Tobiasly’s Blog

Here’s a copy of the new Star Wars Episode III trailer! (Media file removed, sorry…)

We have used Vonage as our phone provider for almost a year now and have loved the service. One of the many features they add at no extra charge is the ability to have all voicemail messages sent as an email attachment. Unfortunately, they only send these attachments in WAV format, which means they take up a ton of room.

I like to store all voicemails I receive in case I need them later, and so I was looking for a way to shrink those emails down. I found this post describing how to do just that using Perl and LAME to convert the attachments to MP3.

Unfortunately, that script didn’t work quite right for me. I have cleaned it up a bit and posted it here for anyone interested.

[UPDATE] 2006.05.14: Towards the end of 2005, Vonage changed the format of their WAV file attachments to use an encoding called “CCITT u-Law” which LAME doesn’t understand. See my new post for a method using SOX instead.

I bought one of those USB flash “thumb drives” (a Cruzer Mini 256MB) a while back, and I keep it on my keychain. This has come in terribly handy when I need to move files around, but I’ve always been worried about keeping anything private or confidential on there. With my track record of losing my keys, I’d hate to think what would happen if someone found my drive and was able to start snooping around.

The drive came with a very lame program called “CruzerLock” that has a very un-intuitive interface. You basically had to drag any files you wanted to work with to and from its program window, and hope you remember to copy the files back (and delete the copies you made!) when you’re done. I ditched it in about three minutes.

After a bit of looking around at other “free” encryption packages (most of which are crippled versions of pay-to-use products), I came across TrueCrypt, a free, open-source encryption program for Windows XP/2000. TrueCrypt can either create a “container” file or encrypt an entire partition. It then “mounts” this file or partition as a regular drive after you supply the passphrase to unlock it. For the truly paranoid, it also offers the ability to create “hidden” containers within the main container.

Anyone who is interested in keeping private date secure should check out this wonderful, well-written, and easy-to-use program.
http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/