It’s coming up on October 31st again which means it’s time for our household to start building out our Halloween decorations. We enjoy Halloween in our neighborhood. There’s quite a few kids on our street and we get into the spirit.

Order placed July 2021. Delivery a year and a half later. Somewhere in between I switched my color to eruption green and dropped the tow package, and I have no regrets about either. The green is perfect.

Ford sent order holders a photo of their Bronco coming off the line, which was a nice touch for a wait that long. Also here: a goodbye to my Honda CR-Z, which carried me almost a decade and close to 100,000 miles and still felt pretty damn solid at the end. Thanks to Lief Johnson Truck City for making the handoff an easy one.

Autocommands are one of the first things you reach for when configuring Vim, and one of the last things you understand. You write an autocmd, it works, and then months later it fires twice, or fires on the wrong buffer, or quietly stops firing at all and you spend an afternoon discovering that the event you wanted was never the event you used.

Here I go through the events I actually rely on, the difference between BufRead and BufEnter and friends, why augroups matter more than they look like they should, and the small set of commands I use to find out what is really being triggered. Nothing exotic, just the mental model I wish I had started with.

My wife and I went with a Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme for the whole house this year, which finally gave me an excuse to build the Tom Servo kit I have wanted for ages. A puppet alone was not quite enough, though, so I set out to make him self-contained: battery powered, one button, a random clip from a pile of prerecorded Servo lines.

What follows is the build. An Arduino Pro Mini left over from last year's eyeball pumpkins, a DFPlayer Mini for audio, servos, speakers, and the awful popping sound that turned out to be the DFPlayer quietly insisting on a steady 3.3V. Code is up on GitHub.

Being new to the neighborhood, we wanted to do something fun, so we took a two pronged approach: a batch of eyeball animatronic pumpkins and a custom window animation. The pumpkins run on cheap servos and Arduinos, built off the usual tutorials, though every one of those assumes the Arduino can power the servos on its own. That works for a few and falls apart around eight, so I ended up with an external supply and a separate power rail for the eyeballs.

The window was the more fun half. My wife handled the design and all the skilled drawing, and I took it into After Effects for the animation loop. I love the way it looked.

A few months' worth of hardware purchases, gathered into one video: a Commodore4ever power supply to replace the old brick, a new monitor, a PenUltimate+ cartridge, and a selectable RAM expansion with a reset switch for the VIC-20. All rad.

Then a drive up to Funspot in New Hampshire, home to one of the largest collections of classic arcade games anywhere. Rows and rows of cabinets, most of which I am spectacularly bad at. Music from Mattie Maguire, The Basic Game, and Falcon Dives, and thanks as always to everyone supporting the channel.