The scariest part of Halloween this year could be how much we're spending on it. American's are shelling out more than $10 billion – a whopping two billion dollars more than in 2020. We're buying up everything from "Squid Game" costumes and candy corn – both top Halloween searches via Google – to TikTok-trendy must-haves like vintage decorations, scary movies and even good old fashioned snail-mail greeting cards. If the high cost of it all is more trick than treat for you, here are several ways to turn your already smart home into a spook-tacularly genius haunted house. Protect your kids' privacy: Google tool lets minors pull images of themselves from search results An estimated one in every fourpeople in America own a smart speaker and 70% of those are Amazon Echo devices, according to analytics site eMarketer.

To death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin's binary list of life's certainties, add the expectation that this six-note sequence: Although we ponder ways to avoid or evade Franklin's list of unavoidable events, we generally accept this more benign certainty as immutable. The penultimate note of the tune generates such strong and specific anticipation that you are likely finding it difficult to continue reading without resolving the sequence. That anxious pause is key to composition and music's power. It creates a sense of prophetic certainty that allows musicians to play against expectations by thwarting the expected. The controlled manipulation of certainty and likelihood lurks behind those magical moments in which music has caused a shiver or a tear to fall. By infusing uncertainty or surprise into the mix, musicians literally play on our emotions.

Q: I looked up my name at a people search site. Wow! Anyone can see my age, where I live, names of my relatives and more, for free! Can I remove these very personal details? A: I'm glad you searched for yourself, and I wish more people would. Many people are shocked to learn how much is freely exposed online: name, age, current address, past addresses, voting records, criminal history and so on. It's almost impossible to delete yourself from the internet completely, but you can easily crack down on these people search databases, no lawyer required.