1. Cru-Inc announced their USB3 usb write blockers. Imaging USB drives and hard drives at usb3 speed is a must; having tried to image 2TB external drives with USB2, I can honestly say this added speed bump will definitely help.
Introducing the WiebeTech USB 3.0 WriteBlocker

2. A colleague of mine has started a blog. Hes the guy we call when we need something accessed or stitched back together at the hex level. His first post explains a bit about what he hopes to achieve with the blog and how he works. Rob’s the type of guy that looks at the matrix and see the girl in the red dress, so definitely worth checking out if you need something at that depth.
The Hex Ninja

3. Last weeks Forensic Lunch had a bit of a discussion about FSEvents on OS X and this week David published a tool on his Github. This tool parses FSEvent records from allocated and carved GZIP files.
https://github.com/dlcowen/FSEventsParser

4. Brian Moran has made some updates to his Live Response Collection tool including an update to the naming scheme (who doesn’t love dinosaurs….maybe most of the people that died in Jurassic park….).
The major talking points relate to OS X. These include a memory dump utility and the ability to parse fseventsd using David Cowen’s parser.
Live Response Collection – Allosaurus

4. Harlan Carvey’s latest post describes his opinions on the hiring process. This isn’t a technical post but interesting none the less, especially if you’re a hiring manager. It’s amusing to think that someone like him, who writes a majority of his own tools and its quite prominent in the industry may get overlooked by an HR rep for not using Encase or FTK on a daily basis – all because people want to write a list of requirements on the job advertisement that may or may not be relevant.
The Skills Dilemma 

5. Western digital smart security flaw PSA. Apparently the WD Security tool cuts off your password at 25 characters, but allows the user to enter a password longer. I’ve experienced this with a number of online services in the past and it’s incredibly frustrating.
Basically, only use a 25 character or under password…or don’t use WD Security.
Western Digital Security – a short story of a known password that doesn’t work

Edit:

6. I missed the update to X-Ways 18.7 SR 8 – minor improvements were made; I don’t use X-Ways enough to comment.

http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/forum/messages/1/4709.html?1451673835