Free DME & DFIR Resources

Fellow LEVA instructor Detective Keith Swanson of the Scottsdale, Arizona Police Department, is compiling data for a DME white paper. If you haven't already, take a moment to complete his very brief survey.

Click here to take the survey!

Yesterday I received my copy of the Adobe Creative Suite CS3 bundle, and although I just installed it I'm already very impressed. Adobe has made great strides with integrating their various design products, making it easier than ever to create, manage, and edit content for any medium. As a matter of fact, I've been using Adobe Contribute now for approximately five minutes with no prior experience, and I'm using it to publish this very post.

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.

Manufacturers often skew their specification sheets to make their product seem better than it really is, typically by providing confusing references and the like. Not cool, but what’s worse than that? When they don’t know what the hell they're talking about, then convince the majority that they do. This is the case for a lot of Digital CCTV (DCCTV) manufacturers. If you’re going to reference a video specification and plaster it all over your video output, AND you’re one of the world’s leading manufacturers of IP-based CCTV equipment, you should probably have your shit together. Here’s why you don’t.

The ongoing clash between plasma and LCD HDTVs (or rather, their owners) rivals classic tech wars such as Apple versus Microsoft and Nintendo versus Sega in its ability to destroy friendships and alienate loved ones. As with any good tech fight, however, the skirmishes that occur in review comments and home theater enthusiast forums across the Internet are typically characterized by fans exchanging glib one-liners (in this case, about black levels and refresh rates). And many of those one-liners haven't been updated since 2002.

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Can you believe it's been nearly 6 years since Media-Geek's official launch? Over 1,500 verified members worldwide, and together we've helped to expedite thousands of investigations. A true testament to what can be accomplished through open information & resource sharing within our disciplines.

In With the New
Earlier this year I started my own DME & IT consulting business, and on November 1st I will be launching my new business portal DMEresources.com.

An all new year brings an all new look and an entirely different platform for our forensic multimedia community.  Our new site has been redesigned from the ground up to simplify information sharing for our members.  Let's take a quick look at navigating the all new members area and point out a few important changes.

If you have a Dropbox account, you have Dropbox Replay.  I've been so impressed with the implementation, and I keep thinking of more ways to use it.  Obviously, you can invite others to comment on and review videos in your Dropbox account (Frame-level review with comments & annotations), but you can do so much more. 

One of the coolest features is the live review capabilities, IMHO.  In any case, rather than regurgitating all of their marketing stuff about it, here's a short video from Dropbox. 😎

The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA) is offering a $200 discount to government employees who sign-up to take two of their most highly sought after courses - Forensic Imaging Techniques and Photographic/Video Comparison.  The courses will be held back-to-back June 9 - 15 at the LEVA DME Lab, which is located at the University of Indianapolis.

Visit the LEVA Web site for complete details!

DMEpod, the new Digital Multimedia Evidence video podcast, will not be released this weekend as originally anticipated. Unfortunately, I just haven't had the time that I had previously planned to work on this project the last few weeks due to a number of variables. As it stands I'm hoping to pull off an early October launch.

Johnny Cash. The Man in Black.

He wrote this song one day while in Binghamton, NY to do a show.

I'm pretty familiar with Binghamton, and can totally understand why Johnny felt this way on that day.

I felt this way a lot of days in Binghamton, and I know that courthouse pretty well too (Even the tunnel beneath it).

Anyway, life is about moments, my friends. Make the most of moments.

Sending ❤

A recent report from NIST on Latent Print Analysis sheds some light on potential human errors in all forensic disciplines.

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The Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA) is participating in the development of a national standards document for police interview rooms.

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