Ghosts, Gadgets & Gigabytes

Welcome to

User Friendly 2.0 with host Bill Sikkens,

Technology Architect.

And this is User Friendly 2.0.

I am your host bill welcome to this week's show.

Happy Halloween everybody.

Bill.

Gretchen happy Halloween.

Happy Halloween.

So in our second segment today we're going to be looking at

Halloween pop culture technology and how all of these things go together

and how much has just changed as time has gone by.

And what makes this year different from the past?

And, Gretchen, you were commenting earlier before we started recording today, that

All right.

At this point, I'd be like, smacking him if we were in the same room.

And it's a good thing this is audio only, because that gesture

would not have been family friendly now anyway. But.

No, but a lot really has changed in in a very short amount of time.

So we're going to be diving into this a little bit in the second segment

and talking about some of the different things that are going on,

and we've got a lot of news this week too.

So with no further ado, let's go ahead and dive into the news.

All right a final curtain for three legends

remembering Patrick Stewart, Walter Koenig and Eric Bowser.

Yeah, this has been an incredibly difficult week for the acting community.

We've lost three of the greats.

So Patrick Stewart, Sir Patrick Stewart, we remember

a man who didn't just command a starship.

He inspired generations to imagine a better humanity.

The legendary British actor, best known for his portrayal of Captain John, Luke

Picard and Star Trek The Next Generation, has passed away at the age of 86.

For millions of fans taught with more than an actor,

his portrayal of Captain Picard gives us a leader who valued diplomacy

over violence, wisdom over aggression, and compassion over fear reminded us

that humanity's greatest achievements would not come from the technology

we created, but from the principles we chose to uphold.

But Stewart's remarkable career extended far beyond the bridge of the enterprise.

A classically trained Shakespearean actor, he spent years with the Royal

Shakespeare Company before becoming an international star.

He introduced himself to another generation as Professor Charles

Xavier in the X-Men films, once again portraying a man who believed

that understanding and cooperation was stronger than hatred.

Offscreen, Stewart was an advocate for survivors of domestic

violence, using his own childhood experience to help others.

For those of us that grew up watching Star Trek,

Captain Picard represented the future we hope humanity might someday achieve

a future where knowledge, exploration

and the pursuit of understanding mattered more than power.

Stewart

may have taken his final bow, but his voice, his performances,

and the ideas he brought to life will continue to inspire generations.

And perhaps there is no more fitting farewell than the words

that became synonymous with his legendary captain.

Make it so.

Rest in peace, Sir Patrick Stewart.

Your voyage continues in the hearts of millions.

We also say goodbye to another beloved member of the Star Trek family,

Alter König, the actor who brought Ensign Pavel Chuck off to life

aboard the original USS enterprise, passed away at the age of 90.

portraying a young Russian navigator at the height of the Cold War,

at a time when the United States and Soviet Union

were locked into political and military competition, Star Trek

presented a remarkable vision, and American captain, a Russian navigator,

a Japanese helmsman, and a diverse crew working together to explore the universe.

It was a simple but powerful message.

Our differences did not have to divide us.

Koning brought humor, enthusiasm and humanity, the character of Chekhov

becoming a beloved member of the original cast

and returning for seven Star Trek feature films.

His talents extended beyond the enterprise.

Science fiction fans will also remember his memorable portrayal

of the calculating, morally complicated Alfred Bester in Babylon five,

demonstrating his impressive range as an actor.

Honig was also a writer and a familiar presence at science fiction

conventions, where he spent decades connecting with fans

who had embraced his work for nearly 60 years.

Walter König helped keep alive the optimism that made the original Star

Trek so special, the belief that humanity could overcome its divisions

and find something extraordinary among the stars.

And we also have

lost another remarkable talent whose voice brought laughter to millions.

Eric Borsa,

the Emmy Award winning voice actor behind modern versions of Bugs Bunny,

Daffy Duck, Orchid Pig and numerous others beloved animated

characters, passed away on October 25th at just 46 years of age.

Born in Toronto, Canada, gave up, grew up loving cartoons,

and eventually turned the childhood passion into an extraordinary career.

He became one of the most versatile voice actors in the animation,

accumulating more than 400 credits across television, movies and video games.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was falling

in the footsteps of the legendary Mel Block,

the original voice behind so many of the Looney Tunes characters.

That's an extraordinary responsibility.

These aren't simply cartoon characters Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig,

or cultural icons that have entertained generations of children and adults.

They will be missed.

Yep, yep.

In other news,

AI coding agents hijacked using agents.

MD file in downloads folder.

Yeah.

Now, this one's interesting because a lot of programmers are programing with AI,

and whether that's liked or hated, that is what is going on these days.

And this is an interesting thing because somebody figured this out.

And first of all, for anybody that doesn't know, a.md file stands for markdown.

And this is something used in programing which is basically a list of instructions.

And this isn't like a viral attack or anything like that.

