Stupid PC tricks
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Ooh ooh, I have another one! Back in the days of Quake 1 (Yes Quake ONE), it was quite fun doing up some quake mods in near C (a revelation at the time). So just for fun when we had a bunch of guys coming over to play some Quake, we did a quick mod so that if you did a certain command you turnd invisible, and if you did another you switched weapons to something that shot through walls :) Of course that only worked if your name was "pmartin" or the others on my team :) Much hilarity ensued that day!
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
At university we had a lab full of Unix machines running X-Windows. So, when another student walked away from his desk, a friend of mine changed the mouse sensitivity in his logon script. (Something in .profile? Too long ago to remember) In fact, he changed it so that the values were negative, meaning that his mouse was totally inverted. I think this poor guy had logged in on pretty much every machine in the lab before he figured it out! There's also a BSOD screensaver[^] from SysInternals that's always amusing... ;)
Sunrise Wallpaper Project | The StartPage Randomizer | The Windows Cheerleader
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Several things we used to do in the good old call center... 1) Switch around the key caps :) 2) Change the mouse to left handed :) 3) Run a search on the system for all exe files and then create shortcuts to all of them in the computers start up group :) Nasty, I know, but it was fun :) ...unless that it someone hit you with it...
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Several things we used to do in the good old call center... 1) Switch around the key caps :) 2) Change the mouse to left handed :) 3) Run a search on the system for all exe files and then create shortcuts to all of them in the computers start up group :) Nasty, I know, but it was fun :) ...unless that it someone hit you with it...
Ray Cassick wrote:
- Run a search on the system for all exe files and then create shortcuts to all of them in the computers start up group
That's just evil. Brilliant, but evil.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Futzed around with someone's registry settings and changed every single user configurable color to black. They were puzzled to say the least. I don't recall why this happened :)
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! VCF Blog
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Several things we used to do in the good old call center... 1) Switch around the key caps :) 2) Change the mouse to left handed :) 3) Run a search on the system for all exe files and then create shortcuts to all of them in the computers start up group :) Nasty, I know, but it was fun :) ...unless that it someone hit you with it...
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I remember quite a while back at school i made a batch file that ran at boot time and printed the contents of a text file, which said something like "The printer has encountered an error. Press any key to continue..." No one complained:omg:, so after a while i simply took it off. Roswell:laugh:
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CA -
Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Years ago I was working onsite with a client who had a very strict PC security policy - basically anytime you were not at your computer, you had to have it locked... There was a new help desk fella there who got up and wandered away from his desk, so I used his open email to tender his resignation for him... muhahahahahaha!!! Luckily the boss was a friend of mine (who I had told about the "resignation" stunt shortly after I clicked send) so he played along, and the desky didn't really lose his job - but he did learn to lock his PC when he wasn't sitting at it!!
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
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I remember quite a while back at school i made a batch file that ran at boot time and printed the contents of a text file, which said something like "The printer has encountered an error. Press any key to continue..." No one complained:omg:, so after a while i simply took it off. Roswell:laugh:
"Angelinos -- excuse me. There will be civility today."
Antonio VillaRaigosa
City Mayor, Los Angeles, CAFurther proof that users don't read our carefully crafted, properly phrased, even spell checked error messages (those bastards!) :-D
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned this one. On many an occasion I've removed the ball from a coworker's mouse and watched in amusement as they shake and jiggle it trying to make the cursor move. You can acheive the same effect with a piece of opaque tape for the newer optical mice. Ah, life's simple pleasures. :)
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Well, not technically a PC trick... this goes back to the days of vt220's and vaxes. Annoying co-worker was bragging about how secure VMS was, and how nobody could EVER possibly break in to his account. It used encryption and everything! VMS... meh. A simple jumper from pin 2 of his terminal to pin 3 of mine when he wasn't looking, and I could see everything he typed. He pestered me for a week before I showed him how easy it was. l-user...
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I can't believe no-one has mentioned this one. On many an occasion I've removed the ball from a coworker's mouse and watched in amusement as they shake and jiggle it trying to make the cursor move. You can acheive the same effect with a piece of opaque tape for the newer optical mice. Ah, life's simple pleasures. :)
I like the tape on the phone switch, so when they pick up the phone it keeps ringing...
------------------------------------------- Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Just bugger off and leave me alone!!
