Halloween is almost here and while we all have a healthy fear of witches,ghosts,monsters and zombies, it’s robots that we should really be afraid of. Robots are capable of killing every creature on that list and then turning on us.

That’s why I’m proposing that we phase out all of the old monster decorations and Jack-o-lantern faces and replace them with robots. If you don’t fear them now, you will wish you had feared them sooner one cool October night when a red-eyed robot TPs a house with your intestines.

Take a look at the pic above. That’s a livingroom inside of a PC. I knew tiny people were living in our PCs, but this is the proof I have been waiting for. But who lives there? How long have they been in residence? Should we be charging them rent? Are they affecting performance? So many questions.

They’ve been in this PC for a while as evidenced by the Cracker Jacks on the table and the tiny copy of the New York Times. They’ve even matched the furniture with the red motherboard.

Suck at Photoshop? No problem. PhotoSketch is a web program that will let you make a rough, labeled sketch and magically turn it into a Photoshopped image. Your lame skills are no longer a problem.

How does it work? It searches the web for images that correspond to the shape and label you’ve drawn, then it puts them all together into an image. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty impressive and is sure to only get better.

Imagine that you land on the moon and that you are just minding your own business, collecting rock samples and playing a round of golf, occasionally driving your rover. And you see plant people coming at you wearing spacesuits. Can you imagine the horror?

I can, thanks to these Domsai Terrariums, which make ordinary plants look like astronauts. Each of these Domsai Terrariums are unique since they are hand-cast and the glass bulbs are mouth-blown. That’s also why they are expensive. They’ll cost you $140. If you want the gold one, it will be an additional $360.

Lego. We had thought that anything you could make out of Lego bricks had already been made. But we forgot about the classical music scene. This cello is made entirely of Legos. And it’s life sized. And it works.

Brick artist Nathan Sawaya claims that it “sounds different than a regular cello”. Use your imagination. What would a Lego Cello sound like? Yeah, like that. Not tinny, more of a brickish plastic sound. Now we just need the rest of the Lego band. They can tour the country and sell out to geek crowds. Get geek groupies. Dig?

Sometimes Steampunk falls flat if the details aren’t there. But this Nixie clock looks awesome. It’s the work of UK artist Kev Stenning.

It’s made from Pyrex glass, solid copper and brass machined parts and it features six IN-18 Nixie Tubes. It would look equally at home in this century or the last. The Steampunk Nixie Clock will be available in a limited run of just 10 clocks.

We love Steampunk around here. We’ve certainly featured our share of steampunk gadgets. And this USB drive is another pretty nice example of the art form, but it’s insanely priced at $3000. I would pay maybe $100 for this flash drive. Maybe $300 if I had some disposable money.

It has some great detail work and looks pretty awesome, so it’s a shame that it’s priced so high that no one will own it. Could be a typo, but somehow I doubt it. Now the Steampunk phone from Russia. That I could pay handsomely for.

We’ve seen our share of steampunk round these parts. I’m not sure if we’ve ever seen an actual steampunk phone though. Check this beauty out. If I didn’t know this was a phone, I might think it was some kind of miniature sub looking at it from the back.

It hails from Russia, and is loaded with all kinds of Steampunk goodness. Look at all of that detail in front. It’s as if Jules Verne took up Steve Jobs’ role a few centuries early. There isn’t much info on it, but the picture speaks loud and clear.

Usually I see a good steampunk designed gadget and I want it. On this one I think I’ll pass. But if you are a member of the Addams family or the Munsters, this may be your ideal point and click device. Even the mouse made from real mouse parts wasn’t this creepy.

This morbid monstrosity of a mouse was created by steampunk artist Ivan Mavrovic. On his site, he says, “”the sheep dyed naturall death”. Well that may be somewhat comforting for the sheep, I don’t want to push this one around all day. Makes me feel sheepish.

Here’s a nasty looking PC case mod. I don’t know whether to admire it or run in fear while I still have my limbs. Apparently it was created by a Russian modder who was inspired by Doom 3. You have to love the detail work, right down to the blood on the chainsaw.

It’s much more than just Doom 3-style yellow paint on the exterior. Inside you’ll find an AMD64 Sempron 2600 + CPU, Geforce 6600GT graphics card and ASRock K8NF4G-SATA2 drive. Not that you can take your eyes off of the chainsaw.

This Steampunk USB Flash Drive looks a little more authentic than some others. This one was created by a Russian modder, using some cogs, screws and a brass pipe.

You can easily picture this one attached to a victorian laptop, had they had such things. You can load your plans for all of your Steampunk creations on this drive and keep them safe in style. If you think you have the skill and want to make your own flash drive with a similar look, full instructions are available at English Russia.

LEGO fans who are also foosball fans will love this one. This LEGO Coffee Table Foosball Table features custom minifigs and an authentic “faux” oak woodgrain finish. The creator says that he still has to tweak some of the finer details, but it looks pretty amazing. Much nerdier and cooler than the Barbie Foosball table.

The only question we have is, how durable is this? It has some amazing detail and looks like a lot of fun. The pirate flag is a nice touch. Now, who will battle him in the first official LEGO foosball championship? You know it’s coming. Better keep an eye out and get your tickets.

We all have a special place in our hearts for the Cassette tape, despite the fact that we would never EVER go back to using them. Remember what a pain it was to rewind and fast forward? Bottom line: Cassette tapes make better lamps.

And these lamps pump me so full of nostalgia that they have fast forwarded my heart, ejected it from my chest, flipped it over to the B side and made it start beating again. We want one real bad.

Well, it’s Friday and you know what that means. It’s time to take a look at some of the things we covered over at Botropolis this week. Whether we like it or not, robots are here to stay. Our job is simply to document the coming apocalypse for future generations. If there are any. So lets take a look at what happened this week.

3 Tenors of Terror: Creepy bots sing Happy Birthday.

i-SOBOT pimps his ride: Gets a new Steam Tank.

AIMEC:3: Karaoke singing bot.

Robot Mythbusters?: Sure looks like it.

Jen Hui Liao’s self-portrait machine will snap a picture of you. After that you are more or less handcuffed to a drawing board as it forces you to sketch your own likeness. So a robot is enslaving you for once. Just for a little while.

Jen Hui Liao is exploring the fact that “our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship.” Whatever. I just picture all future robots forcing us to do art for their walls, while we hang in the closet between masterpieces being fed intravenously.