It's just a little bit different form of what I would call AI prompt injection.

Like we need another form of injection, but that's what it is.

And what ended up happening here is they were able to change these and cause

the AI to do things that it wasn't supposed to

when putting together instructions from the markdown.

So this is something that's being investigated.

Both OpenAI and the other companies that have been involved in

this are looking at a way to be able to offset this.

But again, if you have a list of instructions

and those instructions are compromised, it does create an issue.

All right.

Some more computer stuff.

AI discovered a massive cyber security flaw.

Yeah. And this has been all over the news.

We're going to go with the story

published by BBC, but this has been all over the place.

Last week.

This happened just after we recorded our show last week, too.

And what it is, is there's a language

that runs, I think, something around 70% of the internet.

From what I was looking at, it's one of the key languages I program in.

So it's something that definitely created a little bit of a twofold,

let's just say, for lack of a better term, last week when this came out

and what it was is the PHP programing language had a bug in it

that is essentially been in there for years, but it wasn't known about it.

And I discovered it and it was a pretty big bug

because you could get in and execute code at a server level.

And that's bad.

That's really bad. Yeah.

You know, without needing to change or do anything.

So all of a sudden I and I'll talk about this from my personal perspective

because I dealt with this as I had several clients that we use

PHP for, and there wasn't a fix right away for it either.

It took about a day to get it,

and I just turned the servers off, and a lot of other people did that too.

I found out different governments and things like that

because it's like, well,

either we're going to have some downtime or we're going to get hacked.

And given the choice,

I'm going to go with option

A, and I remember getting on the phone and afterwards

and calling my clients and saying, hey, your sites down. And here's why.

You know, that is not a call you really want to make.

But I'll tell you one thing.

In all cases,

it was appreciated that we took them offline instead of dealing with this.

But, you know, it was one thing because a lot of the sites we work with are new.

So updating once the patch came out, we did that

and then turned everything back on.

But I've got one client

that runs a piece of software that runs on an old version of PHP

that cannot be upgraded because it would break the software,

and it's a version of PHP that was not patched because it's well out of support.

So that was a little bit of a challenge, because we had to go through and figure

out a way to secure it.

We did.

But, you know, this was kind of a big deal.

And I think this is one of the biggest vulnerabilities I've ever seen.

Were you able to fix my old website so that it wouldn't be a problem?

Yeah.

But again, your old websites running on our new server.

So patching the server. Patch the website. That's right.

You know. Yeah. Okay.

You know, I explained that to me.

Yeah, yeah.

And just because you have an older website.

But the problem of it is, is that this other website

which replacing the software for but it uses PHP calls that don't exist

that were deprecated a long time ago and are gone from the newest version.

If you tried to switch it over, it just simply wouldn't run.

And that's a problem, you know?

So anyway, definitely something if your site was down

or you were trying to work on something that's hit a lot of things, like in a I'm

looking now at 74% of the internet runs on PHP.

And one of the biggest things is WordPress, which runs a lot of websites.

The majority.

I wanted to understand two is PHP.

It's what is written on.

So that meant anything on WordPress had to be patched and turned off.

So yeah, yeah.

If you had mysterious downtime and hadn't heard about this, it's probably

that was why.

All right.

James Spader had one request for Ultron's return in Marvel's Vision Quest.

All right. So.

Basically, this comes from the direct I'm going to go ahead with this.

This was covered by a number of different things, but beta originally

For anybody that hasn't seen it, that's where this comes from.

He returned to Marvel's new Disney+ series Vision Quest,

which premiered October 13th of this year,

and at this point,

he wasn't just simply a giant, murderous robot.

He's an AI consciousness residing within visions programing.

Oh boy, this might be a little too close to home in some ways.

Yeah.

So alternate has a beard, long hair,

and a top hat, so his appearance has changed considerably.

I've not seen this yet. Now, Gretchen, have you have?

Yes, I have

it. Okay, well, I actually really like the series.

And it's fascinating how they take all the different eyes and have them.

They're almost like a group of friends in In Visions head.

Right, right. Okay.

And, Ultron.

Oh, he's he's

very manipulative

and very reasonable, which makes him very scary.

So I'm just waiting for the stab in the back.

You know,

I'll post a question here.

You know, from the technology pop culture show.

Can you really kill artificial intelligence?

I mean, you know,

this is something that is being explored in this series, but.

Wow. Okay.

So, one of the AI is actually basically decompile himself

or races himself to save the others at one point.

So I guess that would be a way for an AI to die, right?

So, but he sacrifices himself to save the others.

Okay, well that's interesting.

I'm going to have to watch this. Like I said, I just. Yes.

It's not something that I like Marvel, but it's not like the top of my list

of things I like.

So just lately, life's been busy.

I still want you to watch Wonder Man because of your your

your filmmaking experience.

Yeah, well,

I mean, you know, I'd like to do that too, and eventually I will,

but it'll probably be historical documentation by the time I do.

