Category: geek-instructions

Increasing Domain Renewal Costs

Matthew Heick 1 Comment

Back in the good ‘ol days domain names used to be so economically cheap that you could purchase many of them, renew them, and do things with them. It was great, especially with renewal as low as $9.99/yr.

It’s come time for me to determine which of my 14 domains I want to keep since my current registrar is willing to charge me $37.99/year to renew my domains an additional year.

I used to go through GoDaddy before they did something that I’m not sure but I think it had something to do with buying a domain, then cancelling the domain and forcing me to re-buy the domain at the same price after the cancellation even though the domain was on my account.

Regardless I transferred all my domains to Network Solutions and they gave me a great deal on all my domains. Now renewal is hugely expensive, and so I have to go shopping. I feel it was a bait-and-switch since they really don’t list their renewal pricing on their website nor is it easy to find anywhere on their website.

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Listening to Skype Voicemail .dat files

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Like thousands of other users I religiously used Skype to communicate with many friends and coworkers back in the early 2010s. It was a great platform, with the ability to send messages fluently from computer to phone and vice-versa, as well as make long and drawn out video calls. You could purchase a telephone number from anywhere in the world to have a presence in that country (as I did), and with it you gained voicemail. It did everything perfectly except save voicemails in a reusable format.

I’m not the only person that has a need/want to listen to these types of audio. There are forums of people who have their own needs, such as fathers voices and passed family members. The common solutions proposed are “download VLC”, “use Microsoft Word and run a repair”, or use a “DAT player”, all are non-functional or stupid solutions. There is a ton of common use cases for these old files and the technical solutions are far and none between.

Skype voicemails, once listened to, were downloaded from the Skype servers and stored in the users Skype profile as a dat file. Unfortunately, “dat” files are a general file format and have no immediate player that can open and listen to those files.

Time to dig in. Challenge Accepted!

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heick.family

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

One of my “major” projects was creating a “simple” family tree. Simple went a long way with words.

This was more of an exercise on both Learning Bootstrap and making sure all POST requests occur with JSON ala vanilla javascript.

Suffice to say it went very well. heick.family will now be my yearly $30 pain to my last-namesake on top of normal server costs.

Yiamas!

(and no, greek has nothing to do with the family, as far as i’ve been able to find so far)

Samsung Galaxy Voicemail Archiving

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

A long, long time ago I used to have a Samsung Galaxy. I used to get a ton of voicemail, and I learned later on that I could download the voicemail locally to the phone. It would be stored as an AMR and I didn’t really like that.

I needed to convert the AMR files to MP3 files, so ffmpeg came to the solution:

ffmpeg -i "source.amr" -vn -ar 44100 -ac 1 -ab 128k -f mp3 "destination.mp3"

’nuff said.

nVidia CUDA with the wrong video card

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

In trying to build my first crypto rig I wanted to be able to get it functional with the GPU instead of the CPU.

I had originally installed an nVidia GeForce GT 710 but came to find out later that its not a supported GPU for use with CUDA per developer.nvidia.com.

Lucky for me I had a video card to “Upgrade” to, which was an nVidia GeForce GT 630, which supports Version 2.1 of CUDA-Enabled Compute Capability.

I did have to download and install the nVidia Linux X64 driver, and without knowing that the install required kernel-devel so it could built the driver correctly.

The only thing blocking me is it seemed my build of libxmrig-cuda.so was built with the CUDA 11.6 API and the Linux X64 driver does not support that. In fact, running nvidia-smi tells me that the driver supports CUDA version 11.4, so looks like i’ll have to rebuilt my driver with 11.4.

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