So no big display this year. But may do something small. If I do just one thing, it might be Hallowindow. The videos are awesome and we have some large windows. I admit I do get sucked into sites like Monster Guts — a great selection of prop supplies. But I will resist. Oh and I love these awesome light fixtures from Schoolhouse Electric — A steampunk, mad scientist vibe.

See this is the problem, I say I am going to do a limited thing, and before I know it I have planned out a whole scene and purchased another storage pod full of stuff. Slippery slope.

My recipe for a quality halloween experience:

• Fog. Love fog. You have to have some fog. There are a million options out there. At the minimum, you need a machine that has a duty cycle timer on it so that you can let it run unattended all evening — you don’t really want to have to manually control the fog all night. I have about 4 of these. If you want to go bigger, well the sky is the limit. I have a whole-yard water-based fogger that puts out an impressive amount of fog via a 1/4″ tubing distribution network. What I’d really like is one of these babies but that seems extreme. Or a liquid nitrogen based system which is really extreme!
• You need to have some quality bones and skeletons to spread around. Not the crap sold at the seasonal halloween stores. The 10lb bag of bones at anatomical is pretty nice.
• Thunder and Lightning. You’ve got to have thunder and lightning. If you don’t do any other lighting, do this. I’ve liked the i-zombie controllers in the past.
• Ambient music. If you want some music playing the background, it is hard to beat Bach organ fugues in a minor key. Almost any of them will do.
• Tombstones. You can buy some nicelooking but pricey foam stones at the Halloween specialty stores. And there are a million guides on the internet to making your own out of foamboard. You can whip thru a lot of them in little time in foamboard, I would make your own. And they store easily and are usable year after year.
• Coffin. Whip one or two up out of plywood, your basic plans here.

If that is all you do, well, you will probably have the best place in the neighborhood. 

Optional but very very good additions to your project:

• Hallowindow DVD. This thing looks awesome. It does demand a projector and some sound equipment but I love it.
• Webcasting gun. Simple but makes great webbing.
• Another simple webbing idea — get some black thread and dangle a bunch of it from the trees over your driveway, etc. No one can see it and everyone feels like they are walking thru spider webs.

I probably won’t get to my more extreme efforts this year

• Talking animated tree with voice modification box. This has always been a huge hit but it takes some work to set up.
• Pneumatics. A lot of work to set up and maintain.
• My full size mausoleum that I built out of foamboard a few years back.
• Various animated ghosts. Always winners but certainly won’t have time.

• Monsterlist. Starting point to find any kind of halloween project
• Kurt’s tool wishlist. I can only aspire to Kurt’s skill and tool collection
• Kurt on prop setup. The guy knows more than I ever will about this
• Scott on controllers. Need to read and parse this, Scott is ahead of me here.
• Kurt on foam construction. Foam is my best friend at halloween time
• Measure tape tape. Simple but brilliant
• French Curves. Who doesn’t need these.

Physical Stuff:

• Faux fountains via Scott Loftesness. Cool looking and an inspiration for Halloween.
• IP PBX tips for home. I was all excited about this several years ago but increasingly not so…having resident phone technology seems so backwards
• Projects Watches wristwatches. Cool looking but increasingly I have given up on wristwatches.
• Television emulator. I don’t know, I think the dogs would prefer to watch real TV.
• Olympus PEN. Having just hauled the Canon up and down a mountain Sunday morning, the idea of a smaller form factor camera with great lenses is appealing.
• Super Duper Denon pre-amp. Just can’t face all the cabling problems tho of disconnecting my current and connecting in a new.

Virtual Stuff:
* Mint.com. Like the idea of automated analysis of my financials, but I am just not going to give another party access to all my financial credentials. They should license these tools to financial service firms for use on their own websites.
* Cisco Network Magic. Nice review. Congrats to the former Pure Networks team.
* Filemaker Bento iPhone app. I regularly get sucked into thinking I need a database and this app is sucking me in again. I know tho I will enter 7 records and abandon the damn thing so I am holding off.