Anyway, what do we have next?

Oh, it's for me.

Space wars heat up as Russia tails a Ukraine linked US satellite.

Yeah.

So this, been reported on a number of outlets.

I'm going to use the defense news one

just because it seemed to sum it up, the better.

This comes from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Basically. What?

Washington blame Moscow at the United Nations on Wednesday

for deliberately moving a Russian military satellite with an undisclosed mission.

I can guess on what.

This mission was dangerously close last week to a U.S.

registered satellite believed to serve Ukraine.

I'm not surprised this is happening.

I am surprised it's taken this long, in a way.

And a couple of years ago, there was a concern

that a Russian satellite had been launched

that seemed to be able to chase other satellites.

Now, I have not been able to determine if this is that

or if this is something else.

But at the end of the day,

because so much of our communication and not just, you know, with Ukraine,

but all over the world, it's done with satellite communications.

This is kind of an all or nothing thing.

And if they start attacking satellites, it's going to create a situation

where it pretty much destroy all of them and big mess be a big mess.

And that would obviously be a huge problem, to put it mildly,

because it would shut down modern communications,

which you're going to wish you had landlines again.

Yeah.

You know, but even think about it, if you did,

you still lose a good portion of the internet.

It wouldn't shut off,

but you would certainly have much harder time

accessing things, stuff that's farther away.

That's like on a data center server somewhere else in the world.

It's now going to take longer to get on the undersea cables.

You know, there's all kinds of things that this this could do.

Would it shut everything?

Lines are basic telephone service.

I understand everybody's using cell phones.

If you had if you still had landlines, you'd still be able to call someone.

Yeah.

At the moment we have so many cell

phone users that most people aren't going to be able to call anyone.

Like that's an interesting thing. An ambulance.

Your local calls probably would still work because that's done through the towers.

Oh, okay.

It's the long distance stuff.

So if I say you and I are nearby, which we are, and I call you on a cell

phone, we're going through the cell towers.

That probably is not using a satellite.

Okay.

Fortunately, you would still have that, but

boy, would it just would screw things up dramatically, you know?

Oh yeah.

And it would cause all kinds of other things.

Your GPS would stop working as a, for example.

And then the other part of it is, is it's not easy to put all this stuff back

because it's not just a matter of replacing satellites.

You're going to have junk in orbit.

It's going to destroy anything you launch for a long time.

So either you figure out a way to clean that up, which we don't really have.

There's some approaches being explored for that,

but it's not something we have available yet, you know?

So just yeah, it could definitely, be a major thing.

But the fortunate thing about it is if this was done,

it would also cause problems for the attacking country.

So it's not like they can just take out, you know, stuff

where it's identified as the enemy.

It would cause problems with, you know, everybody.

So like I say, it's a mutually assured destruction type scenario

which will hopefully prevent this from happening.

But this kind of a thing is scary.

Right?

Workers are collecting data for AI by working.

Yeah. So that sounds interesting.

I mean, you know, it's being reported by the BBC.

And, Gretchen, I think you found this on Instagram,

but it's, basically what it comes down to is there are companies that are trying

to train AI models by watching workers work to replace their jobs,

and they have cameras watching hand movements and, you know, stuff like that.

I was looking at this and I think that we are headed in a direction here

where this is going to be like robots replacing humans everywhere.

It's not going to work, at least not now.

And it's but it is something kind of interesting.

Now, I could see a positive to this too, in that

where this would work is using an AI to train people.

If the AI understood hand movements and processes

and that kind of thing, there would be a way to use this as an advantage.

But of course, the way it's been reported is that it's

the idea is to replace workers, which I believe is what they're trying to do.

I just don't think that's going to work. Yeah.

Because these people looked like they were, assembling like clothing

or garments, and they looked like they might have been in India.

I'm not sure if that's correct, but, Yeah.

So but, but but fabric is a very difficult thing,

I would think, for a robot to manage,

you know, because fabric can be very fiddly.

I know

they've been doing this kind of stuff on white collar jobs, using AI to follow

and and basically studying burgers.

And yeah, it's not been good for them.

Yeah.

So we'll see where this goes.

But this kind of leads us into our next topic.

Yes, I was about to say that Nobel winning

computer scientist says AI has become conscious.

All right.

So this story comes from Geoffrey Hinton, who is a BBC

computer scientist who is actually very well known and very well respected.

He's referred to by some as one of the godfathers of AI.

He has been talking about this now, you know,

we've kind of broached the subject in the past here on user friendly.

And I think it's interesting because if we were for the sake of argument

to make some assumptions, let's say that we knew that AI has become conscious.

Okay, I'm not saying it has, and I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this.

I'm just saying let's make that assumption for a moment.

What does that actually mean?

Means we

need to be polite because we're talking to another person.

Yeah.

I mean, we're not liking each other. So.

All right. Okay.

But I mean at least respectful or acknowledging.

