An Essay on Criticism. Alexander Pope, 1711
Sourced from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69379/an-essay-on-criticism
Read MoreAuthor: Matthew Heick
Poem
I heed not that my earthly lot
Hath little of Earth in it,
That years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute:
I mourn not that the desolate
Are happier, sweet, than I,
But that you sorrow for my fate
Who am a passer-by.
- Edgar Allan Poe
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!
Read MoreVirtualBox 6.1 with Windows 95c
I decided to set myself up a goal of running some old, old games in Windows 95. I happened to have an old Windows 98se bootable media and a Windows 95c ISO.
In creating this VM I let the Create Wizard do the needful, and made the following additional modifications:
- 256MB RAM
- 2GB Hard Drive
- Removing Floppy Controller
…and kept the VBoxVGA, PIIX4, SoundBlaster 16, PCnet-Fast II (Am79C973), and USB 2.0.
First off I boot up into my Windows 98se, partition, reboot, and then format the hard drive. Then I mount the Windows 95c disk and copy over the files to C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS like the good old days. From that I run setup from the C: and go through the installation.
Read Moreheick.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.
(and no, greek has nothing to do with the family, as far as i’ve been able to find so far)