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The Media-Geek community is now well over 600 members strong and growing!  Although I was literally operating in a state of emergency for the entire month of April and on the road most of May, this morning I managed to finish a significant system upgrade for our site.  This upgrade provides better integration of the video posting capability, improves efficiency for many features and addresses a few other minor bugs.

It's the end of an era for one iconic device, but Sony plans to continue selling blank cassette tapes, tape decks, and boomboxes with cassette support -- for now.

Full story

Hewlett-Packard has recalled about 162,000 lithium-ion batteries used in its HP and Compaq laptop computers. The announcement, made late last week by HP and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), adds additional battery packs to a recall program announced just a week earlier.

Full story:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/229105/hp_recalls_laptop_batteries.html

For those that do not know, Websense is a Web/Email security company that now sells a multitude of products, to include software and hardware.  Many government agencies use them, as ours did initially when I was with a NY agency, and quite frankly my first-hand experience with them was more problematic than problem-solving.  I totally get error-ing on the side of caution, but at the same time find overly cautious classifications based on IP addresses is not the way to filter the Web; especially given that the vast majority of the Web is hosted on shared servers.  Anyway, since I've responded to a few of these email inquiries from our users lately, I figured I share my canned email response globally with all users....

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.

Do You Have a Blog or Podcast?

Turns out, pretty damn fast. Way faster than I would, on anything, let alone a croch rocket.

Many of my favorite memories of my time in Broome County involve Harry. Like when he and I where taking hang gliding classes together in the evenings, and those dark & early morning hours on the weekend.

My favorite though was almost dying with him, which I would gladly do to this day, if given an option of how to go out. We were riding motorcycles. Enough said.

Okay, maybe not enough. You should know that my career as an amateur daredevil started very young. I began riding our Honda 50 at 5 years old, and just kept trying to think of more spectacular ways to nearly kill myself from then on.

Harry has me beat. Hands down.

Our Executive office spoke with Harry about us riding motorcycles together, taking hang gliding lessons together, etcetera.  Thier comment to him was:

"There's a reason the President & the Vice President don't ride in the same vehicle together, Harry."

It has been an amazing and incredibly busy summer for me and my family. I briefly mentioned in a previous post that we moved at the beginning of summer, which was entirely unplanned by the way (!), and no sooner than that was behind us more curve balls were thrown our way. We’ve been so busy swinging as hard as we can to try and knock those balls out of the park that it’s impacted how active I’ve been here on DME Resources. The short of it is this, I am still committed to our online training library and hope to be posting regularly here again soon. With that said, two quick topics to discuss.

Found this article from TechCrunch absolutely fascinating.

Prosthetic Retinas displaying a cameras image directly into your noggin using photovoltaic materials, which turn light into electric current. Come on, so cool!

The future is very bright, my friends. Be safe out there & make it a great day!

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

The bleeding edge is such a fine line to try to walk successfully, and in my humble opinion Blackberry recentlypushed me over the edge with the release of their touchscreen Storm.  I've been using the Storm for about two weeks and I just can't take it anymore; it's going back to Verizon Wireless ASAP.

This real-time hardware encoder offers strong output. If only it weren't beset by limitations and technical snafus.

Read full story >

It looks like Sony is on a roll with discontinuing legacy recording formats. First it killed the cassette Walkman last year, a few weeks ago it stopped producing MiniDisc Walkmans and now the company announced that it will no longer support the 8mm video format. The video cassette format that was popular way back in the 1980s will no longer get any new Sony hardware to run on.

Full Story

The testing continues today with the Private Messaging (PM) feature that will be made available to all members.  Members will be able to PM each other from any page within the members area, including forum posts.  PM settings will allow each member to be notified of new PM's via email as well, if they'd like; users can be notified of all new PMs, new PMs only when they're offline, or not at all.

Additionally, PM's can be further secured by using an encryption word for each message; you simply enter the encryption word prior to sending the message...and make sure the other party has it or they won't be able to read your PM!