People have used FTP clients to upload, download, and share files over the internet for years, and though the FTP protocol continues to age, it's still commonly used all over the world. Once barebones, many newer FTP clients boast a wide and impressive range of features that are helping to push FTP (and other, more secure improvements like SFTP) into new heights of file sharing and transfer ease. For this week's Hive Five, we want to hear all about your favorite FTP client. On Thursday we'll be back with a roundup of the top five candidates, but for now, keep reading for more details and to nominate your favorite FTP client.

The Hive Five nomination round takes place in the comments, where you post your favorite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: FTP Client Goes Here. If you don't follow this format, we may not count your vote. To prevent tampering with the results, votes from first-time commenters may not be counted. After you've made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: The Hive Five feature series asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get—"Which tool is the best?" Once a week we'll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favorite tools to get the job done. Every Thursday, we'll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For an example, check out last week's Hive Five Best Desktop Search Applications.

Reader math0ne flaunts his killer, totally customized Windows desktop complete with separate operating modes depending on what he's doing. There's the focused configuration (pictured above), the creation configuration, and the research configuration. The apps he uses vary based on configuration, but favorites include previously mentioned apps like Samurize, foobar200, and Executor. He has detailed descriptions and notes on each configuration, so be sure to check them out. While you're there, share your jaw-dropping desktop in the Lifehacker Show and Tell Flickr group.

The Focused Configuration [Flickr]

Windows only: Free Explorer add-on QTAddressBar clones the functionality of Vista's new address bar in Windows XP. For folks unfamiliar with the new Vista address bar, it provides a clickable breadcrumb trail of every folder leading to your current location. Clicking one of your folders will take you directly to it, and clicking the down arrow provides a drop-down for moving to any folder within that one. Brought to you by the same folks who made previously mentioned QTTabBar, this freeware Explorer add-on looks like another nice stopgap between Vista and XP. While you're at it, check out more ways you can power up Windows Explorer with free add-ons.

QTAddressBar [via Download Squad]

We've already shown you how to use Gmail Superstars and Gmail Quick Links—both exclusive features of previously mentioned Gmail Labs—and now reader Alex McRoberts details how he uses the two excellent features to turn his Gmail account into a killer to-do list manager. Here's how he did it:

I went to the General settings (after enabling the two features) and enabled the red, orange and green stars (as well as keeping the original yellow star).

Then I assigned each of the new colors of stars to a few emails to test my search (which would later be the basis of my Quick Link):

l:^ss_sr OR l:^ss_so OR l:^ss_sg

This search shows an email which has the "label" Superstar Star Red OR has the "label" Superstar Star Orange OR has the "label" Superstar Star Green.

Next I saved the Quick Link as "Todo List." As for what the stars mean, I keep things red if I still have to do it, orange if it's in progress, and green if I need to keep it in the pile for a while even though I'm done with it. Then when I no longer need it, I remove the star and the item is subsequently removed from the list.

Sounds like a good system. I've been using the green checkmark and red exclamation point icons for a bit more context in my Gmail-based to-dos, but I am using a setup very similar to Alex's. How about you? If you're using Gmail to manage your to-dos, let's hear more about your methods in the comments.

Windows only: Alpha file manager Explorer++ is a promising free alternative to Windows Explorer that offers features it sorely lacks, like tabbed browsing, secure file deletion, file merging and splitting, instant command line access, and keyboard shortcuts. Explorer++ is still in alpha and may not be ready for full-time use the way Xplorer 2 is, but it's still a simple, functional, and free app worth keeping an eye on. If you're sick of Windows Explorer's paucity of features, shareware TotalCommander is our readers' pick for best alternative file manager; you can also power up Windows Explorer itself with free add-ons. Explorer++ is a free download for Windows only.

Explorer++ [via gHacks]

Blogger Leo Babauta found more free time in his days by decluttering his schedule and "designing" his life to include important stuff and exclude the rest. Lots of good, familiar advice here on managing distractions, your to-do list, and streamlining work to make more time for leisure.

