Time for a rant. Why is it that we, the consumers, have to suffer with this ridiculous HDMI copy protection DRM crap that causes interoperability issues with certain hardware?

Perfect example is my Roku XR box and Vizio TV.  Once the TV goes to standby, the Roku and Vizio will not handshake properly and I get the infamous green screen instead of video.  The only solution that works for me is literally unplugging the HDMI cable from the Roku and re-inserting it. That is completely absurd and makes the box useless to me. I am not the only one, the Roku forums are full of complaints going back years and yet the problem still exists.

I blame Hollywood for this HDMI crap but the specific hardware/software implementation on the Roku, or the Vizio, is their issue – I don’t know which party is to blame but they don’t play well together.  Don’t waste your hard earned money on the Roku, you’ll regret it.

For $5 the Scanner Radio application available at Blackberry App World is cheap fun! It allows you to listen in to over 2,500 police and fire scanners, railroad communications, and weather radio broadcasts from around the world using your BlackBerry®.

A lot of the radio dialog uses 10 codes, a kind of shorthand you’ve likely heard used on TV shows involving police or fire. A reference to the meanings of these 10 codes can be found at the link here.

Here in Orange County, we’re able to pick up the Orange County Fire radio calls countywide. Unfortunately, police and CHP calls aren’t possible since those are encrypted channels.

The app has a free 7 day trial, so no reason not to give it a try. To get a sense of what will be available to you on your  BlackBerry®, head over to Radio Reference and listen in to those channels that interest you. Both the app and the online Radio Reference site are a great way to get a taste of radio scanning without the expense of actually buying a scanner!

If you’ve seen the ‘Could not complete the operation. One or more parameter values are invalid.’ error in Outlook, then you can appreciate it when I refer to it as Outlook Hell!

Apparently, there are a ton of reasons one might get this error. If you google around, you will find all sorts of solutions (which may or may not work for your specific case).

I was seeing this error in Outlook 2003 (no exchange server involved) whenever I did anything with notes. Tried all the recommended solutions with no success until I came across a post here that actually worked for me!

• Tools>options>other tab, then advanced options and unselect “when viewing notes, show time and date”

Thank you so much to Microsoft for giving us one error message that applies to hundreds of possible conditions.