photo by rpongsaj  

Recently Facebook introduced a new “feature” called Instant Personalization that automatically opts you in to sharing your personal information (and your friend’s personal information) with various websites automatically when you visit them. Of course Facebook sells this as a feature to improve your online experience, but personally I think it is a gross invasion of your privacy (especially since Instant Personalization is automatically turned on – it would be different if you could decide that you wanted to share your information and it didn’t automatically share your friends information too). Fortunately you can opt-out of instant personalization, but Facebook does not make it easy (yesterday the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a great video showing you how to correctly opt-out, but this morning Facebook changed their site to make it even harder to opt-out completely).

Currently, to completely opt-out of Instant Personalization you need to take the following steps:

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Able to detect the potential presence of spirits, EMF meters have become one of the most basic parts of any paranormal investigators tool kit. While you can purchase a detector for less than $50, intrepid DIYers can open up a world of infinite possibility by building their own EMF meter using the open source Arduino hardware platform.

This design by Make Magazine’s Collin Cunningham uses a LED bar graph to display the meter’s reading, but as with all Arduino based projects, there are endless possibilities for modifications. This project replaces the LED bar with a LCD readout. Other possibilities include combining the EMF meter with a camera trigger to create a camera trap or you could build in an audio recorder that starts recording when a spike is detected creating an automated EVP setup. The only limit is your imagination.

Making the Arduino EMF detector @ Make: Online

We’ve all seen them. I’ve even seen entire TV shows based around them. I am talking about blurry, grainy or otherwise unintelligible “UFO” photos. Now I know most UFO photos are taken by amateurs who may not even notice the UFO in their shot until after the fact, but I have seen my fair share of pictures taken by “UFO hunters” that look like they were taken by a blind chimpanzee jacked up on crystal meth. Even though UFO sightings are unexpected events, there are a few things you can do that can be the difference between a blurry shot and once that is tack sharp.

(These are just some examples I found with Google to illustrate the differences between a blurry and a sharp UFO photo – the second shot is almost certainly a hoax)

1. Hold The Camera Properly – The way that you hold the camera has an enormous impact on the quality of the pictures you take. Your right hand should firmly hold the camera so your index finger floats softly above the shutter release with the other three fingers wrapped around the front of the camera and your thumb gripping the back. (While you should hold the camera firmly, you do not want to grip it so hard that you shake the camera.) Your left hand should support the weight of the camera by either being positioned under the body of the camera or under/around the lens depending on the type of camera you have. Once you have a good grip on your camera, tuck your elbows into your sides and bring the camera up to your face so you are looking through the view-finder. If your camera does not have a view finder, bring it as close to your face as possible. The closer to your body, the more stable you will be. The more stable your are, the better your shots will be.

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