Hey Brian,
It’s my first Halloween since I moved into my new house, so I really need to make sure I have enough candy so the neighborhood kids don’t change my exterior paint to eggshell white. That means no fun size candy—only the good stuff.
I finally got a chance to play with the New Xbox Experience on my own home console, which Mark reviewed Wednesday, and it’s pretty fantastic, but I still have some complaints. The biggest one is that there aren’t enough avatar feature choices, so it’s just about impossible to make an asian dude that looks like me. The guy I have now looks like Hiro Nakamura and Frank ‘Grimey’ Grimes from the Simpsons. It does have something like nine different levels of receding hairline choices; something that would have pleased Peter Moore if he were still at Microsoft.
But back to H-Ween.
• Sean has a good Gizmodo haunted house for you to pee your pants through
• Frasier’s dad is up on his H-Brew for Wii, distilling dozens of incomprehensible forum posts into something your brain won’t explode while reading
• Want a 1TB hard drive for $99? There ya go
Halloween is a scary day because you never know when some undead miscreant is going to try and harvest your brain. That’s why, as Matt Cutts discovered, Google has ordered its robots to disallow any brain-hungry zombies from…well…eating brains. I’m not sure exactly how this zombie spotting and robot deployment works, but now we can search the web with the knowledge our heads will be intact every step of the way.
You could risk cutting yourself with a knife. Or you could buy one of those mini saw kits that always break off in the pumpkin. Or, if you really want to misuse company/lab equipment, you can requisition a laser cutter to carve your Halloween pumpkins. That’s what Doug did, and he has no regrets other than that the results “smell bad.”
You can see more gorgeous laser pumpkin photos by hitting the link. [
Wow. Four more days to go. The next time you pop open one of our lovely weekly app roundups, we will have a new man in the White House (knocking on wood hard here). I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a little on edge. This week, let’s have a look at the apps that will make you forget about gerrymandering, vote suppression, and how long you just waited in line and keep your eye on the prize.
If you need tons of storage on the cheap, Newegg has a super deal on a 5400 RPM Samsung HDD with a 32MB cache and a whopping 1TB of of space for only $100. Even the shipping is free. Don’t hesitate too long if you want to get in on it. Stock will go fast and the deal ends today. [
We pretty much figured that Nintendo had another reason for releasing the DSi other than just wanting to give us a prettier system like, say, wanting to stop rampant global piracy on the DS. Now that the DSi is out in Japan, the public has tested all of the flash card piracy devices and found the results to be very, very bad. None of them work.
The Gadget: 
Circuit City took a major blow today, according to a reliable inside source, when Sony’s merchandise that was being delivered to nationwide Circuit City distribution centers was stopped in transit and ordered to return to Sony “among worries that Circuit City couldn’t pay for the shipments.” This development means that Circuit City is not getting any Sony products replenished until they are able to convince Sony that their credit line is reliable. And with 
NYC’s new “Rat Information Portal” is being billed as “a one-stop resource website for New Yorkers’ rat prevention needs.” In addition to tips on how to control rat populations, the website also supplies an interactive “Rat Map” with data on inspections, violations, compliance, exterminations, and cleanups for any property in the city going back three years. Basically, it is a hotspot map for creepy vermin within the city. The idea is to put pressure on property owners who are slow to address their growing rat problems and give everyday citizens the tools they need to fight back. That’s right folks…NYC has declared war against the rats. [