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
when the Rubix cube first came out, a fellow programmer bragged about being able to solve it quickly, so I offered to mix it up so he could show me that he could solve it ... I secretly took a corner out, rotated it 90 degrees and put it back together ... gave it to him, sat back and watched him get very, very frustrated ... :evil: :laugh: Steve
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Once we rearranged a co-workers keyboard to be alphabetical. It took him 3 days to realize it, since he barely looked at his keyboard when typing, which was a bit of a letdown.:(
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
I thought I invented the screenshot of the desktop, maybe I did it was a long time ago. Except I used to take all the real icons off and put them in a folder. Well if that ones taken then the oldest one I can lay claim to is back in high school we had Commodore SuperPets in the computer classroom all connected to a single printer via a device called a Mupet which was some sort of printer buffer. I found the manual and learned how to put text in the buffer that would print the next time someone else printed. That was fun and quite rude. We also found the manual to the superpets and found out you could control a *lot* of the hardware by poking values into memory locations. Crazy things like the actual focus of the CRT gun not sure the exact technical terms but I remember we could make the screen entirely backwards or expand it bigger than the actual screen but the best trick of all was shrinking the whole screen down to a single dot in the center which unfortunately killed the display pretty quickly. It looked cool though, this bright burning green spot in the middle of a black screen. I really don't know why they left the manuals for that stuff laying around, it was just asking for trouble.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow in a windows machine. How many know what this trick do and how to revert it?
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Once I removed the power cord from my collegue's computer and put some "invisible" tape on the prongs, then put it back into the outlet. Took him some time to figure out why the computer refused to start... :) On my college, some people found it amusing to remove all the key caps from the keyboards and put them back in random order.... Once, on a new job, a collegue asked me about my salary. Since the company generally had a little "hush-hush" regarding the salaries, I made a quick Delphi program that displayed a large window with randomly plotted pixels. Counting the pixels would reveal my salary amount (which in Sweden is a 5-figures number). I heard lots of bad words from him. Until, unfortunately one of his friends found a disassembler and managed to see the number... :-/
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Press Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow in a windows machine. How many know what this trick do and how to revert it?
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Try it. It's fun. Once you know how you get there, it's easy to go back to normal.
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Have you ever pulled any fun pranks involving someone elses computer? I have. Once I took a screenshot of my friend's desktop. Then I made that picture his desktop background. About a week later he called me up in a panic and said, "Josh, my computer has a virus! When I move an icon it moves, but a copy stays where it was! But if I click on the copy, it doesn't do anything! What should I do?" :laugh: I wanted to say "reformat the machine", but the little angel on my shoulder gave me a firm nudge and I confessed... :doh:
:josh: My WPF Blog[^] Without a strive for perfection I would be terribly bored.
Let me start out by saying I'm not especially proud of this, but ages ago we had a VERY annoying QA guy who thought he was some kind of genius but in fact had the reading comprehension skills of lobotomized blind ferret. Despite the fact that the release notes would say things like "The DataBase functionality in the product is a UI stub at this time. DO NOT file any bug reports on the DataBase functionality not working properly. Issues in the UI are OK to report." he would go through the ENTIRE test suite for the DataBase functionality and file a bug reports on the missing functions. Every frickin' week. Then, the developers would have to waste time at bug triage answering questions or emails as to why there were 1,134,392 bug reports in the DataBase category, not to mention having to personally MARK and CLOSE each of the "bugs", each of of spending at least 2 or 3 precious hours every week on complete nonsense. Why ? Because we HAD to - it was the way the workflow for SQA was designed, and we had to follow it. The managers would have a fit because it made their charts look bad, and upper management would lean on them. "Uh, Pete, can you see why the find/fix ratio on the TPS Reports for your project is growing out of control ? That would be great. Oh, and remember to put the cover sheets on the TPS reports." Also (we did check this with legal) murder was still a crime, even in this context. This would go on for WEEKS at a time. We begged. We pleaded. To no avail. Finally, we'd had enough. The weekly build was scheduled for April 1st. March 31st I (and a couple of the developers) spent putting all sorts of little hacks together. We had a new system to load and execute modules with user-defined tasks at system startup, and it needed to be tested, right ? So we preloaded about a dozen nasty little hacks that were targeted solely to HIS machine. They had no effect on other machines. These did things like put up message boxes saying "Recoverable Application Fault: This application has been very naughty and needs to be spanked. Please contact your Systems Administrator.". We made the mouse cursor randomly move in the opposite direction of where it should, vertically, horizontally, or both, but not ALL the time. We'd hide the mouse cursor sometimes, but just for a little while. We put up a fake BSOD. We made the DataBase functionality APPEAR to work -- for a while. Streams of fake error messages in the Console poured out that made no sense. Message boxes of stunning complexity and nonsene popped up at ra
