• This Is Why You Shouldn’t Put Drunk Ewoks On Live TV
• Next Year, I’m Time Travel Trick or Treating
• Scientifically Haunted Room Shows That Ghosts Are Only In Your Head
• Twelve Beautiful Jack-o’-Lanterns
• Ghostbuster Proton Pack Uses Real Lasers, Can Probably Hunt Real Ghosts
• A Spider-Bot Pumpkin Is the Scariest Way To Dispense Candy On Halloween
• Build The Spirit Radio That Creeped Out Tesla Himself
• The iMac Cylon Mask Is Both Trick and Treat
• “Working” Apple iPhone Costumes Just Plain Win
• Craigslist Ad By A Horrid Excuse for a Human Being
• Sword Illuminates a Pumpkin by Impaling It
• Ideas for Tech-Themed Halloween Pumpkins
• 10 Robot Halloween Pumpkins Provide Artistic Inspiration
• Scare the Crap Out of Trick-or-Treaters With a Rovin’ Pumpkin
• Ruin Halloween For Everyone by Going as Brian Lam or Jason Chen

And please, be safe!

Google Maps Navigation
• Google Navigator for Android Review: Good For Free But Far From Perfect
• Google Maps Navigation: A Free, Ass-Kicking, Turn-by-Turn Mobile App

(An)Droid:
• Motorola Droid First Hands On: It’s a Terminator
• A Visual Guide to Android 2.0: So Much Nicer
• No Android Version of HTC HD2 After All?
• GSM Motorola Droid Caught on Video
• How Motorola Stopped Sucking
• Droid Eris Doesn’t Look Too Shabby for a Cheapo Android Phone
• HTC Droid Eris Might Be the Cheapest Android Phone at $US99
• HTC Hero Among First To Get Android 2.0 Update

Reviews:
• $1000 1080p Projector Battlemodo: Optoma HD20 vs Vivitek H1080FD
• BlackBerry Storm 2 Review: Improving, But Still Mostly Cloudy
• Corsair Flash Voyager 128GB USB Drive: As Big and Fast As a Small Fish
• Canon S90 Review: It’ll Never Leave My Pocket (Except When I’m Taking Pictures)
• Samsung Moment Review: The ED-209 of Android Phones

The Copy/Paste Twins Saga
• I Want to Have Twins Just to Get Them These Awesome T-Shirts
• Twin Apple Fangirls Pwn Twin PC Clones

The Rest:
• 12 Things You Need To Know About Apple TV 3.0
• High Res Video of Ares I-X Launch
• http://gizmodo.com/5393755/an-astronaut-explains-how-well-fall-in-love-with-space-again
• Apple Tablet Will Restore Comic Books To Former Glory
• Build The Spirit Radio That Creeped Out Tesla Himself
• Behold, the BlackBerry* Watch: $US150, Coming in February

Ceramic Cloth: Cloth knit from ceramic fibres can provide protection from extreme temperatures. It is easy to see the benefit for military personnel and firefighters.

Temperature Sensitive Glass: Remember Hypercolor shirts? Picture the same sort of thing happening with the glass tiles in your shower. The water will cause the tiles to morph into all kinds of trippy colours. Finally, burnt out hippies will have a reason to wash up.

Flavour Changing Additives: Imagine food that changes flavours repeatedly over time. These additives contain nanospheres encapsulated in larger microspheres that burst with with new flavours in succession. It could turn everything you eat into a Gobstopper.

Conductive Hook and Loop Velcro: The Velcro pictured here can conduct electricity and complete a circuit when the hook side comes in contact with the loop side. This could result in a soft switch for clothing, backpacks, etc.

Hit the link to check out the rest of the list. [Popular Mechanics]

I still think Android, and its openness toward developers, can do some magical things and give iPhone a run for its money. But as we stated before, a lot needs to happen first–Android devices need to be a lot more numerous in consumers’ hands, numerous enough for third-party developers (along with Google’s first-party talent as well) to have a major incentive to drive the platform forward. It also has some major network power-management issues to overcome; the G1’s battery never makes it through the day for me, and while that may just be because it’s a shitty battery, Android’s always-on approach to network access and background processes surely plays a part.

The Android Market is not yet the iPhone App Store, but here is a taste of what is, hopefully, a lot more to come.

Anycut: Anycut takes advantage of one of Android’s fundamental strengths–the distillation of every possible event your phone can do–send a text message, go to a specific URL in a browser, etc–into a system-wide Intent, which any app can in turn access. Anycut allows you to take any intent and create a desktop shortcut for it–say, opening all of your Gmail messages labelled with a specific tag, or sending an SMS message to your most-texted contact.

