Do-it-yourself ghost busting
Haunted Places
Do you suspect someone other than your teenager is ripping through your cupboards late at night? A restless spirit may be to blame.
Before you hire a team of ghost busters to camp out in your creaky New England home, however, you might want to price some of the sensors the "experts" use to mark the cold corners and magnetic fields they say suggest the presence of ghosts.
Professional ghost hunters have long relied on psychics and dowsing rods to isolate the spirits of dead captains and Revolutionary War soldiers padding around old buildings. Now they use electromagnetic field detectors and infrared thermometers (which you can point at a remote spot) to detect the telltale signs that a noncorporeal being is freeloading in your house.
By purchasing the equipment yourself you won't have to order pizza for a ghost-busting team or make out a check to someone's mom. (I suspect that many ghost hunters operate out of their parents' homes.)
Sites such as the Philadelphia-based Ghost Hunter Store (theghosthunterstore.com) offer starter kits that may include a $12 EMF meter, a ghost-hunting guidebook, and perhaps a flashlight with a red filter (a must if you hope to make visual contact with a ghost in a darkened attic). Geiger counters, IR motion detectors, and digital voice recorders (for capturing so-called electronic voiceprints, or EVPs) are other tools of the trade.
None of these gadgets will ward off an attack by a malevolent spirit. For that you'll need a trusty amulet, crystal, or holy water. The ghost-hunter sites offer some of these items, too.
Most of the online ghost-hunting equipment sellers I have seen fail to list either a phone number or street address, ownership information, or return policies. I would not shop with any site that lacks all of these details.
Many of the sites, however, are reselling products from suppliers such as the German company Aaronia AG ( aaronia.de), which posts all of its information online, including its 30-day guarantee and 10-year warranty.
Mobile Phones
A cellphone that's 'ruggedized' for fall and winter outings
Finding a signal is only part of the challenge when you bring your phone into the wild. One plunk in a stream, for example, will probably ruin a phone barely fit to resist a bit of foam dripping from a cappuccino.
Verizon Wireless last week released the G'zOne Type-V, a military-grade phone subjected by its manufacturer, Casio, to sun, simulated rain, saltwater, shock, and dust -- some of the elements you might encounter on a fall hike on the Cape or in the Whites.
The G'zOne has a 2.0 megapixel camera and you can use it to play videos and 3D games provided by Verizon. Verizon is selling the phone for about $300, with a two-year contract.
Music
An MP3 player built for Rhapsody
That didn't take long: I lost my iPod Shuffle after enjoying the music player for just a couple of months. But it's an opportunity to make a break for a service other than iTunes, such as RealNetwork's Rhapsody service. It's Mac-compatible -- to a point.
RealNetworks and hardware maker SanDisk have released the Sansa e200R Rhapsody MP3 player. Windows (not Mac) users can drag and drop songs directly onto their Rhapsody players through the $15 per month unlimited subscription service Rhapsody To Go. They can also explore "Rhapsody Channels," custom mixes uploaded each time the device connects to its PC base. The new players store up to 8GB, can play video clips, show photos, and have built-in digital FM tuners and voice recorders. Rhapsody To Go also works with many other MP3 players, but not the iPod.
