Turn your blackberry into a scanner radio

You can turn your blackberry into a police/fire scanner radio. I have a Blackberry Curve from Verizon Wireless - with other devices your mileage may vary.

First you need to either create an audio stream off your local scanner or identify a website that contains a live scanner feed. You can set a stream up fairly easily using Winamp and Shoutcast. Basically you will feed the audio from your scanner to your computer and Winamp (running on your computer) will feed the audio to a streaming server. At CalvertNews.info we use Shoutcast - it is affordable and very reliable.

Once you have your URL for your shoutcast feed (usually an IP address) you can do many things with it - embed it on a website or listen via your Blackberry.

Next - you need to download and install mediaPlayer from dollars5 software onto your Blackberry. You can then use their radio functionality to add your Shoutcast station to the player list. It works great - you can then feed the mini-jack earphone output into the aux jack (if you are lucky enough to have one) in your car to listen to your scanner in your car!

Snakehead!

On a more personal note: I was fishing back in July in a local southern Maryland pond and caught this 18" snakehead frankenfish. These fish stink, but fight well.

Personalized URL's for direct mail

We've just introduced a new feature into our contentManager content management system that allows direct mail vendors to create personalized URL's from their mailing lists. Imagine sending a direct mail piece with your potential customers name as a part of your website URL. The response rate increases dramatically and you have the opportunity to collect additional marketing data.