Windows only: Free boot CD EASEUS Disk Copy copies any disk or partition sector-by-sector for an exact copy of the original. Disk Copy is a perfect tool for upgrading your operating system to a new, larger hard drive, or just making a quick clone of a drive full of files. With support for virtually any drive type or file system and an easy-to-use interface, this app is a fast, effective tool for quick drive copying. I haven't cloned a full drive with it, but according to reader Jason, it copies files significantly faster than previously mentioned HDClone. On the flip side, if you're looking to hot image your hard drive continuously, check out how to do that with DriveImage XML. Disk Copy is freeware, Windows only. Thanks Jason!
EASEUS Disk Copy

Despite the fact that it ships with a DVD drive, for whatever godforsaken reason, the Nintendo Wii doesn't support DVD playback—until last week, that is, when a homebrew hacker released a tool that enables DVD playback on your Wii. The best part? You don't have to crack open your Wii or disturb your hardware in any way to install it. Let's take a detailed look at how to softmod your Wii with the Twilight hack to run homebrew apps. Then I'll show you how to install the Wii port of the open source media player, mplayer, to turn your Wii into a DVD (or should I say WiiVD?) player.

What You'll Need Since we're going to be doing a softmod of your Wii (i.e., we're not modifying any hardware), you don't really need much to accomplish this hack.

• Nintendo Wii
• An FAT16-Formatted SD Memory Card (more on this below)
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess ($50)
• The Wii Brew SD Installer (Windows)
• A Windows PC with an SD card reader

NOTE: I'm doing this all on a Windows PC, but you can manually install the Twilight Hack if you don't have access to a Windows PC.

The secret sauce lies in the Twilight Princess game. Essentially, we're going to load a fake game into Twilight Princess that exploits a buffer overflow and allows you install homebrew software on your Wii.

Sound complicated? Figuring it out may have been, but the excellent Wii hackers have made exploiting the Twilight hack is a cinch.

Hacking Your Wii for Homebrew
To get started, plug your SD card into your computer. It needs to be formatted as a FAT16 filesystem, so find the SD card in My Computer and format it by right-clicking, selecting Format, and setting FAT as your file system. (If you have trouble formatting your SD card this way, try out the SD Card Formatter.)

Now it's time to prepare the SD card with the Twilight Hack. If you haven't already, download the Wii Brew SD Installer. When you've got it, make sure your SD card is plugged in and run the installer. The installer is fairly self-explanatory, but I'll walk you through it.

Choose Your Install Location

This should match the location of the SD card you just formatted above. Select the Homebrew Features and Twilight Hack Now you need to select the packages you want to install on your SD card (and, eventually, your Wii). I'd suggest selecting the Homebrew Channel (in fact, you need to if you want this to work), the Homebrew Browser, and DVDX (you'll need this last one for DVD playback). Make sure to select the Twilight Hack that matches your region. Hit Next and the Wii SD Installer will copy all the necessary files to your SD card.

Take Note of Your Twilight Princess Disc

If you're in the U.S., your copy of Twilight Princess is one of three different versions. One of the versions of the disc requires that you use a different save slot when we load the game later on, so just take note of the text on the inner circle of the bottom of the Twilight Princess game disc. (I needed TwilightHack2, for example.)

Perform the Twilight Hack on Your Wii By this point, your SD card is officially prepared for your Wii. Unplug it from your computer and move over to your Wii. Plug it in and power up your Wii. At this point, you'll need to erase your current Twilight Princess saved game, copy the Twilight hack to your Wii, and execute it in Twilight Princess. (If you haven't played the game and created a save slot, you should do that before proceeding.) The video below from the WiiBrew folks details exactly how to do this.

NOTE: If the installation froze after you loaded the saved game and talked to the man, chances are you need to use the other saved game.

