tried.

Requirements:

• Run remotely on either my NAS (preferable) or my always-on Windows XP ‘server’ box.
• Easily view logs from my main desktop, and preferably any other box I give access to.
• Doesn’t require a separate IRC ‘presence’ like a bot. (Bots aren’t always welcome, and I want the ability to send messages from the name I’m always logged-in as)

Apps Tried:

• mIRC – I actually started off using mIRC with logging enabled on my Windows ‘server’ box. The plain-text logs are quite hard to read though, and I couldn’t get the only mIRC to HTML converter I could find (ircLOG2HTML) to work. X-Chat 2 also had the same types of problems.
• A variety of Windows IRC logger ‘bots’ (e.g. ircA). These worked somewhat, but their log formats still weren’t all that great, and they had the disadvantages of being similar to bots (see ‘Requirements’)

Having tried many of the Windows clients, I decided to try out the (argueably?) best linux client, Irssi, on my NAS. I’d used Irssi before, but I found referencing this guide to using Irssi and screen invaluable. I used the following settings to automatically generate logs without the noisy join/leave messages and to auto-create a different log file for each channel and day.


"fe-common/core" = {
autolog_path = "/root/irclogs/$tag/$0.%Y-%m-%d.log";
autolog = "yes";
autolog_level = "all -crap -clientcrap -ctcps -joins -parts -quits -nicks";
};

So now I had text logs being output. But they still looked ugly when viewed in a browser, so they needed to be html-ified. Enter irc2html.pl (yes a perl script). Feed it a log file and it outputs a nice-looking html page. I ran into some issues with that script where large sections of text would have a black background (making them unreadable unless highlighted with the mouse), so I commented out a few lines which seems to have fixed the issue. You can get my version of the script here.

I then created a simply bash script that would check for any irc log files modified in the last 5 minutes and run the perl script on them, dumping the html output in a different directory (get it here). Then it was just a matter of adding a crontab entry to run this this script every 5 minutes.

To easily remotely access these logs, I set up lighttpd on the NAS, sharing the html output directory. (lighttpd was incredibly easy to setup, I highly recommend it for other simple projects like this!). Now any computer on my LAN can browse to the server and easily browse and read all of the logs.

This whole project was definitely more work than I intended it to be, but the resulting setup is perfectly tailored to me. I can comfortably browse the IRC logs at my leisure from any computer on my LAN, and if I want to start talking in the conversation, I can fairly easily ssh into my NAS and talk in Irssi. (My next blog post will likely be on remotely accessing the logs using SSH port forwarding, fun stuff!)

As a side note, please do not post the logs online for others to view (i.e. publicly log) without consent from the channel admin. (See the IRSeek incident)

Instead, I wanted to only be alerted when a message I really cared about and possibly had some importance/urgency arrived. This means I needed a mechanism to separate out the ‘good’ messages from the rest of the cruft. Luckily, the phone (and Google’s Gmail Notifier) are only aware of new messages in the inbox. As long as only ‘important’ messages end up in the inbox, I won’t receive unwanted notifications.

This can easily be accomplished using Gmail’s filters. Some of the optional actions are to ‘Skip the inbox’ and ‘apply label’. Any message that I consider unimportant never goes to my inbox and is automatically given a ‘Junkish’ label. I’ve never explicitly notified of these messages, but I can easily see if there are any new ones once I’m in the main Gmail interface.

Of course the last step is to actually filter out the unimportant messages. This is definitely the most time-consuming part of the process, so I do it gradually as the new messages come in. The ‘simple’ solution for most newsletters/notifications etc is to just add the sender’s email address to the filter so that anything sent from that address will be caught.

For any new website signups/subscriptions, I’ve been taking advantage of Gmail’s ‘dot addressing’, which means that if your email is john@doe.com, an email sent to jo.hn@doe.com will also reach you. When signing up for possibly spammy sites, I add an extra dot in my email address. Then I have one Gmail filter that automatically junks all emails sent to that specific address. This way you don’t need to update your filter for each new sender of junky email.

