Listening to Skype Voicemail .dat files

Continued at Still trying to listen to Skype Voicemails…

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

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

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

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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grub2 for Windows 10 after installing Rocky 8.5

So, I came into a hiccup, and the amount of time it took to diagnose and resolve seemed like it should be something I documented.

In doing the initial installation of Rocky 8.5 on the computer that my kids sometimes use that runs Windows 10 I wasn’t really given the opportunity to configure a multiboot. Instead, the system happily booted Rocky 8.5 and nothing else.

Additionally, running os-prober didn’t really find another operating system, so I had to do some manual work.

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