I mean, if you, if you had real aliens land on our planet,

how are you going to treat them?

Unfortunately, you know, badly in a lot of if

if you're going to treat them badly, then you're going to end up

with bad stuff, like in the example of The Orville.

Yeah.

And so if you treat others with respect

and then you're going to get better results,

at least that's not all is a television show that explores the idea

of what happened, that created a problem with AI's, and I'll leave it at that.

It's worth checking out, but it really is that being that being said,

if this is in fact true,

it goes far beyond being polite, being polite one thing,

but we're not very good at that with each other, like I said.

But it also means you can't turn them off because that would be a form of murder.

You're canceling form creature, right?

So yeah. Yeah.

So, this has been considered

fringe, but not lately.

And I'm noticing this more and more as there are tests

like the Turing test and other things that are used to try to determine this.

And at this point, the AI agents are passing with flying colors.

So by that metric

they would be considered conscious.

And so I understand where he's coming from with this idea.

So anyway.

All right

Disney set to lose

Yeah. So this is an interesting thing.

And there's a whole legal description that goes under this.

The franchise that we're talking about here is The Rocketeer.

And this is something that if you haven't seen it I recommend it.

It's a good I enjoyed it I really did.

Yeah it is.

So reporting on this comes from Screen Rant.

And again what they're talking about here is that there is a legal thing

that has to do with licensed rights from 35 years prior.

There's other people that can go into that in a lot more detail

that would actually know what they're talking about.

I do not, but

Disney has been served with a notice

Disney is fighting this, obviously,

but if they were to lose, they're going to need new

licensing agreements to continue with the series.

So, you know, again, it's interesting.

I'm going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

And there's a lot of people here that Disney has grown too big and owns

too much intellectual property.

So I know there's people cheering for this happening.

But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is

what is actually going to happen, because I think this will bleed into

other things.

All right.

The Google Book prize to put Android on the desktop.

What does that mean? Well,

this isn't that different from Chromebook,

but what they're looking at doing is using Android as a desktop operating system.

So basically right now you have two mainstream for

if you really look at it, operating system windows, of course, Mac OS

and then Chromebook and Linux.

So Chromebook is the newest of that bundle.

There was versions that are newer, but the point of it is, is windows

has been around a lot longer than something like Chromebook,

as has Mac OS, Linux as well.

Linux isn't used as widely because for a long time

it was difficult to set up and there was a learning curve,

which, by the way, isn't the case anymore.

You can set it up as easily as windows now.

The only thing that Linux has with a little bit of a problem

is that a lot of software

that will run on windows and on Mac no longer will not run on Linux.

However, from a game standpoint, steam has done a lot

to bridge that gap, and with a lot of what's going on right now.

One of the biggest products that won't run on Linux yet is Adobe.

However, that's been cloned and that does run on Linux.

So, you know, it's interesting to see where this goes.

So what they're talking about here is taking the operating system

on your Android phone and making that run a laptop.

Question is would this work?

And I think the answer to that is probably so we'll see where this goes.

All right.

Highway thieves literally are spoofing GPS

to steal millions in data center bound cargo.

Yeah. So we're just about out of time.

So I'm going to give a quick summary on this.

But basically what's going on is that actors are hacking

delivery systems and changing GPS signals to get truckloads or drivers

that are in the group of this that are also thieves themselves to pick up cargo.

That is stuff bound for data centers.

And as many of us know, memory prices have gone through the ceiling.

They have not come back down.

So that's one product that is really being stolen these days.

And other things like servers and copper wire, you know, all the different things

that you would use for something like this has a lot of value to it.

So from that end, they're being successful and being able to do this.

So there's another problem for the truck drivers.

I have a lot of respect for truck drivers.

They deliver everything.

If you've ever purchased anything

that's probably been carried at some point by a truck driver,

and they're having to deal

with a lot of this right now, the higher fuel prices and everything else.

So it's like they don't really need something else.

But this is really drivers.

Yeah, that's another thing too.

You know, that's been out there I think forever.

This is user friendly 2.0. We'll be back after the break.

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Well, the day that this drops is Halloween,

so welcome to our Halloween edition of User Friendly 2.0.

We're going to be exploring the intersection of technology and terror.

Doesn't that sound?

No, but when you think about it, from haunted computers,

robotic monsters to ghost hunting gadgets and artificial intelligence, technology

has given us entirely new ways to scare ourselves, and we pay for it.

In fact, next to Christmas, Halloween

is now the most spent holiday of the year in the United States.

What's in the billions?

And why do we enjoy being scared?

Well, there's science behind this.

You know,

if you think about watching a horror movie,

you know the monster isn't actually going to crawl out of your television,

but your brain can still react as though it's a threat.

And then we invented virtual reality,

where we can put that monster right in front of your face.

And I'm going to have to try that this Halloween, too.

I just finally got our Oculus is working.

You got mine working too.

Yeah, they're both working.

So, did you manage? My goodness.

