We had a focus group last night, and it went really well. This was the first time I used our new hard-drive based camcorders and I was pretty excited. Well, turns out I wasn’t the only one excited about them. While I was collecting all my equipment from the break out rooms, someone stole one of the cameras. Brian got their license plate and we had the contact info for the guys finance, plus I had the serial number at home for the camera.  I’m not holding my breath that we will get the DCR-SR82 back or anything.Â
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CCleaner
This free tools does a number of jobs and does them very well. It reminds me of Norton Windoctor, but it is about a million times faster, and gives good detail. It cleans up registry issues, broken links, unused/missing dll’s, etc. I found this linked on an article from TheInquirer.net while I was looking for tools to clean up my XP install before I upgrade to Vista Ultimate.
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National Safety Commission Supports Proposed Ban on Radar Detectors
UGH! If this bill passes I will be ticked. To be honest, I really don’t speed that much anymore, now that I sold my Talon and got the Durango, but thats not the point. For one thing, I don’t think cities and states would like this bill either. Traffic violations are a *huge* source of income for many municipalities. Also, there are other studies showing that higher speed limits actually reduce the risk of accidents. Sometime in the last year, Indiana increased the limit to 70 on I-64, which is great for when we go visit my parents in St. Louis.
Not that I think something like this would ever pass because there are many businesses that make a lucrative amount of income based on these devices (Valentine, Bell, Cobra, Escort, etc.) and I’m sure they would lobby the heck out of Congress to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Heck, there’s also the geek factor in this. I love my gadgets and my radar detector (from www.CarDomain.com) is pretty nifty.
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XM and Sirius satellite radio companies strike a merger deal – USATODAY.com
Probably not a huge deal to everyone who reads our blog, but this is a really big deal in the Radio/Automotive industry.  I’ve heard rumors about this for quite some time now, but I just never figured it would go through. Sean thinks is a smart move for XM, who has watched Sirius’ subscriber base grow since Howard Stern joined forces with them, plus Sirius is rumored to have streaming video on the way. It will be interesting to see what auto manufactures do since some of them have only used one brand (EG: Mazda uses Sirius) – or heck, it will be interesting to see how the two companies go forward with their technology and channel line-ups.
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CDBurnerXP Pro – free burning solution
I’m often asked what software I use for CD/DVD Burning. I’ve used Nero, CDRWin, and Roxio. They work well…but they cost money! CDBurnerXP is a great bit of software that will burn CD/DVD/ISO/MP3/etc very easily. I’ve used it on three different computers and reccomended it to people in the past.
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I did some re-arranging on the blog today. Added a shoutbox to the site on the side bar. You can use it to leave messages for us without having to reply to a topic. The post will show up automatically and pretty much instantly. Hopefully we won’t have a spam issue with it like Chris did over at KY Blogger. I also moved the categories down to the bottom of the site. We kept adding more an more with each post and it was getting really long. Don’t think many (any?) people use them much anyway.
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Notebook Hardware Control (NHC)
NHC is a great program that digs into your laptop and gets all kinds of great information. Yeah, that part is pretty geeky, but even for the non-geek it can provide some good insight about your laptop. Some of the features I like are its ability to display CPU temps, harddrive, temps, battery wear level, etc. It also allows you to adjust the CPU speed, graphics card processor speed etc. Give it a shot, it doesn’t take up many resources and sits quietly in the systray.
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Free Firewall, Anti Virus, File Backup, etc. Solutions
Comodo is a company that sells SSL certificates and they are trying to get their name out as a “security provider” company. Their techs put together some nice looking software packages – and they are free for personal and business use! They have antivirus, firewall, antispam, backup, and more…all free! I believe I read their firewall software won an award from PC magazine as an editor’s choice or something. I have it installed and so far I really like it. I’m going to try out their antispam and antivirus software next. I hate what Symantec has done to their Norton line of products, so I don’t even have it installed anymore. Won’t even consider it. I’ll keep you posted on what I think about Comodo’s other products.
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