You'll need to accept a disclaimer and go through a few other screens to finish the installation (just use the 1 button on your Wiimote to accept). When it completes, head back to the Wii menu. The glorious new Wii Homebrew Channel awaits.

Turn Your Wii into a DVD Player

Now that you've got the Homebrew Channel installed, setting up DVD support is a breeze. Fire up your the Homebrew Channel from the main Wii menu and you should see the DVDx installer and Homebrew Browser. Click on the DVDx installer and run through the prompt. Hit A to select Normal install unless you've installed a modchip in your Wii. (If you're following this guide, chances are you don't have a modchip.) You've finished the first step.

Now you need to shut off your Wii and plug the SD card back into your computer, because it's time to install mplayer, the app that will play back DVDs on your Wii. You can download it from the HackMii web site at the bottom of this post. (Mplayer appears to be available in the Homebrew Browser, but it's not the version that supports DVD playback, so make sure you download it manually.)

After you've downloaded it, copy the entire mplayer folder the the apps folder on your SD card. Now just take the SD card back to your Wii, plug it in, and run the Homebrew Channel again. This time you should see mplayer next to your other installed apps, like below.

To play back a DVD, just fire up mplayer, insert a DVD, and select the Play DVD option in the mplayer menu. You'll notice two Play DVD menu items, the second of which reads Play DVD (libdvdnav). The libdvdnav attempts to use the built-in DVD menu, while the other just plays the first title. Unfortunately libdvdnav doesn't really work correctly with the Wiimote yet, but it looks to be on its way.

It takes a few seconds for mplayer to start playing the DVD, but once it does it plays without a hitch (or at least it has in all my experience). Thanks to YouTube, here's what it looks like:

The Wiimote/Gamecube controller playback shortcuts work as follows:

A - Pause
B - OSD
1/X - Toggle on screen menu
RIGHT - Seek 10s forward
LEFT - Seek 10s backward
UP - Seek 60s forward
DOWN - Seek 60s backward
+/R - Seek to the next chapter
-/L - Seek to the previous chapter
HOME/Z - Quit What Else? Once you've got your Wii opened up to homebrew apps, you've unlocked all kinds of potential, including emulators for old-school gaming consoles, different media players, and other utilities. If you've already got the Homebrew channel running on your Wii, let's hear what homebrew apps you've been using and loving in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker whose multitasking Wii has cemented its spot next to his TV. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Earlier this week, we showed you how to auto-change desktop backgrounds in Ubuntu using a small script and a scheduling tool. Turns out a good number of our commenters were already hip to dynamic, time-tracking wallpaper, and have found easier, more full-featured means of keeping their desktops fresh—and using some pretty cool backgrounds as well. Let's take a look at what else you can do to keep your Linux desktop fresh without a lot of hassle.

Gnome Wallchanger
Martin Owens, author of the original wallpaper-changing script I detailed, wrote to let us know that he'd since built that little function into a complete app with a user interface, a great feature list, and integrated scheduling through Linux's cron tool. The really cool features are the ability to auto-grab wallpaper from any RSS feed (including Flickr), or set up searches through deviantArt that auto-delivers fresh wallpaper to your desktop. You decide how often to rotate the wallpaper (minutes, hours, days, months), and where to stash the downloads, and once you set the job, there's no background app necessary to run. Here's the single-screen setup:

You can grab Ubuntu-ready packages from his Ubuntu Forums post, or add his PPA repository list to your sources and keep up to date.

Desktop Drapes
This one's more accessible to non-Ubuntu users, and offers the same kind of no-code convenience. Drapes pulls wallpaper from your GNOME Appearance panel and lists them according to how they fit your resolution (perfect fit, 4:3, widescreen, etc.), but it can also monitor any other folder for new files. You check one box to auto-start, and it offers hot-switching by right-clicking its panel icon. Drapes wouldn't let me change my scheduling time—possibly because of the cron job I've already set up—but otherwise seems to be a straight-forward switcher. Drapes is available in many Linux repositories. Thanks to twosox and many others!

