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A peer recently shared this article, as he is one of the co-authors, and I personally feel it contains vital fundamental information for those who testify as Forensic Experts.  Hope you find it helpful.

"The following material was revised from an original article, “Survival Checklist for Medical Experts,” written by Deputy District Attorney Michele McKay-McCoy, Solano County District Attorney’s Office. With her permission, it was revised for forensic experts by Deputy District Attorney Michael S. Groch, San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, and Deputy Attorney General Robert M. Morgester, California Department of Justice."

Survival Checklist for Forensic Experts (PDF) 

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Let's keep on doing what we do, my friends; solve problems, help people.  I'm honored to work with you.  Be safe out there!

Intel Monday announced a new line of solid-state drives (SSDs) that are based on the serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 specification, which doubles I/O throughput compared to previous-generation SSDs.

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I was out in the Seattle area Tuesday along with my colleague Ed Baker to provide a couple of free seminars on digital video evidence for members of the Washington Homicide Investigators Association (WHIA).

Many thanks to WHIA for the opportunity and hospitality, as well as to our employer Ocean Systems for their dedication to, and continued support of educating the LE community on the multitude of issues related to digital & multimedia evidence.

FFmpeg is a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re a multimedia geek. If you live mostly in the world of Microsoft Windows and have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of files to process though they lose a little luster. Sure, there are tons of free applications built on FFmpeg that provide some limited batch processing capability, but usually they're just that; limited. Here’s a simple way you can process hundreds of files from one format to another, using the full capability of your FFmpeg install.

First, which scripting languages do you know? Great, we won’t need those, but that’s really cool that you know them. Given that you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you can write plain text into a text file. I don’t like to assume anything, but I’m feeling pretty good about that one. Alright, let’s get started.

Two new large format printers from Canon are ready for their big close-up at the Wedding & Portrait Photographer International (WPPI) Convention in Las Vegas next week.

The 24-inch and 44-inch models of Canon's imagePrograf line of large page printers have a new 8-color system (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, matte black, photo cyan, photo magenta and gray) and Canon's "Lucia Ex" ink-set, which can achieve greater details in shadows, deeper black density, and improved scratch resistance.

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As Adobe's Creative Cloud lineup of art and design applications gains prominence on the company's landscape, the quantity and pace of updates to Creative Suite 6 and related subscription-based products is gathering momentum. New features for subscription products and services, in the pipeline throughout the summer, are being prepped for public release over the next few weeks.

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Did you know you can preview your encoding output before writing it to a file with FFmpeg? Just call on your old friend ffplay and use the same encoding options/settings you're considering with FFmpeg. When you do you'll see exactly what the output will look like without having to wait for the entire file to be generated and saved.

Easy peezy lemon squeezy. 😎

The DVR database will be moving into the new secure members area effective February 11th, in conjunction with our official launch of Media-Geek.com. Having the database available to the public has always been a security concern as well as a target for spam bots, among other things. There is no membership fee or advertising based revenue generated from this site, and I'm hopeful most will understand and take the few minutes to register. Look forward to seeing you "on the inside!"

A producer for Discovery ID recently reached out to me looking for cases to research for the upcoming 4th season of Discovery ID's "See No Evil"program. They are looking for "cases whereby surveillance footage was key to cracking a mysterious homicide case."  This could be a case you recently worked on which has now been through the courts, or it might be a historical case from 10 or 15 years ago. At this stage, they are merely looking for interesting cases to research, and stated they'd of course go through proper channels to obtain media should the case pass their initial research stage.

For more information please log-in to the members area and see the related Forum post, which contains the producer's contact details.

The Minneapolis Police Department Crime Lab is seeking to hire a Forensic Video Analyst. Applications will be accepted from Monday, October 22, 2012 through Friday, November 9, 2012. Complete details can be found online at www.minneapolismn.gov. A direct link to the city's job listings is provided below for your convenience.

Minneapolis Career Opportunities

Hitachi is not the first storage vendor to bring a 3TB drive to market. However, it is the first to introduce an internal 3TB drive reliable enough for hardcore business use.

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The software giant, along with a Swedish technology company, is providing photo-identification technology free of charge to law enforcement to help detect and thwart child abuse.

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