MAKE haunted house this week!
Friday night, October 28th, from 7:30- 9:30pm there will be preview of The Occidental Haunted House (a special collaboration between O’Reilly Media’s MAKE Magazine team, local actors, artists and technologists). Friday Evening’s Adults Only Haunted House and Costume (optional) Fundraiser is for the Occidental Center for the Arts. This special evening activity will include a pumpkin pie and port (or other beverages) party at the Occidental Center for the Arts campus, formerly Harmony School. I’ll be there with some lasers and taking photos, it’s not too far from San Fran, so if you’re looking for an adventure on Friday here are some more details…
Matthew writes “This is a page detailing how I made a Jack-o-Lantern lit by blinking mixtures of red, green, and blue LEDs in about 3 hours using about $5 worth of parts from a local electronics store and the power supply from my cordless phone. Includes pictures and a video.” 
Dale writes “In Chicago Tuesday, I came across an Auto Dismantling Demonstration, sponsored by Allstate and the Chicago Police Department. They wanted to show how a chop shop operates, taking apart a car for its parts. They wanted to show that it could be done in under twelve minutes or less. According to the Allstate spokesman, the stripped parts from a stolen car fetch more than the book value of the car and the most popular stolen car is the Honda Civic because it has interchangeable parts…”
Michael Tiemann here at OSCON has a challenge “Many car audio systems have a feature that increases the volume of the program to keep the signal level constant over the noise level. But with cars like the Prius, we can control the level of the noise based on the signal–a better approach. The first hack is to mod the Prius power management system so that in addition to battery level, acceleration, and speed, it takes GPS data into account…”