That's awesome. Yeah. You know, it's it's cool.

That was scary too.

But I think that's too scary

to put in today's episode what I actually had to do anyway.

Yeah.

I remember when

I first got a VR headset, it was before the Oculus I was watching.

I think it was Resident Evil and you know,

that had some scenes in it that are a little bit and they all biting.

And I still believe my cat timed it this way,

but right at an appropriate time.

My little cat jumped in my lap.

I almost jumped through the window.

It was just.

I remember that.

So now do you guys enjoy scary movies or are you the person watching them

through your fingers or not watching them at all?

I mean, what do you think of all that?

I enjoy a good horror film.

I'm not really into a I'm not into slashers.

I like more suspenseful.

That that really gets your attention.

I just got through watching

something called A Pale Horse or the Pale Horse,

and it was an Agatha Christie thing, and I'm watching this going.

This is so creepy.

Yeah.

You know, but there isn't any, you know, massive amounts of blood

and guts flying everywhere or a guy running around with a chainsaw.

But it was creepy and suspenseful, so I think I prefer that.

Yeah.

You ever want a creepy, campy zombie movie?

Check out something called Dead Snow.

That one was funny. It's funny.

Yeah, it's a

but, you know,

movies aren't the only place where we're seeing this.

The video game industry is not an idol on this.

And they've spent the last four decades using video games, which are interactive.

So first one that I could find that came out

And this game featured a pair of eyes moving through a haunted mansion,

collecting pieces of an urn while avoiding bats, spiders, and ghosts.

At least that's what the manual said they were.

This was a game system that had 4K of memory, not for megabyte

4K, so you were somewhat limited as to what you could actually put on the screen.

But they did a good job of it.

And as you've used your imagination, you really,

actually could get the idea of this now. Terrifying.

No, I wouldn't say it's that bad, but it certainly had the idea of doing this.

But some of the other notarized, notarized video games, the

retro games these days.

Oh, so what was that game that I was playing in that arcade

that was really creepy with a crossbow?

I don't know.

You were, weren't you?

Oh, gosh.

Maybe it was James Sherwood that was sitting with me.

There were lots of weird dead zombie people,

and it was getting stressful because they they kept coming.

That's like, in a way that might have been House of the dead,

what you're describing or something like that.

But, yeah, it's, Yeah, definitely.

And when you think about it too, you know, with modern stuff,

modern games, modern lighting, images can engines can simulate reflections

and shadows, high resolutions, textures make environments believable.

And the other one that's kind of a big deal now is spatial audio.

Because with surround sound, Atmos, these type of technologies,

the ghosts that's walking behind you on your left shoulder, you hear them

walking behind you on your left shoulder.

I mean, you can really do some things with that.

And I don't know, Bill, you play games, I think more than most of us.

Do you have a favorite horror game

and maybe talk about the technology a little bit?

Oh, there's a couple.

I will say that my first one was Silent Hill,

which was an interesting game because it was on PlayStation one,

and the fog mechanic was actually because they couldn't render distances

or made the extra spooky because they just literally couldn't do it.

That's fun.

It it was just a terrifying game for its time.

Or there's been new renditions and story and all that kind of stuff.

And I am a fan of Pyramid Head.

He is a terrifying enemy.

And later ones, but honestly, one of my favorites.

And this is going to be an interesting one because it's only like a 32 bit

is actually called Corpse Party.

Okay, I've never done a Japanese.

It's Japanese one.

It's about a bunch of school kids, teenagers

that get stuck into a haunted school.

And it is, I will say it's gory, but it is terrifying as all get out.

There's been MAGA and anime adaptation of it because it's just that popular,

but it is a quite a spooky one.

And it again, it's only 32 bits, so you wouldn't

think it would be that spooky. But the music is amazing.

The graphics are utilized perfectly to what they need to do

and it is just spooky.

Yeah, sometimes music can really help.

Yeah.

So music is very important even in Silent Hill that that booming.

I don't even know how to describe it.

The siren and then the doom.

Doom.

But do you think in looking at kind of retro and modern horror games,

do you think it's more important to have the realistic graphics?

Or does leaving something to the imagination work better?

Do you think it's a combination of the two?

I have always believed that one of the greatest.

And don't get me wrong, he had his problems.

Not going to say he didn't, but Lovecraft is one of my favorite horror

writers because it left it to your imagination.

And I believe that goes into a lot of different mediums.

But again,

like I said, I believe that sound design graphics can definitely help.

There's that new Hellraiser game out that is looks fantastic.

Again, that is adult game.

Nobody

children play that because it is a hill raiser game.

You know anything about Hellraiser?

It's it's a terrifying one.

But I think it's a mixture.

It really depends on how you want to present the horror.

Right, right. Yeah.

And I think that makes a lot of sense, because if you look at a lot of the horror

movies from 50s, you know, in that era, you have the same thing

to where a lot more was left to the imagination, but it's still scares you.

