Well, this ain't _that_ easy.
Even if you pay for a Spotify Premium account, and you are able to listen "Offline" to your Music, the songs have a quiet tricky Protection, making it impossible to copy your favorite Music to CD or USB stick.

But hey, noone said you have to play that game like you are forced to. Let's cheat:
Imagine my suggested way as the possibility to head a microphone to your speakers and record it (just w/o microphone and speakers :D)



The trick is to use a tool called "sound capture 1.0", a command line based tool, which records the output of your soundcard (which is exactly what you hear, in CD quality) and save it as an mp3. get it for example here
Another (graphical) Tool doing this is called "Audacity" Just configure output as input (1 click - very easy to use)

Tip: close ALL other programs and chatclients and so on... all output is being recorded, includung incomming msg beeps :P

OK, there is a loss of quality: spotify decodes the song and sends it with 44100 hz to your soundcard, which is listened to by the soundcapture tool of your choice. The tool now encodes this audiostream back to a file as mp3 (with loses quality, again).

But what to do with a whole Album of your favorite Artist as a huge mp3. You cannot skip a track or repeat it... So lets slice it into pieces ....
Use the tool "mp3splt" It autodetects gaps in the large mp3 file and automatical cuts here... with the connection to FreeDB it also should be able naming to the songs :-D

et voilà!

yours webdoc

one last tipp:
open a good playlist (like http://open.spotify.com/user/toquinoqui ... GsHNuIuxmm by Jorge García de la Cruz) and record in shuffle mode overnight ... endless fun

here's a funny little (and indeed adictive) game i just got notice of:
http://wademcgillis.com/games/2012-games/astronot/

te demo is free to play, so dl and have fun!



reg. webdoc

Back home from Deauville

Nach den Regenfällen und dem äußerst miesen Wetter im Juni und im halben Juli haben wir mit dem Schlimmsten gerechnet, Gummistiefel und Friesennerze eingepackt. Aber: nur Sonne \o/ Danke lieber Wettergott.
Das beschauliche Dorf Deauville gilt als die Badewanne der betuchten Pariser, dementsprechend voll ist es dort an den Wochenenden, aber ebenso leer wieder am Montag :D
Die Gastronomie orientiert sich am Publikum, also fiel für uns das Essen gehen aus... wie schrieb es der Reiseführer so schön "Menschen am Strand, die aussehen als ob sie gleich zum Golfen gehen". Das trifft es ganz gut.
Um es noch ein wenig auszuschmücken: Beim joggen wurde ich von einem Püppchen mit Handtäschle stehengelassen, ein Bild für Götter (also nicht ich beim joggen,...).
Ach so: ich habe Angelina und Brad nicht getroffen, deren Anwesen nur 1500 m entfernt ist.
Das Appartment, welches wir von einem Freund mieten durften ist direkt an den Strand gebaut (*), man konnte in den Sand spucken. Die Sonnenuntergänge waren unbeschreiblich.
*) in Deauville selbst ist der Strand unverbaut, ein paar Meter weiter in Benerville sur Mer ist das möglich ;)

aber genug geredet: ein paar bilder!

years ago i bought a little computer on ebay including a bunch of disks of "Office Pack 2.0", which is nothing less than

Star Office 2.0

from 1993 (i.e. the grandgrandgrandfather of libreoffice and openoffice). the computer was also from 1993 and more or less unusable except as a disk drive emulator for my atari800xl ;) ...

to preserve the programm for the rest of the world, I decided to copy the floppies to images, but never used it and forget about them.

today i was thinking (just for fun purpose) if i could use this tiny but powerfull office siute on a modern computer.

i chose not to install it on dosbox, but direct on my dualcore windoze pc.. . but what if this modern kind of pc does not have a disk drive to insert disks? the solution is a little tool called VFD - virtual floppy drive. the installation of VFD is simple and so i installed star office 2 in less then 1 minute.

a first check was perfect. its unbvelievable fast (yes modern computers are 1000 times faster than in 93 )
but what is a office suite worth w/o printer? the suite only supports a bunch of really old printers and they have to be connected to your pc ... no networking back then :(

so i installed a HP postscript printer driver, which is still a popular printer protocol. and the program allows to output to a file, which can be opened (& printed) with the unique UI and program "gsview" and "ghostscript"...

bingo!
fast, powerful office suite on modern systems, with less then 4 MB (!)

your retro webdoktor

p.s. contact me to get a copy of staroffice2 ;)

StarWriter compact 2.0


p.s. also in this package were StarDraw 2.0 and StarBase 2.0

If you need images of the Floppies, use the contact link pleaase

Ever thought of using a small USB RSA Credential for logging in your secure areas?
bad idea
Romain Bardou, Riccardo Focardi, Yusuke Kawamoto, Lorenzo Simionato, Graham Steel, Joe-Kai Tsay describe fast a way to hack the secret key out of many of those little devices. The security issue was discovered by Daniel Bleichenbacher in 98 (=known for a long time), but never fixed. The new discoveries speed up the attack, so a key can be hacked in 13 minutes [source]

as always in the history of cryptography, it's just a bad implementation of a good idea (called RSA-PKCS#1v1.5 ).

To get a detailed (understandable) description, read M. Greens blog
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com ... aphic.html

ouchn!