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The last three or four weeks I have been absolutely swamped, and unfortunately have had little time to contribute to the Media-Geek community.  Despite my schedule others have kept things moving forward by adding articles and other content, and new members continue to join almost daily as the word spreads about our shared resource.  Although there are many things on my to-do list for Media-Geek regarding further development and maintenance, as well as several articles and blog posts I've been meaning to write, this weekend I spent some time doing a little Spring cleaning.

Initially I intended to spend a few hours addressing some maintenance tasks and reorganizing menus to simplify navigation.  Before it was all said and done I had spent nearly my entire weekend completely re-designing the site.  Go figure.  Anyway, along the way I made a few notable changes that are worth mentioning.

In the last few weeks, we've added several new features and content areas to Media-Geek, and more are on the way. Some of these updates are specific to our members only area, while others are available to both the public and private sections of the site; such as our new customizable home page.

By default, the new home page displays recent articles from a few of our content areas, such as Member Articles, Media-Geek News, Larry C.'s Blog, and Newsflashes. Both members and visitors can change the number of articles that are displayed on the home page for each of these areas, and they can also re-order the way in which they are displayed using the drag-n-drop icon in the upper-right corder of the display for each area.

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Merry Christmas & Happy New Year my friends!  Just a quick note to pass along season's greetings and give you a heads up regarding upcoming topics for my podcast, Nerds & Non/Sense™ .

In our January, 2020 episodes we'll be discussing The Illusion of Privacy.  Cambridge Analytica, "The Great Hack" documentary on Netflix, the Best Selling book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and chatting about how metadata about your daily activities is used to not only predict, but influence your behavior.  How you are the commodity, and most of you still don't even understand the extent to which you've facilitated this.

In our February, 2020 episodes we'll be discussing Work/Life Balance.  Mandatory professional therapy and mental health resources & evaluations for digital evidence practitioners, and how they should be mandated in ALL agency SOPs, IMHO.

We announced a major update to Adobe Creative Cloud at our MAX Creativity Conference on May 6th and as we gear up to ship this release of Creative Cloud in a few weeks, we’d like to update the community on the feedback we’ve been getting.

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Another Jem from the Photoshop Jedi Master Deke McClelland. Think a discussion on Photoshop's Image Size tool is too basic for you? Fear for you I do, for that is the mindset of someone leaning toward the dark side.

"The essential Image Size command lets you scale an image on screen or in print. In this week's Photoshop Top 40 Countdown episode, Deke explains resampling and resolution, both of which affect the core quality of digital photographs."

Just viewing child pornography on the Web is not necessarily a crime according to New York law, the state's Court of Appeals decided Tuesday, but upheld the conviction of the appellant by a county court on other counts of storage of images and video of child pornography on his hard disk.

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Upcoming training events from Ocean Systems. Hope to see you in class!

Forensic Video Analysis – FVA 101 (4-Day)
June 9 @ 9:00 am - June 12 @ 5:00 pm
Ocean Systems, 4016 Blackburn Lane, Burtonsville, MD 20866 United States
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Introduction to Forensic Video Analysis is 4 day course that provides a comprehensive approach to your casework for both digital and analog video evidence with a primary focus on our stream-lined workflows and digital media processing. It is intended for anyone who is new to the field of FVA or persons who have not been formally trained using these tools.
Generate a proposal – Training Auto Quote »

DVR Assessment & Video Recovery (3-Day)
June 16 @ 9:00 am - June 18 @ 5:00 pm
Brighton Fire Department – Station 1,
3100 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14618 United States
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This 3 day class will provide students with an overview of the multiple challenges and issues that may arise or should be considered when acquiring digital video evidence using multiple techniques. This course is recommended for anyone who will be responsible for the recovery of digital video evidence from CCTV systems, from Patrol Officers and Technicians to Forensic Video Analysts.
Generate a proposal – Training Auto Quote »

CCTV cameras across London help solve almost six crimes a day, the Metropolitan Police (Met) has said.

Det Ch Insp Mick Neville, who heads the Met's identification unit, said CCTV images were "treated like fingerprints and DNA" by the force.

The number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year.

Full story:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12080487

I was hoping I’d be able to wrap this series up with this post, but it’s clear to me now that I won’t be able to. There’s simply too much to cover and I’m certain that at least a few are still scratching your heads (like I was), wondering why we shouldn’t just rely on the pixel matrices to calculate Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR) from analog sources. It is critically important to understand that I am approaching this topic from a forensic perspective, with the goal of standardizing the methodology used for forensic processing, interpretation, and presentation.

Applications on display showcase real-time collaborative viewing and synchronized crowd-sourced video.

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Adobe has officially announced that Adobe CS5 will be released on April 12th, 2010.
Visit http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ for more information.

Apple has discontinued the "prosumer" Final Cut Express and its high-end Final Cut Server products in the process of its release of Final Cut Pro X earlier this week. And, to the surprise of no one, the complete restructuring of Apple's direction for its video editing software aimed at professionals has been met with loud criticism. But Apple plans to quickly improve Final Cut Pro X over time, addressing many of the complaints with incremental feature updates.

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Microsoft, in partnership with the New York City Police Department, is announcing a new state-of-the-art law enforcement technology called Domain Awareness System. The said system is designed to bring the latest crime prevention and counter terrorism technology capabilities to New York City and to other law enforcement, and intelligence agencies around the world sometime in the future.

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