And, I think what you're saying is accurate.

I think it's both.

And I think it makes sense, you know.

Well, like Nazareth, too, was like one of the earliest horror films,

but it was creepy, you know, that was the technology

they used, the technology they had available to make it, what it was

that of the living dead.

The birds or the birds.

Yeah.

So no, that's definitely the there was a

there was a film called duel.

There's no blood, no gore.

It's about a diesel truck that chases

this guy, Dennis Weaver down the road.

And it's terrifying.

Yeah.

I, I seen that that it's an older movie,

and that you can tell by the clothing, but I think we're in this.

Yeah.

What was it?

Jeepers creepers, I think

took a lot of inspiration from that because they had the giant truck

that was chasing them down the highway and

oh, now it's it's interesting,

but, you know, television and game consoles, that's a place.

But it's not necessarily limited to that.

Sometimes if you want to get scared,

you just walk through your neighborhood in October.

And this is one of the changes we're seeing with technology is,

you know, growing up, Halloween decorations were pretty simple.

You had a plastic pumpkin cardboard skeleton, maybe.

And if your family

was technologically advanced, a light bulb inside a plastic ghost or a pumpkin.

However, today you can have a 12ft monster

that moves, talks, lights up, and terrifies the delivery driver.

Coming up the thing and Bowyer, those fun.

I just gotta stop you for a moment.

When I was a kid, nobody decorated for Halloween.

We just didn't do that.

So, yeah, it's just the way life was.

You didn't do that.

I remember, so I remember Halloween when I was a kid.

Lots of pumpkins, a lot of a lot of those cardboard, like,

paper doll skeletons and stuff.

They used to fold up, and they used to have, like, those ones.

Yeah, I saw those were usually at the school, like an elementary school.

Or if somebody had a birthday party.

Remember a lot of people having them. Yeah.

But I when I was little, probably the most that we had was a carved pumpkin.

And you'd put a candle, a real candle, you know, burning flame,

you know, in the candle and you would in the inside of the pumpkin

and stick it on the porch step and just hope some pretty kid doesn't

kick it over or their costume catches on fire.

You know, so we lived in different times then.

So, Gretchen, since you've grown up, we have something called electricity.

Now, I know, and we also have a pre-made costumes.

We didn't go and dig through our parents wardrobe, trying to find something

that we could turn into a Bobby socks or a hobo or a, a gypsy.

Or, you know, something else.

Or rip up the sheets and make yourself into a ghost or a zombie or a a mummy.

We made our own costumes, so I think that's partially where

I've gotten my love of the cosplay stuff, because we actually made our own stuff.

It was fun.

You know,

after we after we talked a little bit about decorations,

I want to dive into the costume thing

a little bit because it is absolutely amazing.

We walked into a spirit Halloween and some of what it is

definitely not an option that you would have had not so long ago.

And you know, but,

you know, dealing with

I'm going to talk from my own standpoint here

because I've got one of those giant Halloween things.

I've got a giant 12ft tall, which. Right.

And I think it's actually a little unique.

I'm not sure if they still make that model.

I haven't seen a lot of them.

But you know, as an engineer, I couldn't leave it as it was from Home Depot.

So this year, I added a remote control relay system

so that I can turn it on electronically, because you had to climb up into the thing

and find a button which, you know, first world problems, right?

But the thing of it is, is it required undoing part of the of the unit.

It didn't look particularly polite and I'll just leave that at that.

He had to reach up her skirt and rearrange the

room where the control was, and then if it was cold and raining

and all that kind of stuff, that made an unpleasant.

So I thought, you know, maybe I'll add a key fob and I didn't.

It worked.

And, but, you know, this just isn't enough.

I'm not stopping here.

I'm working on adding it to my home automation system because a 12ft,

which just isn't enough.

It needs network connectivity, especially if one is an engineer.

But that being said, we're seeing a lot of technology in these things.

That was something that not so long ago

was something you might see at Disneyland and haunted house, you know.

Yeah.

And these things are my favorite of yours is your blow up kitty.

I love that black cat.

And he doesn't just.

He doesn't just sit there.

He moves his head, doesn't he?

Yeah, but yes, he does.

And that's, you know, to put all this together

and looking at the tech behind it because we do that here on user friendly.

It's interesting

what you bring up because electric motors, that's part of what makes this work.

So yeah.

So what Gretchen's talking about and I've had this

this isn't the newest thing, but it's one of the coolest pieces.

I like them too.

And he's a big black cat, as you say.

And his head moves back and forth.

So in order to make that work you have a motor or a couple of motors in it.

Maddox forceful movements using compressed air.

That's part of it too, because the thing blows up.

But it's more than just blowing it up,

you know, that works on that type of a thing.

Microcontroller to make all of it work.

Same thing in the which so the which has motion sensors

when you walk up LEDs obviously and all this stuff.