Wallpaper Tray
For those who like to keep their wallpaper out of the main system settings, or just have a lot of images to choose from, Wallpaper Tray's an attractive option. The app, which you manually add to your auto-starting apps, can change wallpaper on a timer and set scaling like its brethren, but also lets you maintain multiple folders of wallpapers, scanned at each startup. You can switch backgrounds from the tray icon, and there's even a search tool for finding the specific image you want to change to—nice to have after a downloading binge. Wallpaper Tray is available in many repositories, and as pre-packaged and source downloads at its website.

Neat idea: World Sunlight/Weather Map as Wallpaper
Commenter Joelena once had a pretty neat desktop setup: A real-time world weather and sunlight map as a background, updated through the powerful wget command.

The auto-updating JPEG file is courtesy of the OpenTopia world encyclopedia. We've offered a guide to mastering wget, but we're asking the crowd: What's the best way to set this up?

Got any more desktop-switching tools or neat background ideas to share? Let's hear 'em in the comments.

When you don't want Google content cluttering up your search results, the Google minus Google custom search engine cuts out pages from Knol, Blogger, and YouTube. [via]

Windows only: No-nonsense task manager ToDoList is small, lightweight, and portable (so you can run it from your thumb drive), and it offers the feature other task managers frequently and strangely lack: the ability to track multiple levels of nested tasks. Here's a screenshot of the nesting in action.

In addition to nested subtasks, ToDoList sports a large settings pane directly beneath the task list itself. There you can set a large number of attributes on your tasks, including color coded priority, time started and completed, status, category, if the task is recurring and how often, dependency on other tasks, and even a link to related files.

Just below the primary menu bar you'll find quick filter menus that slice and dice your tasks, sorting by due dates, complete/incomplete, status, priority, category, and who the task is allocated to. If the quick filters won't cut it for the search you're performing there is a robust search query with support for rules based searches.

While the number of features included in ToDoList is impressive and the task display tree is great for managing large and complex tasks, if the software has an Achilles heel it's the lack of syncing with popular applications like Outlook and mobile platforms. ToDoList does have support for plug-ins and add-ons, some are linked to from the main page. ToDoListPPC is one such program helping Windows Mobile users manager their to-do lists on the go. According to the developer's Frequently Asked Questions, file list syncing between ToDoList and Outlook will be addressed in the next version. ToDoList is a free download for Windows only.

ToDoList 5.6 [Abstract Spoon]

The Productivity Portfolio blog runs down three common fixes for the unexpected and highly frustrating bug of hyperlinks going non-helpful—meaning your browser doesn't open, goes to a dead page, or some other problem. The post notes that resetting your browser, re-registering DLL files, and resetting file-type handlers in Windows usually fixes the problem without a re-install, and runs down the steps to do so. The fixes mostly involve working with Internet Explorer, but, as pointed out, you can then just switch your default browser back to Firefox (phew!). Add your own fixes for this annoyingly common problem after the jump.
Outlook Hyperlinks Fail to Work [Productivity Portfoilo]

Search site del.izzy combs through the actual word content of your bookmarks on (newly re-launched) social bookmarking service Del.icio.us. So if you vaguely remember, for example, bookmarking a guide to hacking your router, but the link has one of those annoyingly non-specific titles ("w00t x 25! Awesome hack!"), you can find it with a quick search here. The site notes that it occasionally gets throttled by the Del.icio.us overlords; in that case, head over to previously mentioned Google hack deliGoo and try your luck there.
delizzy [via etc.]