Compare Everywhere: Like a hybrid of Japan’s QR codes and Google SMS’s UPC price check feature, Compare Everywhere reads barcodes (of just about everything, from a Criterion Blu-ray of The Man Who Fell to Earth I just watched to the stick of Right Guard sitting on my desk) and gives you a list of best prices–from online sources as well as physical brick-and-mortar shops near your GPS coordinates. The haptic buzz indicating a successful scan is unbelievably satisfying, and saves you money.

Shazam: Shazam’s same great song identification skills–able to snatch notes from the barroom’s speakers and pick the song in seconds–here on Android, co-existing with its identical iPhone version and similar ones for dumbphones. It’s an amazing trick, regardless of the platform, and good to see one of the bigger hits on the iPhone quickly and smoothly ported over.

TuneWiki: Still jailbreak-only for the iPhone since apps can’t access your iPod music, TuneWiki can show its full potential on Android, grabbing lyrics (that scroll karaoke style) and videos for all of your music as it plays.

Video Player: Video player plays H.264 MPEG4 clips, making up for a glaring hole left open in Android’s first release: no video player. It gets the job done, and is a prime candidate for something to get sucked back up into the core Android distribution, as is an open source project’s frequent wont.

Power Manager: Another necessity that’s both a blessing and a curse, Power Manager lets you take limited control over the things that influence how long your battery will live–turning on/off all the radios, GPS, adjusting screen brightness, etc according to your current power level. It shouldn’t be a necessary app for G1 owners, but it is; on the other hand, it shows how easy it is for a developer to fill a need and access hardware directly without having to ask permission. System-level functions like this, in large part, are not available to iPhone developers, and that’s notable.

WikiTude: One of the apps we were most excited about at launch, WikiTude could still use some polishing, but it shows just how cool augmented reality apps can be. Overlaying link to geo-tagged Wikipedia articles on your camera’s live view image utilising the G1’s built-in compass and accelerometer, it’s an amazing thing to fire up on my roof in Brooklyn. Not so useful in the living room, but it’s a great proof of William Gibson’s classic notion—overlaying data from the web onto our live view of the world.

PhoneFusion Visual Voicemail: Solid visual voicemail support for Android. Another example of something other platform/carrier combos make you pay for (ahem, Verizon) or don’t let you access at all.

Chomp SMS: Well, what do we have here. This looks familiar. Chomp is a replacement SMS app that mimics the iPhone’s iChat-inspired text interface, and also happens to include a great soft keyboard looking exactly like the iPhone’s, but adding haptic feedback–something coming to future Android distros. It also ties into Android’s system-wide notification services, so if you want to drop the default SMS app altogether, you can.

Locale: In early versions, Locale was cool: it changed your ringtone or a few other phone settings based on your GPS location. Then, the features started coming, like the ability to send Tweets or use several other of Android’s Intents, and it became clear exactly what Locale is–a framework (like Applescript, essentially) for triggering anything on your phone according to your location. When I’m at the office, set Facebook status to frowny face. When I get home and it’s before 4PM, tweet “meet me at the bar” and start playing “O Happy Day.”

So what did the reviewers think?

CNET
The Instinct’s touch screen dominates its real estate. With support for 262,000 colours and a 432,240-pixel resolution, the display is positively gorgeous. Colours popped, graphics were vibrant, and text was crisp. Indeed, it’s one of the better displays we’ve seen in a while…but [it] can look rather cramped…

AP
The result is a lucid, logical interface. It’s not as pretty as the iPhone’s, but it allows the user to quickly use e-mail, Web browsing, GPS navigation and text messaging; watch videos, live TV and photos; and listen to music and online radio.

Wall Street Journal
The touch system on the Instinct is more like that on an ancient ATM than a cutting-edge gadget, even though it has a gimmicky feedback mechanism that gives you a tiny vibration-jolt when you press an icon.

infoSync
Above all else, the Samsung Instinct made phone calls that sounded great..crisp and clean, with no static or drop-outs in our test period. Reception was a steady three bars in lower Manhattan, which seemed a bit low, but this didn’t affect calling, messaging or data, so we didn’t let it bother us.

PhoneMag
Messaging is a mixed bag, with the Instinct falling a little more on the corporate side than the consumer. SMS, MMS and email are all supported, with the latter playing nicely with webmail, POP/IMAP and Exchange accounts, but there’s no instant messaging client and only plain-text, not HTML emails are viewable. Attachments can be sent with outgoing email, but not opened from incoming messages.

