The four-ounce, $30USD, Boogie Board runs on a watch battery and mimics the feel of putting pen to paper. To erase, simply press a button. It is a 8.75 x 5.5 inch thin plastic slate that has the same functionality as the Magic Slate (it doesn’t store what you write) except that it uses LCD technology. However, the battery that powers the Boogie Board is not replaceable. Once it’s depleted, the board is useless. According to the Boogie Board site, that’s around 50,000 erase cycles.
Please note:
I won’t tell you why I’ve been so interested in the Magic Slate, 18th Century PDA, or this gadget, but I’m sure you might be able to imagine some uses for them.
If Moleskines are a throwback to a time before PDA’s, then 18th century version of the PDA is the pocket notebook made of sturdy brass stock with 4 old ivory pages and a pencil can be written on with pencil, smudged off with your finger, and used over and over again. It closes into a 1-1/8 inches by 4-1/2 inches by 3/16 inch thick package. It seems like an 18th century version of the Magic Slate.
The General Registry now offers a search feature that allows registered users to search online for Companies Information.
The Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation (CLEAR) listings of online license verification databases maintained by state agencies/provincial regulatory bodies provides links to sites where you can verify a professional license.
GoogleGuide is one of those things you find and say, “why didn’t I think of that.” If you need a guide to using Google’s advanced search operators, then bookmark the table that lists the search operators that work with each Google search service.
A U.S.A online gun retailer, has published an excellent article explaining the differences between each generation of night vision gear.
Here’s your crash course in NVGs. Night vision technology is broken up into different levels. Gen 1 night vision is the gear you buy at Wal-mart for $500. Gen 2 costs a lot more and is widely used in the law enforcement sector. Gen 3 is what our military uses. Gen 4 is scary cool and the price of a Rolex.
While this article is about night vision devices for military use, the description of the characteristics of each generation and their associated costs is good background information for the Investigator contemplating the purchase of a night vision device for surveillance use.
The following short article is quite good and it has an excellent bibliography. If you conduct interviews, this stuff is important.
How to Prevent Crime BEFORE it Happens
Written by Damian Ross
Crime is never unpredictable. Before a lie is spoken, a pocket is picked, or an assault is inflicted, each and every criminal gives off silent cues. They can be as subtle as a shrug of the shoulder, a pointed finger, or an averted gaze. But together, they make up a nonverbal language that speaks loud and clear if you’re trained to see it…
The incinerator and shredder were the crook’s best friend prior to the computer era. Today, software is available for the same purpose. A search for “anti-forensics” turns-up a lot of usable information and guidance for those so-inclined.
Of particular interest should be the Metasploit Anti-Forensics Project. If you are unaware of the tools that come under the term, anti-forensics, then an article from CIO entitled, How Online Criminals Make Themselves Tough to Find, Near Impossible to Nab, should illustrate that Investigators now face anti-forensics as part of everyday life.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is warning taxpayers to beware of a recent scam where some Canadians are receiving a letter fraudulently identified as coming from the CRA and asking for personal information. The letter is not from the CRA. A PDF version of the letter is available on the CRA Web site at www.cra.gc.ca/alert.
SlideFinder.net offers a search engine powered by Slide Executive, a PowerPoint software and tools company.
Searching “McEachin” in Google I get 37 hits. Doing the same search in SlideFinder, I get one hit. In the Google results, the SlideFinder result appears third from the bottom with a different file name than found by SlideFinder.
According the SlideFinder blog, they concentrate on indexing presentations from university websites as these “will often contain high quality content.” The blog is worth following if you regularly search for PowerPoint presentations.
This thing works very well for finding references to company names and Web sites. The person who prepared the presentation usually knows things that interest me. It’s usually easy to find the person who made the PowerPoint file. Write-out my questions, make a telephone call, get answers, write report, and move on to the next job.
Beginning 1 January 2010, the new limit for claims has increased from $10,000 to $25,000. This makes it worth searching for Small Claims Court actions when doing due diligence research. However, the Small Claims Court is often in a building some distance from the Superior Court.
FindThatFile
Previously, I wrote about file searches using OSUN.ORG.
findthatfile.com provides a file search encompassing Web, FTP, Usenet, Metalink and P2P resources (ed2k/emule) including 47 file types and 554+ file extensions including over 167 file upload services. It also offers an alert service sent to your email.
However, not all information in the search database has every property you might be searching for, therefore, you have to explore the different ways to search for the file in the advanced search screen.
In my experience, this is not a good search engine to use to search by a person’s name or a company name. The files are not well indexed in this fashion. One must also be careful to select the “All Files” button in the “Adult Filter” to be sure all the files found appear in the search results.
I usually search by a file name for other versions of a file that I already know about. In some cases, findthatfile.com will give me an understanding of how widely circulated a file may be, or turn-up different versions of the same file.
American journalists meeting with Soviet dissidents in Russia used Magic Slates as a way of communicating without being overheard by bugging devices. Low cost, low tech, and effective — what more can you ask for?