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Despite our efforts to educate everyone in the digital evidence chain on the proper way to label and care for CDs, DVDs, and BDs (see CD and DVD Care and Handling: Stop Destroying Your Evidence!), read errors still happen...a lot. Here are two of my favorite tools for repairing and recovering data from disc-based media.

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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A few months ago, my wife got up on a Sunday morning at 3:30am and stood in line at Toys-R-Us to pick up a Nintendo Wii for our son.  Neither her or I have every done anything like that before and trust me when I tell you she's not a morning person, so I was absolutely amazed that she not only got up that early, but even more so that she stood in line in the freezing cold for hours just to get the darn thing. 😮

This afternoon my son and I were playing Guitar Hero III on the Xbox 360 and out of the blue decided to finally configure the Wii for Internet connectivity.  As you probably know, Wii has a Wi-Fi adapter built in, but I just never took the time to configure our router and the settings on the Wii.  Well, within a few minutes of our decision we were online surfing the Web on our Toshiba 46" HD TV.

Peer networking and participation in professional associations are both integral components of keeping abreast of your field. The key word in that sentence is participation. Simply joining a group brings little value; volunteering and being actively engaged as time permits increases value exponentially.

Bugs are a way of life in software--fortunately, so are bug fixes. Earlier this week, Adobe released Photoshop 12.0.1, which brings a number of stability enhancements to the professional image-editing software, including several specifically related to 64-bit operation on Mac OS X.
Though Adobe says that CS5 is more stable than its predecessor, CS4, there's always room for improvement. The 12.0.1 update addresses a number of issues that could cause slow performance, as well as several common crashing bugs, user interface and workspace issues, font-related crashes, and several painting-related issues, including problems with video layers.

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Support for x264 is now available in Sorenson Squeeze. How does the encoding quality stack up against MainConcept H.264?

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CHICAGO (AP) - When the body of Chicago's school board president was found partially submerged in a river last fall, a bullet wound to the head, cameras helped prove it was a suicide.

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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/06/cameras-make-chicago-closely-watched-city/

Police officers in Aberdeen will wear CCTV cameras mounted on their uniforms from next month.

The force will operate 18 of the cameras across Aberdeen for a trial period.  Strathclyde is currently the only force in Scotland which uses the system.  Senior officers claim it will help reduce anti-social behaviour and improve evidence gathering.

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A DVR comes in to the lab and there’s not a single label on it. No identifying marks, labels, nada. The owner has no clue where it came from, nor any manuals or documentation. Sweet.

Well, in the past, one of the tricks of the trade was to take a photo (or two) and drop it in to Google image search. With any luck you stumble upon one that looks just like it. Success! Not so fast zippy, it’s rarely that easy, but I thought the following was worth pointing out.

Bing has now joined the image search game too, so the next time you’re in a similar pickle, be sure to give them both a shot at it. Good luck!

Video technology combines footage from different cameras to allow people to see the same event from multiple angles.

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So, I ditched Windows 8 Consumer Preview for Windows 8 Release Preview Friday night, and so far, so good.  I've even noticed that I've actually started using some the Metro style apps included by default, which I hadn't used at all in the Consumer Preview really.

If you're interested in checking out the new Windows 8 Release Preview visit http://preview.windows.com/

Among the announcements made at today's Google I/O keynote is WebM, a new open-source, royalty-free video format based around the VP8 codec intended for use with HTML5 video. The WebM project's goal is to develop "a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone." The project has the backing of Google, Mozilla, Opera, and numerous other companies. If it catches, on, it could settle the rift that currently exists with HTML5 video support, thus speeding up HTML5 adoption.

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Imagine the following scenario:
You're the first responding officer to a crime scene and have just completed taking the victim's statement. You then tell the victim you have to leave for another call. Before you go you politely ask the victim to take photos of the scene and their injuries, collect all of the DNA and fingerprint evidence, and note that you'll either be back later in the day or maybe tomorrow or the next day to pick it all up. You note that they can just leave the evidence at the front desk for you.

This is exactly how many agencies have chosen to deal with the overwhelming amount of DCCTV evidence available to them today. "Oh, there's video? Okay, have someone export it and we'll come back to pick it up."