Gizmodo
Samsung and Sprint borrowed liberally from the iPhone playbook when it came to look and feel. But the comparison itself isn’t fair: The iPhone is a software platform that is growing every day, soon to have a host of applications that put it squarely in the smartphone category along with BlackBerry, Palm and Windows Mobile. The Samsung Instinct will never be mistaken for a smartphone.

•iPhone 2 to be 22% thinner. Thinness-wise it may not be cake-cutting MacBook Air slim, but the iPhone’s already fairly slender. You want more thinness, and more capability?
Verdict: Maybe, but only if you leave some good stuff out.

•Better battery, more RAM. Who wouldn’t want these features in a portable media player? It’d have to be a balance against the 22% thinner rumour. But technology does advance quickly…
Verdict: A definite possibility, at least on the RAM front.

•GPS function on board. More accurate than cell-tower positioning, and rumours based on FCC info even say Broadcom is chip-provider. Then again, wouldn’t on-board GPS require Apple to develop turn-by-turn navigation software?
Verdict: Could be true. Location-based services FTW.

•Squarer shape. Icons hidden in the iPhone SDK hint at a squarer shape versus the shiny curved corners of the first version. True, or are the icons just placeholders?
Verdict: Who knows, but why mess with a winning design?

•Front-facing camera, mobile TV. A source in Swisscom, Switzerland’s iPhone supplier suggested these two. Many a 3G phone can do video-calling, and mobile TV seems like progression from the slightly unexpected youTube app.
Verdict: Camera and video calling is reasonably likely, assuming 3G technology. Mobile TV? No way.

•US low-end iPhone to cost US$200. Kevin Rose set the rumour mill spinning when he suggested that the iPhone 2 would launch at half the 8GB iPhone price, and US$100 less than the 8GB iPod touch.
Verdict: Sounds nice, but Kevin’s predictions have been off-target before…

•Spain to get €100 iPhone 2, UK to get £100 version. Local reports in Spain suggested this price for people signing up to a 24-36 month contract and the Times suggested similar deals in the UK.
Verdict: Our contacts say not this cheap in Spain, but it’s not like we’ve seen signed contracts or anything.

•iPhone to ship first week of July. An insider with the UK’s O2 apparently let slip to T3 that they’ll be “very busy” in the first week July. And similarly on June 9th. 2+2=4.
Verdict: A four-week news-to-launch timescale is reasonable, but disagrees with what we’ve learned from our sources.

•Quanta using FedEx to move huge numbers of iPhones. Forbes.com staked out Apple contract manufacturer Quanta, and saw frantic activity. Could be iPhone 2s, could be someone else’s electronics: the boxes are just plain brown.
Verdict: At this point in the timeline, anything’s possible.

•iPhone 2 games to cost upwards of US$27. The CEO of Spanish game developers LemonQuest says that a new generation of iPhone games are coming, and that they’ll be sold in iTunes for the equivalent of around US$27.
Verdict: Understandable, given the capabilities the new iPhone would have and the already-revealed game-friendly SDK. However, developers are free to set their own prices on games, so don’t expect every game to cost US$27. When’s the last time you saw a mobile mobile phone game cost that much?

So, there you have it. Which’ll prove accurate? The truth is out there… and we’ll find out on Monday.

• Throwbot: A small camera on wheels that can enter rooms where a gunman might be hiding
• SkySeer: a UAV with a camera meant for urban police work
• PepperBall: Think paintball, but with pepper powder
• Bola Ball: A bolo that cops would use to trip up assailants (proved a tad hard to master)

The piece covers some sweet demos, like Raytheon’s Active Denial System pain ray (which we’ve mentioned), the TigerLight pepperspray-shooting flashlight, and a blinding laser cannon meant to “visually dissuade” assailants.

At the end, the author and Heal visit to the HQ of one of the most successful non-lethal weapons: magnetic acoustic device. It’s not new, but it’s only now being explored as a device for police forces. It’s a sound projector that can shoot audio up to a mile in distance, and when it projected the sound of .50 cal machine-gun fire, the author says it sounded like it came from a gun “the size of a backhoe,” and mentioned that all the birds in the vicinity took off in fear.

The link will give you a digest of the piece; I think you’ll need to find an actual paper copy to read the full story. (What’s up with that, New Yorker?? No love for the internet?) [New Yorker]