YouTube Podcaster takes your YouTube video searches and creates RSS feeds of either links or download-able videos from them. In a standard RSS reader, the search results come back as video titles and links, but copy the link to the iTunes feed and you'll get a stream of MP4-formatted videos. Given the popularity of the video sharing site, you'll want to winnow down your search to avoid overwhelming your reader or iTunes player every hour, but the service provides two seriously useful functions that YouTube itself doesn't. The service requires no sign-up and is free, although donations are accepted.

YouTube Podcaster [vixy.net via MakeUseOf.com]

Windows only: Disk utility FosiX Lite is a visual hard disk analyzer in the vein of previously covered WinStatDir and JDiskReport. What sets FosiX apart is the interactivity of the bar charts and pie graphs it produces. Run the application and see that you have two directories at the root level taking up a huge amount of space? Click on one and you're immediately inside the directory looking at new graph showing how space is distributed in that directory. FosiX lets you quickly see and drill down through large directories to get a sense of how your data is stored and the amount of space it is taking up. FosiX Lite is a free download for Windows only.

FosiX Lite [via Life Rocks 2.0]

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): If you like the concept of bookmark tags introduced in Firefox 3 but just can't seem to get into the habit of using them, Firefox extension Tagmarks adds tag images to your awesome bar for quick and easy bookmarking and tagging. Once installed, you'll see several new images next to the default star when you hover your mouse over the star. Click one to both tag and bookmark that page in one fell swoop. You can click on as many of these tags as you want, and when you view your bookmarks, you'll notice text tags have been automatically assigned. Tagmarks is free, works wherever Firefox does. Hopefully we'll see a more customizable version of Tagmarks in the future.
Tagmarks [Firefox Add-ons via CyberNet]

• What should my first programming language be if I just want to have fun?
• How do I de-stress after an awful, expensive vacation?
• Why is my laptop's power draining even though it's plugged in?
• How do I limit and monitor internet usage?

Apple releases their second iPhone 2.0 software update through iTunes today. The release notes only say it includes only "bug fixes" (any fixes at this point are welcome, but faster typing and better 3G connectivity are the high hopes), and AppleInsider reports no new settings appear on your phone. If you install it, be prepared for it to undo your jailbreak. [via]

Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The AutoPager Firefox extension automatically loads the next page of a site inline when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content. By default AutoPager works with a ton of sites, including Lifehacker, the New York Times, Digg, and, of course, Google. At first blush AutoPager is a little difficult to understand, but just set it as Always Enabled by clicking the AE link on supported sites and it'll take care of the rest. If you want to add your own custom autopaging to unsupported sites, the site wizard feature makes it easy (first pick the Next link, then pick only the content you want loaded (in Lifehacker, for example, the posts). AutoPager is free, works wherever Firefox does. For similar functionality, check out previously mentioned Repagination.

AutoPager [Firefox Add-ons via Max Nax]

Windows only: Free application Executor is an application launcher very similar in look and feel to Lifehacker reader's favorite application launcher, Launchy. In fact, after a bit of testing Executor might have just snagged Launchy's place as the app launcher of choice on my Windows machine. One of the major differences between the two is Executor's emphasis on keywords. Although it does text search for just about anything, Executor gives priority to user-assigned keywords for launching apps, documents, and folders. What's more, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any keyword for quick launches without even invoking Executor. Keyword functionality aside, Executor is also very fast and lightweight, eating just over 10MB of RAM in Task Manager. But that's not all that makes it great.

You can browse your filesystem and even view your launching history and clipboard history. Like Launchy, Executor does web searches (e.g., wiki Lifehacker searches Wikipedia for Lifehacker), accepts quick calculations (e.g., #5+2), and supports many different skins. As an added bonus, it works seamlessly with the latest Windows Desktop Search in Vista and XP (just type find search terms to use it). Executor is wildly customizable, sporting an enormous set of preferences that any power user will be dying to tweak.

It's also chock-full of smart keyboard shortcuts and other hidden features worth reading through in the documentation page. Executor is freeware, Windows only. If you give it a try, let's hear how you like it in the comments. Thanks crazacool!

Executor