I know this system is rather simple and probably common sense, but it definitely cut down my distractions and I highly recommend that anyone else who receives email notifications try it out.

The Xbox 360 doesn’t have any built-in methods for being remotely controlled. This immediately narrowed down the possibilities to one apparent option: internet streaming radio. If the 360 could play a streaming radio station, then I could probably remotely control that.

Unfortunately, the 360 doesn’t natively support streaming radio internally (i.e. you can’t just copy a .asx or .pls file onto it or manually enter a web address). It does, however, support streaming radio when accessed from a DLNA capable server. I tested a sample radio stream from shoutcast.com with both TVersity (a PC app that acts as a DLNA server) and my Buffalo LinkStation NAS which has an embedded Twonky DLNA server. Both work pretty well, but I noticed that the 360 seems to buffer streaming radio from TVersity (i.e. if you choose to stop listening on the 360, then soon after start listening again, it will begin playback from when you initially started listening). For this reason, I give a slight edge to using a NAS/Twonky if you have the option.

Now that we can stream radio, we need our own radio station. I used Winamp with the edcast plugin and DNAS application. This basically allows you to create your own shoutcast station. I won’t go into much detail on this, since the guide here is pretty straightforward. You *should* be able to use the Shoutcast DSP plugin from the guide, but I instead used the edcast plugin available here. Note that Winamp/DNAS will need to be continually running for the 360 to access the music stream.

The 360 will need to access this station through a playlist file. I created a very simple .m3u file with the following contents (you’ll need to change the IP address to that of the PC running Winamp/DNAS):

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1,[connecting to host] http://192.168.0.105:8000/

http://192.168.0.105:8000/

Make this file accessible from either TVersity or your NAS, and play it on your 360.  I won’t go into detail on this because there are already plenty of guides found on Google (such as this one). At this point your 360 should be playing whatever Winamp is playing (with a 5-30 second delay). If you simply want to control your 360′s music from your PC, then you’re all set; simply choose your songs in Winamp.

For me, this was all just a setup to use my phone to control the music. Ideally, I now wanted to remotely access Winamp from my Windows Mobile phone. I found some Windows Mobiles apps that claim to do just that, but they were all commercial, and I strongly prefer free software (either open source or plain freeware). (Note that I’m using my phones WiFi connection to get a local IP address, you can do this over the data connection, but you’ll need to forward the appropriate ports on your home router).

If I can’t use a native Windows Mobile app, then the next best thing would be a Winamp web interface to access using my phone’s browser. This also has the added advantage of being inherently cross-platform. There are many existing Winamp plugs that give remote access via a web interface. Unfortunately, none of the ones I tried fully met my needs. I’d used AjaxAMP before, and while it works pretty well when used on another PC, the interface doesn’t work so well on a small mobile device. It is technically usable and very simple to setup, so I would still offer trying this before moving on. I had very high hopes for WWWinamp which seems similar to AjaxAMP but even supports a skin for mobile devices! But after an hour of tinkering with it, I still couldn’t get it communicating with my Winamp installation.

In the end, I gave up on the Winamp web interfaces and settled for a whole PC web interface using VNC. I used the Windows Mobile VNC viewer here (direct link to cab on blownfuze.org) and UltraVNC on my PC. The Winamp interface can be a bit hard to navigate using it, but it does allow me to use all Winamp features such as searching my library and accessing playlists. The obvious downside to this is that the PC shouldn’t be used locally while being accessed by VNC. If this were to be a commonly used setup, I’d strongly recommend running this on a separate server PC if possible.

And there you have it! You can now control the music played by your 360 from anywhere using your phone. It’s currently not simple enough to be all that practical, but it was definitely fun to set up and play with!

Current issues/annoyances:

• Requires an ‘always on’ PC for running the streaming server and being remote controlled
• Changing songs isn’t noticed for up to 30 seconds or so due to the buffering. I’d much prefer the instant satisfaction of choosing a song and hearing it immediately.