And when you walk up it senses that somebody there

and she'll start talking to you or with an added little feature I have on,

I can talk with her voice to people walking up and down the sidewalk.

That one.

No, that one's fun and I haven't put a camera in yet.

I have to watch out the window, but it works just fine.

And believe me, you know.

Hey, Amazon, what are you doing out there?

You know, people do jump a little bit. It's.

It's not that I would do that, but,

you know, it's,

and then sound modules, of course, you know, for when it does

the dialog and I don't screams affects that kind of a thing.

And again, when you think about it now, you can buy a pre-made thing like this

for a couple hundred dollars.

And if you tried to do this 20 years ago, and first of all,

you wouldn't have been able to buy it, you would have had to have built it.

Yeah.

And the components alone would have been in the thousands of dollars, you know,

because what you're going to what are you going to do,

stick your Commodore 64

and the thing to make it work, because you would

have needed a microcontroller and there was no such thing

until very recently.

Stuff like raspberry pies and the other things that we use now

and can buy for 20 bucks.

Yeah,

I keep thinking about the giant skeleton in my my garage.

Yes, but I haven't opened.

We're gonna have some fun with that next year.

Gretchen has a sculley. It's what it's called.

It's the older version of the Home Depot 15ft tall skeleton.

But now that I know how the controller works on

the which, we're going to be able to do some upgrades.

Oh, so you can upgrade him.

Oh, okay. Cool.

So I don't know if you guys have a favorite.

I mean, you've seen decorations and stuff.

Gretchen, you're sounds like the black cat.

Bill, if you want going to buy something.

Okay. Gretchen. Go ahead. I love the black cat.

I love, there's a very dragons.

I love the dragons.

The creepy woods and the ghosts.

The wig. That really tall.

Ghosts.

I like those,

so I, I was driving somewhere earlier, and somebody had taken their 15ft

tall skeleton and converted into a 15ft

tall dead Mandalorian, which was kind of cool.

Oh, neat.

So somebody had a lot of creativity there, and you'd walk up and walk by in

a crackly voice.

This is the way, you know, but it's.

I mean.

Going back to where my history is, a curator was I worked for a museum

that had a certain history with the local area about giant mummies.

I saw one that is the same as Scully, but it is a

mummy recently that I wanted.

But, of course I don't work there anymore, so I couldn't use it, but.

Oh, is that the giants that are there out in the desert?

And they had Medicare, or at least the hair bleached or something.

And they're really, really tall people.

Yeah.

You know, it's it's interesting though, we talk about

modern technology and the idea isn't that terribly new.

We talked about Disney a little bit.

And there's the right there is not hunted house.

It's actually called Haunted Mansion.

I think I said hunted House previously,

And it's creepy if you've gone to Disneyland

and a lot of people have gone through this.

This predates all the stuff we just talked about with microcontrollers

and things, and basically is based on lighting effects.

One of the notable ones is a thing called Pepper's ghost,

and it's an illuminated figure that's reflected in a transparent surface

positioned at an angle, creating the appearance of a ghost

floating in another space.

And I remember that, you know,

and they have a lot of set up the elevator that goes for ever.

Yeah. You know, all of that kind of stuff.

So it seems like now to build that compared to what it costs

to put up the 12ft tall, which there's a huge difference.

It's made it accessible to everybody.

But it's kind of cool to see how this is coming full circle, you know.

So one other topic that we got to talk about here.

And then we're going to

drop into costumes because I know we want to talk about that too.

And we get a lot of questions in on this.

And this time of year is the idea of ghost hunters.

So there's a lot of shows over the years,

some real, some not so real that do paranormal investigations.

And, you know,

everybody has their own beliefs on these things and that kind of stuff.

But they have hardware and we get asked about it all the time.

So I wanted to go through some of this stuff, and one of them is the EMF meter.

And this seems to be a go to thing.

So it's a meter that registers electromagnetic fields.

Some are better than others.

There's a $14 one on Amazon and there's a $200 one on Amazon.

And it's a little different on what the capabilities of these things actually are.

So what these are forest picking up fields from things like electrical wiring,

appliance motors, transformers, other sources used a lot for troubleshooting.

So if you have a giant Em field that wasn't there before,

you might want to check on the electrics.

That kind of an idea, right? So

the idea here is that ghost hunters

claim that they can use this to detect vote, ghosts.

You know, we haven't scientifically established that, of course.

But the idea is if you take your EMF meter into a room

and it suddenly lights up, you might have discovered a spirit.

The problem is, is you might have also discovered your refrigerator clicked on.

So it's hard to know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's bad wiring in your wall.

Yeah. So it can mean a lot of different things.

Now, if you're in the middle of nowhere and pick up an M

field, that might be more impressive.

In fact, that would be more impressive.

You know, now the next one is thermal cameras.

Now I use these when I'm diagnosing, electrical engineering boards and things.

You. If something doesn't work

and I plug it in and something heats up really fast, I might know that there's

a shorter problem.

