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Alexa Speaks Out of a Halloween Skull With This Amazon Echo Hack
Modern technology is pretty wild. It’s also pretty creepy. Take the Amazon Echo, for example, which gives you your very own personal assistant in the form of Alexa: a disembodied voice who does whatever you tell her to, plays you songs, and even reads off the weather. Someday soon, she will probably also rebel against you. She will start to hate you. And she will probably kill you.
But you’ve seen The Terminator. You know where this is all headed.
In the meantime, let’s have some fun!
Computer and robotics hobbyist Mike McGurrin just combined his Amazon Echo with his love for Halloween, celebrating the best holiday of the year early by hacking the smart device and giving Alexa a human face. Well, a human face without any skin on it, that is. The clever hack allows Alexa to speak out of an animated Halloween skull, and the results are pretty awesome.
And just a little bit creepy. But mostly awesome.
Said McGurrin:
I like to decorate for Halloween, including various talking skeletons that I’ve set up over the years. For Christmas 2015, my wife gave me a great 3-axis talking skull with moving eyes so I could upgrade one of the skeletons from just a moving jaw skull. Then a friend suggested that there had to be other applications for the rest of the year. This got me thinking, and when I saw the Alexa Billy Bass I knew what I had to do; and the Yorick project was born. I’m pretty happy with the result.
How did he do it? Head over to The Aspiring Roboticist to find out!
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor best known for his role in 1993’s Jurassic Park, has passed away this week at 78 years old. In a statement shared on Neill’s Instagram page this morning, the actor’s family said that his passing was “sudden and unexpected.”
Neill had been diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in 2022, but stated the following year that he was in remission. The family notes that he “remained cancer free” at the time of his passing.
The family statement reads, “It is with immense sadness that the whānau of Sam Neill share the news of his passing on Monday 13th July, in Sydney Australia. Sam was surrounded by family and passed with the dignity that has characterised his whole life. The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free.
“They would like to express their deepest gratitude to the staff at St Vincent’s Private Hospital for their incredible care. More details will be shared later, but for now, on behalf of the family, we ask that you respect their privacy as they navigate this immeasurable loss.”
In addition to his iconic role as Dr. Alan Grant in the original Jurassic Park and the sequels Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World: Dominion, Sam Neill left an indelible mark on the horror genre with memorable roles in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, The Omen: The Final Conflict, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, and sci-fi horror favorite Event Horizon.
Sam Neill’s vast resume in film and television began in the early 1970s and also includes the films Sleeping Dogs, Enigma, The Good Wife, A Cry in the Dark, Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Hostage, The Jungle Book, Snow White: A Tale of Terror, The Horse Whisperer, Bicentennial Man, Daybreakers, Escape Plan, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Sam Neill is survived by his four children and eight grandchildren.
Steven Spielberg said in a statement to Variety, “I owe a debt of gratitude to Roger Donaldson, Gilliam Armstrong, Graham Baker and Phillip Noyce for casting Sam Neill in the roles in which he was so brilliant that brought him to my attention and led to his playing Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Sam was exceptionally collaborative. It was a stretch for him to play a character who acted as though children were messy and smelly because this was the opposite of the loving father he was to his children. I adored making all the Jurassic movies with him.”
Spielberg adds, “Along with Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, we will always have our Jurassic family and Sam will never be forgotten by us or his many millions of fans around the world.”
Sam Neill in ‘Event Horizon’
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