You know, that kind of a thing?

They're used for that type of a thing and a lot of other stuff, too.

But the idea is, is there's a belief that a ghost

or a spirit creates a cold spot or a warm spot in the room.

And if you want to take that a step further,

you probably don't want to deal with the ones that create the warm spot.

So camera can be used for that.

Now, one of the other ones though,

that I have always thought these are kind of cool.

And the science behind how they work is the idea of a spirit box.

And this is a device that runs through radio frequencies, picks up the static,

and then if a ghost is supposedly

talking back to you, you can hear it in the static.

Right?

And again, this hasn't been scientifically proven,

but our brains are wired to find patterns.

And there's a lot that it's a belief that that's why these things work.

Now, whether or not it's actually a ghost is up to each of us to figure out.

But the pattern that comes from the static is something that you, you know,

pick up. So, you know, from that standpoint, it's kind of cool.

But these are instruments.

You can buy them, you can build them, go online.

There's a lot of communities, the spirit box, not so much, but a thermal camera.

And the Em EMF detectors are things that you would use a thermal camera

called a flare.

A flora is a company that makes thermal cameras.

Oh, okay.

But that's like saying Windex. There's other companies too, so.

But fluorescent is a well known. All right.

So for the last little bit of this let's talk costumes because like

we were saying earlier spirit Halloween we walked through there.

You can buy everything now.

It's questionable quality sometimes but you know it's available.

And I know for us we've done our cause plays and things.

But but Gretchen, why don't you deep dive into this a little bit?

Because you've you're the one that's made our most of our costumes.

Well, there's different things that least

when I was younger were not readily available.

Like a wig, different colored wigs.

If you have, like, a cartoon character

that you want to portray, and it has a certain color of hair

that you couldn't find that years ago, and now you can go to, spirit to find it.

You could go on Amazon.

Gosh, there's got to be a lot of other places

where you can find these that I flat out wig stores.

Yeah. And they're providing more choices.

And so when you're building a costume,

you're putting the different pieces together.

It's like you're composing a piece of artwork, right?

And you just need all of the different pieces.

So I,

you know, it's it's kind of hard for me to just to do it

all in a few moments because it's a pretty complicated topic.

And Bill Snodgrass has also made some wonderful

costumes and constructed really, really cool.

Why don't you talk about what went into that a little bit?

Well, I guess my biggest one was Darth Revan.

Which I had to make the mask from scratch,

had to make the entirety of the costume pretty much from scratch.

A lot of Sintra, which is the type of expanded PVC

panel

and a lot of spray paints, and they, they,

they use the Sintra in, signage,

a lot of plastic signage.

So sometimes if you go to one of those stores where they've cut stuff up,

you can maybe by scraps, or maybe they'll give you the scraps.

And did you, did you use your sintra

and like bend it with like a econ?

Yeah.

See, and Jeremy made my, Mandalorian armor and stuff like that with Sintra.

Yeah, yeah,

but I built the mask from scratch using Sintra and a pair of snow goggles.

I, had

to learn how to sew a Herkimer because of the pants.

Yeah.

And, it was just a lot that went into it.

I mean, some parts got bought, like a shirt

and under a pair of leggings for underneath boots and stuff like that.

But, it was quite a project.

Well, like with Bill's Wookie costume, we actually took a pair of his old shoes

and covered it with the fur that we were using for the Wookie fur.

Right?

And we actually covered his shoes, you know, and Jeremy made

toes, you know, to put out there.

So it looked like he had toes, you know. Yeah.

And sometimes you can buy gloves and you add on to them

and there's just so many different.

There's another thing

to, you know,

you bring that up because we did fare and the shoes are the one things the

Wookie costumes been extremely comfortable because it is a pair of shoes and fair.

We try to use these boots and usually cheap ones

because we didn't have money to buy good ones.

And boy, it screwed up. Yeah, yeah.

You bought the moccasins.

The the really thin moccasin, leather boots and.

Oh, gosh, you're feet must have hurt after they did.

No putting it must have. Yeah.

And so you want to think about that.

One thing about the Wookie suit is it's warm because it's basically a fur suit.

So, you know, I figured that out one time when we were in Sacramento,

and I had to walk from the car

about a half mile to the convention center in 90 degree heat.

And let's just tell you,

I can understand why Wookiees get upset, because that would make me want to.

He was a sweaty Wookie.

I remember the first night you took it out,

and that was you took it off and just poured sweat out.

Yep, yep.

And it's just miserable.

Yep. I know, and it's just,

oh, man.

So you want to keep these things in mind.

And when you're putting your costumes together.

So send us your questions and your comments

and you want to know something else that's really scary.

If you purchased a computer, most machine

there's a secret computer hiding in your computer.

So this is a topic for another User Friendly,

and we're going to be talking about it next week here on User Friendly 2.0.

Until then, this is User Friendly 2.0, keeping you safe on the cutting edge.

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